I’ve been dying in my dreams lately.  The first time, my femoral artery was slashed and then I was held under water in a bathtub until I passed out as I watched the water turn red from my blood.  The second time I was stabbed multiple times, but I didn’t die until somebody slashed my throat (from my collar bone up to my ear).  Not the best dreams I’ve ever had.  In both, I spend most of my time running from these demons who are trying to kill my friends and I.  At some point, I end up thinking I have escaped or killed them all, but they always come back and taunt me for thinking I could ever defeat them.  They surround me, and laugh at me — “Did you ever really think that you could kill us?  You can’t kill us, we will always be with you” — and then they kill me.

I was talking about this with a friend the other day, and she mentioned a nightmare she had recently.  She was staying with a couple of friends on the farmhouse where she grew up.  At some point, she got up to look outside and the sky was full of parachutes carrying dead bodies wrapped in bags and tied up with ropes.  She stood at the window, terrified, and watched them fall by the thousands from the sky.

A little while ago, one of my brother’s wrote a post that mentioned how the founder and former CEO of Blackwater (now Xe) had contributed significant sums of money to a number of Conservative Christian groups like ‘Focus on the Family’.  In response, I asked if ‘Focus on the Family’ should be considered a Christian organization.

On the one hand, I was having a bit of a laugh, as ‘Focus on the Family’ is probably one of the most influential and widely known ‘Christian’ groups in North America.  On the other hand, I was being completely serious, and this had gotten me to thