Planet FLCS

Posts for 2009

2009-01-02T18:46:51+00:00

Well, as you all know there has been a dearth of posts lately around here. But now that the holiday slowdown is over and the new year has begun things should be able to pick up once again. Here are some of the theological topics that I hope to blog on in the coming year:

Notes on Apocalyptic Ecclesiology
John Howard Yoder
The New Edition of the Church Dogmatics

And, as promised here are some of the topics I hope to hit into my pledged excursion into theological exegesis/biblical theology this year:

Johannine Theology
Theological Commentary on First John
Readings in Isaiah
Christology in Hebrews
The Minor Prophets

So, I hope some of these topics interest folks. And I look forward to another good year of blogging.

Steven Klein on Conflict Management

2009-01-02T08:04:00+00:00

One of the editors of Ha'Aretz, Steven Klein, has a very interesting analysis of how to move forward past the current stalemate in Gaza. The key part of his proposal, after a discussion of game theory, is that Israel should implement a unilateral but conditional cease-fire:

In the current situation, Israel should not simply declare a limited cease-fire, but rather an unlimited one, as well as an end to its blockade of Gaza, contingent on subsequent cooperation by Hamas. Reports indicate Hamas is willing to entertain truce offers - and now is the time for one.

Simultaneously, Israel must communicate clearly to Hamas what the consequences of continued rocket fire would be: For example, for each rocket fired across the border, Israel would close the border crossings for a day, or destroy a certain number of targets.

The advantage of this strategy is that it gives both sides the opportunity to de-escalate the violence and to save face. If the rockets do stop, the Israeli government can tell its citizens that it has secured their safety, while Hamas can tell Gazans it forced Israel to back down and achieved more freedom of movement.

This is a very interesting idea, and one that I've pondered in the past. It's probably what I would do if I were in Israel's shoes.

Chatting with Charlie about Gaza

2009-01-01T19:48:01+00:00

My pastor recently posted a thoughtful response to the ongoing violence in Gaza. I started to post my own thoughts on his blog, but I realized that they were more complicated and extensive than I could easily put into a simple response. So I'm going to post them here, and then link to them from his site.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tough problem for a Christian to think through. Whether you accept the "just war" theory (which I think I do), or advocate strict pacifism, it's difficult to know how to respond to a situation in which each side has been responsible for so many unconscionable acts of violence and oppression. Certainly no honest Christian can side entirely and unequivocally with one side or the other. (And I should state up front that Christians who believe whatever Israel does is right, simply because it is Israel, have badly and baldly misunderstood the Bible. Certainly neither Isaiah, Jeremiah nor Ezekiel held such views – let alone Jesus.) Israel has done many horrible things in their conflict with the Palestinians. To take the most obvious example, its continued settlement building in the West Bank is unconscionable, indefensible, brutal and stupid. Similarly, while Israel is well within its rights to build a wall around the West Bank, it has no such right to build a wall inside the West Bank.

Nevertheless, although neither side is without fault, I do think that it's important to understand as much of the situation as accurately as possible; and in that light, I take issue with how my pastor characterized the situation in Gaza. Or to put it another way, I agree with almost everything he says about how a Christian should respond to the situation in Gaza; but I disagree with his understanding of what that situation actually is.

Charlie wrote:

What happened? In the ongoing struggle for control between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Israel cut Gaza off from the world's trade. They refused to allow none but the slimmest of food supplies into Gaza. After months of fruitless talks, Hamas began last week to fire Qassam rockets into Israel to force them to allow countries to recontinue trade with the 2 million people living in Gaza.

It seems clear to me that the conflict in Gaza is specifically not about who controls Gaza: it's about who controls everything else. Israel made it plain that this was the case when it withdrew its army from Gaza in 2005, and forced its settlers – sometimes at gunpoint – to follow. If Hamas (or even Fatah) had taken the opportunity to apply its considerable ingenuity and collective intelligence to building a Palestinian state, instead of continuing its futile and insane war against Israel, we would have a very different situation right now. However, since the Israeli withdrawal, Hamas and its allies have fired over 5000 rockets and mortar shells at Israel (over 3000 just in 2008), and the rocket attacks continued apace even during the six month "truce". Nor is it quite true that Israel didn't open the border during the truce: they opened it repeatedly, only to shut it again after Hamas continued to lob rockets at Israeli civilians. Moreover, even when the border crossings were open, Hamas used them to launch suicide attacks against the Israeli border guards.

These rockets are nothing like Israeli or US rockets. The Israeli Ministry of Defense views these as "more a psychological than physical threat." Called a Qassam, they are 5 to 90 lb handmade affairs powered by sugar and fertilizer with TNT in the top and no guidance system. But of course they can be lethal. 15 people have been killed by the 5000+ that have been fired since 2001.

Charlie is very right that the rockets which form the backbone of Hamas' arsenal are pale and primitive things in comparison with the guided munitions that arm Israel's F16's. But it's also important to distinguish between the primitive Qassams Hamas has been using over the last few years, and the Grad rockets that they've been using more recently. These are not homemade rockets, but are rather versions of the military-grade Katyushas that Hezbollah used with dramatic effect against Israeli civilians in the 2006 Lebanon war. These Grad rockets were manufactured in China, and were smuggled into the Gaza strip during the cease fire with the help of Iran and Syria. They carry much larger warheads, with a much greater range. It's true that they are virtually worthless as a military weapon: their single purpose is to kill as many civilians as possible. Their warheads, for instance, are packed with ball bearings to maximize civilian casualties, and nearly a million Israeli civilians now live under the threat and reality of rocket bombardment.

Last week Hamas resumed firing these rockets. Before there were any injuries of Israelis, Israel began a devastating attack on the Palestinians. They bombed Gaza City from highly precise fighter jets. After two days one Israeli was killed by the Palestinian rockets and 300 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli Air Force. Those included men, women, children, and infants. Also another 600 Palestinians were burned and injured.

The disproportionate response of the Israelis outrages me. The Israelis say they are killing Palestinians to protect Israelis from the rockets. Yet in one weekend the Israelis killed 20 times more Palestinians than the Palestinians did Israelis in seven years of rocket attacks! Whatever happened to the command for retributive restraint? "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," says the Lord in Exodus. What we see in Gaza is unrestrained revenge.

I disagree with Charlie that Israel launched this most recent offensive out of a desire for revenge. I think Israel did launch its 2006 war against Hezbollah out of a desire for revenge, but the results of that war made it clear to everyone in the IDF and in the Israeli government that revenge is a singularly inadequate motivation for all-out war. Nor does Israel think that it can actually eliminate Hamas' ability to fire rockets into civilian populations: this also was made clear during the Second Lebanon War. What Israel intends to achieve against Hamas is the one thing it actually did achieve against Hezbollah. Israel wants to make Hamas suffer so badly that they will not just agree to another cease fire, and but will actually hold to its terms once it's in place. That's what eventually happened in Lebanon, and it's what Israel wants to happen in Gaza. It's not a Christian means or a particularly merciful end, but it's a practical means and a livable end, and it needs to be understood (or even condemned) as such, not as a blanket desire for revenge. Hamas knew that Israel would respond when they escalated their rocket attacks, and Israel knew that Hamas knew this; Israel's hope is that Hamas underestimated how strongly and effectively Israel would respond, and overestimated the support they would receive from the international community. (Even the Egyptian foreign minister has recently acknowledged that Hamas "served Israel the opportunity on a golden platter to hit Gaza".)

This leaves open the question about whether Israel's response has been proportionate; and that's more difficult to answer. My pastor is very right when he points out that Israel has killed far more civilians than Hamas has, and I'm genuinely grieved at the death of these innocents. I can't imagine the grief and rage of the parents who've lost their children in Israeli air strikes. Nevertheless, there's a genuine and widely held moral distinction between killing non-combatants accidentally when going after legitimate military targets, and killing civilians intentionally. Clearly, Israel is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties: as just one example, it's been reported that prior to the first attack, the IDF actually telephoned thousands of Palestinians who lived near targeted areas, warning them to move out of homes or neighborhoods which were serving as Hamas military sites. The most recent information I've been able to find is that of the nearly 400 Gazans killed in the fighting, nearly 300 of them wore Hamas uniforms. In contrast, there is a great deal of evidence that Hamas cynically uses mosques to store weapons, and launches its mortars from schoolyards, specifically to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties. If Hamas had Israel's weaponry, it seems highly likely to me that they would direct that firepower into the heart of Tel Aviv residential neighborhoods; and if anyone has evidence otherwise that I've overlooked, I would like to see it.

Another way to look at it: if Mexico were foolish enough to launch 5000 rockets from Tijuana into San Diego, or if Nepal were to launch them into China, or Venezuela into Colombia, the aggrieved nation would certainly respond, and in a similarly "disproportionate" fashion. Israel's initiation of this war may not be justified by the highest Christian standards – standards no actual country has ever lived up to, certainly not the US – but I can't imagine any nation in the history of the world not responding to Hamas' blatant, repeated and foolish provocations. Perhaps Israel should legitimately be condemned for doing in this war what any nation does in any war: but we should be clear that we are equally rejecting all nations and all warfare, Britain in 1940 as much as Israel in 2008.

But the issue goes deeper than the comparatively simple matter of who violated the truce most egregiously or whose tactics are the most reprehensible. It's almost universally acknowledged that a two-state solution (going back in its rough outlines at least as far as 1947) is the only just and legitimate solution to the ongoing crisis. No other resolution short of genocide is conceivable, and no organization or ideology, Arab or Israeli, can be taken seriously if it refuses to acknowledge that both Jews and Palestinians have a right to a homeland. The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority are together working fitfully towards this solution; the difficulty, as always, is in the details. In contrast, Hamas has had numerous opportunities to renounce its stated goal of the destruction of Israel, and has consistently refused to do so. In other words, while the Palestinians have many legitimate claims against Israel, Hamas can't be taken seriously, or treated as other than a terrorist organization, until it acknowledges as a matter of justice that Israel has a right to exist, and as a matter of practical politics that Israel will in fact continue to do so. Until this happens, Hamas is fighting, not for anything noble, and certainly not for freedom, but for a horrible and terrible lie. (In all fairness, it's clear there are any number of Jewish settlers who are also fighting for a lie, and who need to be treated in precisely the same way.)

All that said – and it was probably said at more length than it needed to be – I agree with Charlie about the appropriate response a Christian should have to the situation in Gaza. We should grieve the loss of life, and must always reject the temptation to dehumanize even those we are convinced are in the wrong. We need to discern injustice and identify evil whether it is done by "our" side or by the "other". And in our work and prayer for peace and justice, we must finally remember that final reconciliation can come only from the Prince of Peace.

Metz on Redemption

2008-12-31T18:06:13+00:00

With its message of redemption Christianity is not offering up some meaning, however washed out, for an expiated suffering of the past; rather, it is telling a particular history of freedom: a freedom based on the redeeming liberation by God in the Cross of Jesus. It is no accident that this history of liberation includes the descensus ad inferos, in which we are in no way dealing with some mythological topos that, for not belonging to what Jesus was really about, would have to be eliminated right from the start or really relativized as a subsequent interpolation into the Christian idea of redemption. This is how all the apocalyptic sting has been drawn from Christian soteriology; it is also how the decisive meaning it gives to freedom is obscured. This descensus, this “being-with (of the crucified) with the dead” indicates the original liberative dynamism of the history of redemption, without which every history of freedom is downgraded back to natural history and as such tends to be brought to a standstill: the final stage of freedom’s history as the apotheosis of nature!

Johann Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, 124.

Posted in Johann Metz, redemption

Metz on the Church

2008-12-31T17:54:49+00:00

Religion is tolerated because it absorbs painful disillusionments in society, neutralizes obscure anxieties, and silences dangerous memories and unmanageable hopes within social life. In short, it is tolerated because it brings a more or less welcome stabilization to complex societies. However, if this functionalization of religion and of the church were to be perfectly achieved it would be the death of them. The church will be able to ward off this danger in the long run only if it lives as a religious communio in which everyone has become subjects, that is, in which an identity has been developed that does not originate simply from above but from out of people’s religious experiences themselves.

Johann Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, 142.

Posted in ecclesiology, Johann Metz

The Incarnation and Racial Reconciliation

2008-12-27T00:24:23+00:00

Over at Christ, My Righteousness, the series on racial reconciliation is now onto its sixth guest post. Mine was a few days ago and you can see it below. Still, be sure to give the other ones a read. As James Cone once said in class, “You’ve gotta talk about it!”

While this small essay is oriented towards racial reconciliation, I want to begin with a brief foray into incarnational theology. The incarnation, the particularity of Christian life, is not founded simply on a covenant, although we must always remember constantly that it is within promise that God acted and continues to act.^[1] The Christian particularity is the action of God herself living (not only as participant, promise-maker, or covenant redeemer) within the human story – the joining of divine and human stories in Jesus of Nazareth.^[2] Therefore, God truly is with us, Emmanuel: “He is not a symbol for the apex of our existence which is lost asymptotically in the infinite. He is Emmanuel, the God of an historical hour. Transcendence itself has become an event.”^[3] In human flesh, in Jewish flesh, God joined with human existence in a space and time.^[4] Still God and also human, the divine and human stories were forever joined together: “God act[ed] in such a way in relation to the world that he accepts it irrevocably in his Son.”^[5]

The incarnation is only intelligible within Jewish covenant, as well as the reaffirmation of previous, divine promise: “he proves to be God’s own autobiography, God’s writing of Godself.”^[6] Thus, Lieven Boeve is right to say, “[t]he truth of the incarnation indicates, rather, that the particular is constitutive of the truth, essential and indispensable. Truth is real, concrete, incarnate, and can only be grasped as such.”^[7] The truth of God living in the world and the truth of what God’s living affirms and reforms, is to be understood within the stories and promises as creator, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the one who invoked the tetragrammatron in response to Moses’ question, “Who are you?” J. Kameron Carter states the particular of Christianity succinctly, “Christ’s flesh as Jewish, covenantal flesh is a social-political reality displayed across time and space into which the Gentiles are received in praise of the God of Israel.”^[8] Indeed, to know God alive is to know the truth of God, and vice versa. And then to know the mind of the Creator, is to know creation’s proper telos. Carter summarizes the reconciling work of the incarnation and its implications well:

Christ’s divine-humanity transforms the meaning of humanity in its totality. The call of the gospel, then, is for human beings to enter into Christ, whose humanity is open to receive them and, thus, to (re-)name them and to confer a new identity on them as gift. Hence, the Jewish humanity that the triune God receives in union with the trinitarian Son is, at the same time, the humanity that now redemptively receives Gentile-others into itself. Consequently, in pressing this insight theologically, one might say that Jesus’ Jewishness is always already positively disposed toward receiving Gentiles. Conversely, it shows that Gentiles, too, are positively disposed for being received by Jesus and, thus, for entering into his Jewish humanity. This mutual disposal of Jews and Gentiles for each other in Christ may serve as a parable both of the way in which God holds nothing of himself back in his positive disposition to receive the world and of the way in which the world finds its own proper identity only in being received in God. The Jewish humanity of the trinitarian Son, Jesus Christ, is analogically central in this reciprocal movement of giving and receiving. Thus, far from being inconsequential, Jesus’ Jewish humanity is, in fact, a crucial element in what it means to exist concretely.^[9]

With a good understanding of who Jesus was and is, then we can re-understand and perhaps begin to talk better about race and racial reconciliation, because we will begin to rightly understand how the church is supposed to understand identity. To this, Carter has also written, specifically on the theme of baptism for the beginning of Christian identity:

Inhabiting or being received into Christ’s actual body in such a way that one lays no claim to naming oneself and, therefore, in which one holds nothing of oneself back in self-possession-this is what baptism represents…. Baptism…involves handing oneself over to God in Christ so as to receive oneself back as gift. This is the deeper meaning of Christ’s baptism, which cannot be severed from the event of the Cross.^[10]

But, importantly, this is not a “color-blind” Christianity, or where skin pigmentation ceases to exist, or where the church turns a blind eye to racial injustices outside of itself. Instead, this is a call for the economy of God to wash over the church – the body of Christ formed by the memory of the incarnation and the acts of the incarnation – so that we take seriously our baptism out of Babylon and Mammon and into the basileia of God. To do so, I believe, would force us to take race and racial reconciliation far more seriously than we do now, as we would take more seriously our participation within the economy of God. To quote Carter at length one more time:

The story of God’s journey with God’s creatures occurs, then, in history—the history and ﬂesh of Israel, which culminates in Jesus of Nazareth. For in Jesus God has brought Israel’s history to an irrepeatably unique pitch, whereby Christ becomes translated into the languages of all nations. In brief, what emerges within this new economy of divine love is a self that is known in, through, and as another— a transformation which entails a re-imagining of identity on both personal and cultural levels. All of this means that the destiny of a given nation, its sense of peoplehood. Indeed, this sense of “co-peoplehood” or “inter-nationalism” is theologically rooted in the unfolding of Christ’s existence in history as an eschatological movement towards the Kingdom of God, an unfolding in which the church haltingly and imperfectly, but for all that no less truly, participates.^[11]

With all the above – the importance of the reconciling work by the embodiment of the incarnation – in mind, we can actually deal with topics that the wider society cannot find the words to even address. Consider Obama’s hybridity as a specific instance in the racial pluralizing of white America. Christian theology has the tradition and doctrine to draw on for the reforming of identity, rather than ignoring the significance of hybridity behind the desk in the oval office, while at the same time, acknowledging and valuing plurality with the goal of living as a Christological people.

Now, the real questions are, “Why we do not do this?” and, “How do we implement this?” Such questions are difficult, but must be taken with the utmost seriousness, otherwise this is simply intellectual, theological masturbation.

I see one major culprit that lingers in the background: capitalism and its notions of private ownership. The selfish “Mine!” and the idea that material goods and class status are deserved or un-harmful, drive a wedge between Christians, as the dollar bill and commodified economy dictate identity and the relationships there in. The movie Crash comes to mind. We drive around in our fortresses, never meeting another human being until we have a crash. This also is seen in white flight, giant houses with large lawns, and the churches who are formed by such an economy. So the answer to this is to live together, to live close to on another, and not to “run” from others or react in a manner that treats others as less than human. We have the solution in the incarnated creator who came to live with the creatures: we cannot reconcile if we do not know one another and we cannot hope to reconcile if we do not take care for one another. Quite simply, we are to live a Christological-hospitality for our community that is full of different people.

_________
[1] I am not trying to deny the divine promises that some may see in the Hebrew Bible to foreshadow the incarnation (i.e. Genesis 3:15). Instead, it was the incarnation that helps us re-understand the promises of God, while at the same time, the incarnation was not a new covenantal promise that required two parties to keep the promise to one another. The incarnation was an act of asymmetrical grace.

[2] When talking of God by pronoun, I will alternate between himself and herself where applicable.

[3] Johann Metz, Theology of the World, translated by William Glen-Doepel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 22.

[4] Ibid., 23.

[5] Ibid., 22.

[6] J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33.

[7] Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval, (New York: Continuum, 2007), 176.

[8] Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 30.

[9] Carter, “Christology or Redeeming Whiteness: A Response to James Perkinson’s Appropriation of Black Theology” Theology Today 60:4 January 2004, 532.

[10] Ibid., 538.

[11] Carter, “Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity: A Theological Engagement with Douglass’s 1845 Narrative“ Modern Theology, 21:1 January 2005, 58.

Posted in incarnation, race, reconcile

Racial Reconciliation

2008-12-24T05:57:07+00:00

Over at Christ, My Righteouness, Lou is hosting a series on racial reconciliation.

There are two posted so far and worth a read:

“The Cross and Racial Reconciliation : Jews and Gentiles in Christ” by Kepha

“Kingdom of Men or Kingdom of God: How Your View of Diversity Defines Your Kingdom” by Lionel Woods

There look to be quite a few more. Mine is titled “The Incarnation and Racial Reconciliation” and will be showing up when it shows up. So keep your eyes on the series for the rest of the posts to show up.

Posted in race, reconcile

Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, and a Priest

2008-12-24T03:32:50+00:00

From the BBC:

Priest ‘ruins Christmas’ for kids

A Catholic priest has been criticised by parents in a city in northern Italy for telling their children that Father Christmas does not really exist.

Father Dino Bottino, the parish priest of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Novara, let out the secret at a children’s mass earlier this month.

A local paper published complaints from dozens of parents. “You’ve ruined my children’s Christmas,” said one mother.
But an unrepentant Fr Bottino called it his duty to set the record straight.

“I told the children that Father Christmas was an invention that had nothing to do with the Christian Christmas story,” he said.
“And I would repeat it again, if I had the chance,” he added.

But Father Dino could not have imagined the scorn that would be heaped upon him after he told children at mass that neither Father Christmas - nor the kindly witch called the Befana who provides presents at New Year to Italian children - really exist.

The priest said he had never intended to hurt anyone, but it was his duty to distinguish the reality of Jesus from the story of Father Christmas which was a fable just like Cinderella or Snow White.

Fr. Bottino is mostly right. The current incarnation of Father Christmas isn’t Saint Nick. In fact, he is a racist stereotype. I did a post on this by way of Professor John McGuckin last February, but it why not mention it in season?

McGuckin did an op-ed piece for the NY Times that only sketched part of his inauguration lecture just over a year ago. I highly recommend the lecture, as the op-ed is less detailed. A plus is that McGuckin is a great lecturer, so the brief address will go all too quickly.

As for the short op-ed piece, McGuckin touches on areas that are sometimes left to the margins in relation to the capitalistic aping of the church. To list the subjects off, he hits on: race; slavery (sexual); preferential option for the poor; uses “feminist history” (that is, focusing on the females in history, which is not limited to females of power, but generally the opposite because historically females in western history didn’t en-mass have much power); the corporation’s use of the church (turning from the poor to the rich); and infuses the entire text with “iconic” images - with “icon” functioning on two levels, one as the colloquial term for icon and a second as the ecclesial idea of icon; and he finally even brings in the idea of saints. He does all this in a very short time, and without the text becoming unwieldy. I think this might be too smart for the New York Times.

Implied in the piece, I would venture to say, is that American capitalistic advertising is the bastardizing of ecclesial iconography (and the saints as well) - one of the highest forms of Christian art. The term simulacrum comes to mind. I’m also suspicious that the reason the west doesn’t see the conflict is because we have an aesthetic vacuum.

One last interesting observation. Often Christianity is blamed for absorbing other religions, or at least pagan religious holidays; however, in this case, it was Coca-Cola that infused the now common conception of Santa with an Odin like figure - a patriarchal god of the dark sky. Hows that for a parting bit of information to chew on?

Posted in capitalism, John McGuckin

Galileo and the Catholics

2008-12-22T00:26:31+00:00

From the BBC, as Benedict celebrates the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s discoveries:

Galileo used his scientific methods to demonstrate that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around.

His view directly challenged the church’s view at the time - that the Earth was static and at the centre of the universe.

Galileo was accused of heresy in 1633 and forced to publicly recant his theories.

Unfortunately, this is wrong. The Catholics condemned Galileo for other reasons, namely calling the Catholic Church a liar. It wasn’t the idea that the earth was at the center of the universe — in fact, the Catholic hierarchy supposedly welcomed the discovery — it was Galileo’s insistence to immediately and widely publish his findings, rather than a slow dissemination that the magisterium wanted, and then saying the Catholics lied about the sun standing still on Joshua’s day (the final straw).

I’ll be the first to say that Christians at times can be really, really annoying and daft, especially when dealing with science and the enlightenment (particularly the Catholics… heh, sorry, I couldn’t resist). But lets first set the record straight. Its important to note that the saints of science are just as human as the saints of the church. And on the historical and theological note, perhaps we can rethink the science/religion discussion.

Posted in science

$1.6 Billion for Bailed-Out Executives

2008-12-21T17:27:48+00:00

The AP is reporting that at the financial firms that have received taxpayer bailout money, the top 600 executives have received a total of $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses and perks. That's an average of $2.6MM each.

Normally, I'm not a fan of government interference in executive pay. I find multimillion dollar pay packages as distasteful and excessive as anyone else does, and knowing that a company pays its executives outrageous sums makes me less likely to invest. But under normal circumstances, I don't think the government does anyone any favors by mandating salary caps. It's shareholders, not the government, who should be demanding sane and reasonable compensation packages. Executive compensation should always be oriented strongly towards performance, and in a year like this, in which the decisions these executives made were responsible not only for the systemic failure of their own businesses, but also for bringing the American economy to its knees, it's inconceivable that any investor would think these executives' contributions were worth anywhere near $1.6 billion. But it's shareholders, not the government, who should normally demand change.

In this situation, however, I think the government does have a legitimate reason to call these companies' compensation committees to task. These executives have had to come, hat in hand, to the taxpayers, asking for money: in other words, they're being paid, not with money earned legitimately in the open market, but with my tax dollars. And I don't like it. I supported the original bailout bill, and I still do, but only with fairly stringent conditions attached. Before it approves the second half of the $700 billion bailout, Congress should demand reasonable executive compensation as a condition for any company that wants to participate in any aspect of the program. (Not just the asset purchase part, now scrapped.)

I thought it was stupid that General Motors spent $20,000 to fly their chief executive to Washington to ask for a bailout. I think it's really stupid that these financial companies collectively spent 80,000 times that much on compensation for executives who were clearly asleep at the wheel. And before these companies get any more of my money, whether as an investor or as a taxpayer, I want to see that number lowered significantly.

Salt in the Wound

2008-12-21T00:06:16+00:00

The culture wars:

Sponsors of the California ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage are seeking to nullify thousands of marriages between gay and lesbian couples performed after the state Supreme Court ruled them constitutional.

Christmas, Christ Mass, and Incarnation

2008-12-19T04:24:17+00:00

This post was brought to you by the insanity that spews from radio stations. I hate Christmas songs. I detest Christmas specials (save for Colbert’s Christmas Special). And quite frankly, this “war on Christmas” and “saving Christmas from all those atheists” is a bunch of crap. You’re saving Christmas — the capitalist holiday — from any meaningful critique.

Now enter the Christian calendar and the season of Advent. Often in this time, we talk of the incarnation. On one hand, it is a perfectly legitimate time to do so. On the other hand, we misunderstand the incarnation as simply divine conception. With this problem, we disconnect the incarnation from the entire life of Jesus and therefore, misunderstand much to be seen in the incarnation.

We need to remember that the action of the incarnation made God’s story – his mind and heart – known as never before. It showed God’s acceptance and rejection; it was the embodiment of the divine yes and no within history, to a greater extent than ever before. While God at the beginning called creation good, God in the incarnation brought creation into herself. At the same time, Johann Metz argues, “God’s divinity consists in the fact that he does not remove the difference between himself and what is other, but rather accepts the other precisely as different from himself.” In other words, God accepted creation. In point of fact, “[i]n Jesus Christ, man and his world were accepted by the eternal Word, finally and irrevocably…. what is true of this nature that Christ accepted is also fundamentally true of the acceptance of man and his world by God.” He did not ontologically destroy or divinize creation; he did not conflate the divine and human narratives, he accepted creation.

God’s acceptance of the world and humanity was proclaimed from the beginning: when Gabriel told Mary of what was growing in her and she accepted it with praise, when Joseph accepted the Messiah growing within Mary and Mary’s own obedience, when Jesus was born, when the Angels told the shepherds, and when the wise men brought their offerings. God’s coming, God’s acceptance, was heralded to all. In the proclamations, God did not only affirm creation, but upheld much more about the world. The incarnation was no vague or one-sided acceptance of humanity; the announcements were one of affirmation and salvation. Coming as an infant, from a miraculous birth, the creator of the world grew up; he was formed by the divine promises of the past and looked into the future. Thus “the process of history is ‘accepted’ in the Christian logos and remains so.” However, as scandalous as the idea that the creator grew up, it is inextricably linked to an equally scandalous idea, one of salvation history – one of promise and interruptive action by the creator within history – that makes good on the proclamations from birth. Metz maintains that the otherness, or creation status, of the world is necessary for the world to be, and that “[t]he reality of the world as creation is always mediated through the historical saving reality of the world.”

However, Colin Gunton reminds theology and the world, from another approach, that the whole of creation has a telos that speaks of salvation, while affirming the creator/created distinction:

If, then, to be created is to be in indissoluble relation to God through the Son and Spirit, it follows that that shape of being, the dynamic form that it takes in its various space-time configurations, derives from creation’s relation to its creator. Incarnation, the involvement of God the Son, on the initiative of the Father and through the enabling of the Spirit, then, is a violation of the being neither of God nor of the world. On the contrary, there is a sense in which it realizes the true being of them both, for it perfects at once the Father’s work of creation and creature’s determination at the traditional doctrine of the incarnation and its teaching of the coming of the one through whom all things were made into direct and personal relation with the creation.

With the creation act bringing creator and creation into a distinct relationship, the incarnation takes center stage, where “Jesus Christ is the one through whom all things take their shape and to whom the Spirit directs them. The shape is unmistakably full of purpose and eschatological significance: “[w]hen the Spirit shapes him a body from the flesh of Mary, what we see is not just the working out of election—through we do see that—but the renewing of the whole of creation, the redirecting of the world to its end.” The incarnation, quite simply, restores “creation’s teleology.”

It is from this incarnational realigning of creation with its telos that salvation history can be understood, and vice versa: the acceptance of creation-history also meant the salvation of creation-history. While the acceptance of God was extensive – in both time and space, it was not only acceptance. In short, the salvation of creation and history are interlinked. The creator incarnate, more than metaphorically elbow deep in creation and history, would not stand for a broken state – that is, creation-history deviated from its telos. The world, humanity, and history must be reconciled. But what method for reconciliation would God incarnate use? Grace and interruption was and is the method.

Thus, Christ’s Mass should never be understood within the context of a jolly, vapid song, or the fight for a Christmas tree in a shopping mall or airport, but within hesed, promise-making, promise-fulfilling, solidarity, divine love, justice, peace, and reconciliation. This is why I detest so much the false Christmas and those who seek to wage, in their estimates, a holy war to save Christmas. We must remember that it is for their bourgeois Christmas, not Christ’s Mass of acceptance and reconciliation.

Posted in Colin Gunton, incarnation, Johann Metz, reconcile

Warning on Linksys WRT110 Firmware

2008-12-17T15:27:06+00:00

Several months ago, I upgraded my wireless router to a Linksys WRT110, which supports a (draft) version of the 802.11n protocol. Everything worked well out of the box – as you would hopefully expect – until today, when I tried to upgrade the firmware. I'd been having some odd trouble with DNS queries getting handled in unexpected ways; that and a couple other things that I noticed led me to suspect that my router might conceivably be the source of the problems. So I upgraded my firmware from the 1.0.02 that it had shipped with to the 1.0.0.4 available on the website here.

Big mistake. Turns out that this version of the firmware can't handle multiple connections to the router, which of course is sort of the point of a router. If only one computer was connecting, the router would stay up and work just like you'd expect. But as soon as a second computer (say, my desktop upstairs) tried to connect, the router would go completely silent: it wouldn't route traffic or respond to pings or answer HTTP management requests.

Apparently this problem isn't necessarily universal with the 1.0.0.4 firmware, but it's been reported again and again on the Linksys discussion forums ever since Cisco first posted the 1.0.0.4 firmware back in May, and Cisco still hasn't done anything about it.

The solution, I found, was to downgrade the firmware. Cisco won't let you download the older 1.0.0.2 firmware from the WRT110 support page, but they will let you download it from the WRT100 support page. I downgraded the older firmware, and all was well (unless you count the two hours I lost troubleshooting the problem, of course).

This is the second day this week that I've been astonished at the poor choices made by very large, well-funded, reputable companies.

On a side note, this would have been an interesting time to try one of the open-source firmware options (here or here, among others), but apparently the WRT110 is based on an Ralink platform instead of the more common Broadlink, so the drivers aren't available as of yet.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence

2008-12-17T06:28:35+00:00

Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider not that they do evil.

Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.

For a dream cometh through the multitude of business; and a fool’s voice is known by multitude of words.

Theology has been Saying this for YEARS

2008-12-17T02:56:39+00:00

God save anyone who models relationships on romantic comedies. From the BBC:

Rom-coms ’spoil your love life’

Watching romantic comedies can spoil your love life, a study by a university in Edinburgh has claimed.

Rom-coms have been blamed by relationship experts at Heriot Watt University for promoting unrealistic expectations when it comes to love.

They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner.

Many held the view if someone is meant to be with you, then they should know what you want without you telling them.

Psychologists at the family and personal relationships laboratory at the university studied 40 top box office hits between 1995 and 2005, and identified common themes which they believed were unrealistic.

The movies included You’ve Got Mail, Maid In Manhattan, The Wedding Planner and While You Were Sleeping.

The university’s Dr Bjarne Holmes said: “Marriage counsellors often see couples who believe that sex should always be perfect, and if someone is meant to be with you then they will know what you want without you needing to communicate it.

“We now have some emerging evidence that suggests popular media play a role in perpetuating these ideas in people’s minds.

“The problem is that while most of us know that the idea of a perfect relationship is unrealistic, some of us are still more influenced by media portrayals than we realise.”

As part of the project, 100 student volunteers were asked to watch the 2001 romantic comedy Serendipity, while a further 100 watched a David Lynch drama.

Predestined love

Students watching the romantic film were later found to be more likely to believe in fate and destiny. A further study found that fans of romantic comedies had a stronger belief in predestined love.

Kimberly Johnson, who also worked on the study, said: “Films do capture the excitement of new relationships but they also wrongly suggest that trust and committed love exist from the moment people meet, whereas these are qualities that normally take years to develop.”

Posted in love

Propositions on Christian Unity (1)

2008-12-16T03:39:28+00:00

0. Christian Unity Exists - The scriptures teach us that we as Christians are indeed united in Christ. This concept is expressed with various metaphors (the body being perhaps the most prominent), and is taught by many New Testament writers.

1. Therefore, problems with Christian unity are really problems with the understanding or expression thereof - If number zero is true, then we as Christians never suffer from a lack of unity. The reality of our communion in Christ is more powerful than any of the disruptions of the expression of that unity which we produce. These disruptions can be the result of a misunderstanding of Christian unity as expressed above or the result of our failure to express what we know to be true (and perhaps the result of other things - this is by no means an exhaustive list). This will affect how we address problems of Christian unity.

Schwab Password Insanity

2008-12-15T10:05:36+00:00

For some reason, I've never signed up for web access to my Schwab investment accounts, but I just did today, and I was astonished at one particular security feature. Schwab actually limits your password to 8 characters, and doesn't allow any special characters (#./!, etc.). This is sheer insanity from a security perspective, since you want your passwords to be as long as possible (8 characters is closer to a reasonable minimum length than the maximum), and in addition, you want the character space to be as large as possible, so you want to include as many special characters as possible. Does anyone have the slightest idea why Schwab would do this? The only thing I can think of is to make their password rules as abstruse as possible, to make it unlikely that you'll re-use passwords from another service. Of course, that has its own security risk, since it virtually guarantees that you'll need to write the password down somewhere…

Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek Debate

2008-12-12T04:55:29+00:00

I found a debate between Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek from 2005. Without further ado, watch it.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Posted in Cornel West, Slavoj Žižek

Metz on Grace

2008-12-11T02:47:01+00:00

Living differently: this was indeed always a characteristic mark of Christians. And when Christians truly believe in grace, in its free and liberating presence, in its intimate connection with our senses, then it must also mean that in society as well they do not just live under the anonymous constraints of the issues, but under the “constraint” of grace. But grace signifies here the ability to interrupt, to stop; it means not simply having to go on living as before. Grace is the capacity, manifested at last in the political dimension also, not to see ourselves and evaluate ourselves with our own eyes, but with the eyes of our victims, out of which, in the end – the Lord himself impressed this on us with unmistakable clarity – he himself looks upon us.

Metz, The Emergent Church, 61.

Posted in grace, Johann Metz

New Book - The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul

2008-12-10T18:56:51+00:00

Well, here’s a book to look forward to from Eerdmans. This looks like yet another excellent addition to the recent work on the doctrine of justification, Pauline theology, and apocalyptic. Here’s the blurb from the publisher:

This scholarly book breaks a significant impasse in much Pauline interpretation today, pushing beyond both “Lutheran” and “new” perspectives to a new, noncontractual, “apocalyptic” reading of many of the apostle’s most famous and most troublesome texts.

Douglas Campbell holds that the intrusion of an alien, essentially modern, and theologically unhealthy theoretical construct into the interpretation of Paul has disordered the broader interpretation of his thought and created many of the difficulties that scholars now struggle with. It has, in fact, produced an individualistic and contractual construct, which Campbell terms “the Justification discourse” that shares more with modern political traditions than with either orthodox theology or Paul’s first-century world. In order to counteract that influence, Campbell argues that it needs to be isolated and brought to the foreground before the interpretation of Paul’s texts begins. When that is done, new readings free from this intrusive paradigm become possible and surprising new interpretations unfold.

Demonstrating in detail how prior positions in theological and political terms affect exegesis, how commitments to either lead to bad exegetical decisions at key points, shifting the theoretical implications of certain key texts, The Deliverance of God proves itself a unique and very important work for those looking for an accurate reading of Paul’s words.

The Case Against Pop Theology

2008-12-10T06:57:17+00:00

From a recent Newsweek article entitled Our Mutual Joy, which makes “the religious case for gay marriage”:

Let’s try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists.

This is probably the most fundamental of blunders in Biblical hermeneutics: to confuse description with prescription. In none of those cases did God commend polygamy. In the case of the kings of Israel and Judah, they are explicitly breaking a commandment (Deuteronomy 17:17). In the case of Abraham, by sleeping with Hagar he was not trusting God’s promise for descendants. And even a casual read of the story of Jacob will leave the reader with the strong impression that polygamy is not a good idea.

But wait, there’s more:

Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as “an abomination” (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?

Yes, Leviticus is a legal code for Jews in covenant with their God. No, Christians do not follow every prescription found therein. But what this article argues is the converse: that we should disregard a commandment because it is in Leviticus. This is obviously problematic because Leviticus also outlaws bestiality and incest. Are these also to be regarded as mere “codes for living in the ancient Jewish world” and therefore not to be taken seriously? A commandment’s presence in Leviticus does not tell Christians whether or not it should be obeyed.

The article moves on to note that some scholars regard Paul’s polemics against homosexuality as not really against homosexuality but against “self-delusion, violence, promiscuity and debauchery” as manifested in the Roman emperors of the time. Such arguments are not at all convincing, but that does not keep the article from postulating that:

Religious objections to gay marriage are rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition . . .

The Biblical witness has not been dealt with at all. Yet that doesn’t stop the author from proceeding as if it has. Still more:

Jesus reaches out to everyone, especially those on the margins, and brings the whole Christian community into his embrace. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, cites the story of Jesus revealing himself to the woman at the well— no matter that she had five former husbands and a current boyfriend—as evidence of Christ’s all-encompassing love.

Jesus also did not condemn the woman caught in adultery, but nonetheless he admonished her to “go and sin no more.”

Finally:

[Martin] adds that in his heart he believes that if Jesus were alive today, he would reach out especially to the gays and lesbians among us, for “Jesus does not want people to be lonely and sad.”

Of course Jesus would reach out to gays and lesbians. However, that welcome will not necessarily include an affirmation of homosexual behavior (let alone gay marriage).

This article is going to be read by a lot of people. It attempts to “kosherize” gay marriage for Christians, in spite of having terrible hermeneutics and theological reasoning. What impact will it have? Nobody can be sure, but I will hazard to guess that it’s impact on the dialog on homosexuality in the church will not be positive.

Suspicion of the State and the Divine Economy of Grace

2008-12-10T04:27:27+00:00

Sadly, I again feel justified in my suspicion of the state. And not only by way of history and political theory. Just recently I’ve come across the following.

From the Republicans:

I’ll just go ahead and say it: God damn the Republicans, and much of the Republican structure, who would turn divinely-inspired prophetic speech into a political tool by calling it hate speech. You parasitic fools.

However, Democrats, you will probably have a lot of explaining to do, if this article, This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House, is even half true about the future:

Amid the euphoria over Obama’s election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton’s boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the “New Military Humanism.” Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and “free trade” deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama’s foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama’s transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances.

Although unassuming, Jesus of Nazareth as the incarnation of the divine and human stories was an interruption from the beginning. The embodiment of divine grace, a relational act that always calls others toward the divine economy of reconciliation, had to enter into the world in some fashion. In fact, there could be no other way than interruption. With the truth of God encountering a broken world that acted as simulacra of divine politics and disconnected from its telos, and therefore in need of healing, God’s grace interrupted the structures of the world. The true politics of God could not but show self-reliant, human politics for the farce they are. Quite simply, the grace of God was not, nor is now, the economy of the world; the story of God did not live as human in the category of bargain, but that of radical grace and reconciliation.

We cry for true peace.

Posted in grace, modern nation-state

Starbucks vs. Tully’s

2008-12-09T09:26:46+00:00

I keep trying Tully's for my morning coffee. Tully's has free wi-fi and a store on the most direct route out of my neighborhood. I'm probably the last coffee drinker in America who has to drive out of his way to get to a Starbucks. And yet I keep driving right past the Tully's and five minutes out of my way to find a Starbucks.

There are three reasons.

Starbucks simply has better coffee. I don't know what Tully's does to mess up their drinks, but probably 75% of the time, a latte from Tully's tastes bitter and burnt. Their consistency seems to have improved over the last several years, but it's a long ways from Starbucks. A latte from Starbucks consistently has exactly the right combination of sweet and bitter.
Starbucks has at least a few edible pastries that aren't guaranteed to give me diabetes. The Tully's selection consists either of "a doughnut by any other name", or inedible health food.
Starbucks wants me there. This morning, I tried out Tully's again, because I wanted the free wi-fi. I sat down at one of the tables wearing a long-sleeve shirt, a fleece, and my ski jacket, but the AC was blowing at full blast, and it was so cold I couldn't type. When I asked the barista if they could turn off AC, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, "Sorry, we don't control the heat."

Chauvet, Grace, and the Incarnation

2008-12-09T02:47:57+00:00

I’m working on my incarnation paper, due all too soon. Below is an excerpt. If anyone has a word about the following content (yeah, I know, I’ll get an editor soon), I would be interested. Especially the last sentence.

The world, humanity, and history, must be reconciled. But what method for reconciliation would God incarnate use? Grace and interruption was and is the method.

Grace is characterized by an over-flowing, or beyond what is necessary. As Louis-Marie Chauvet put it: “grace is essentially that which cannot be calculated and cannot be stocked.” Grace is not achieved in bargain, but through “super-abundance.” Indeed there is a sense of joy at providing more than is necessary, further than any need may go. With grace understood as such, the method of grace speaks partly to the measure of the incarnational action and life, that the incarnation is immeasurable. This over-abundance indicates that grace supersedes, or meets and surpasses a need, but through a process from one to another that is not understood through an economy of bargain.

Thus Chauvet touches on the other half to grace – a gift freely given from someone not ourself. Grace, rightly understood, is gift. But Chauvet does not simply stop with gift, possibly extended without hope for response; rather, for gift to be gratuitous, it must be dialogical: “the gratuitousness of the gift carries the obligation of the return-gift of a response.” Grace, the process of extending graciousness and waiting for reply to complete the “whole circuit,” is not safe, but includes exposure to rejection. The incarnation then was the literal embodiment of divine gratuitousness and graciousness open to humanity; a different kind of messiah than expected, Jesus of Nazareth was divine hesed within humanity seeking reciprocation. Thus, the incarnation was grace, or, by another name, a eucharistic self-giving that affirmed existence, but called for the human story to participate in reconciliation.

The quotes are from Symbol and Sacrament, pages 108 and 109.

Posted in grace, incarnation, Louis-Marie Chauvet

Google outage?

2008-12-08T22:24:07+00:00

I've been having odd trouble with Google's various applications over the last two days – including at least Picasa and Gmail (and Blogger). They're much slower than normal, and periodically stop responding altogether. Has anyone else noticed this?

Metz on Discipleship

2008-12-07T02:54:29+00:00

XXVI
The Christian idea of Discipleship and the apocalyptic idea of imminent expectation absolutely belong together. It would not be possible to live a radical following of Jesus — that is, one that gets at the roots — “if the time were not shortened.” Jesus’ call, “Follow me!” cannot be separated from Christians’ call, “Come, Lord Jesus!”

XXVII
Discipleship in imminent expectation: this is the apocalyptic consciousness that does not cause suffering, but shoulders it — defying apathy as well as hatred.

Metz, Faith in History and Society, 163.

Discipleship as Class Treason
It is possible that what love demands of us here may look like treason — a betrayl of affluence, of the family, and of our customary way of life. But it is also possible that this is the very place where the discernment of spirits is needed in the churches of the rich and powerful countries of this earth.

…When the praxis of Christian love is placed under the sign of this obedience, which forbids us to confuse the mystery of God’s will with the quite non-mysterious will to self-preservation endemic to our familiar patterns of life, then something of the messianic power of this love may be revealed. It strikes deep into our preconceived patterns of life and priorities of life. It has power to change hearts, power not to increase sufferings but to take them upon itself. It has the power to show unconditional solidarity, to be partisan, yet without the destructive hate which negates individual people. It combines within itself the program of holiness with that of militant love — even to the foolishness of the cross. Presumably such a “conversion of hearts” will in fact be dismissed by the experienced strategists of class struggle as feeble and useless, and branded as treason by those who are infatuated with our system of exchange and barter and whose rejection of the inhuman consequences of capitalism is at most only verbal.

Metz, The Emergent Church, 14-16.

Posted in discipleship, Johann Metz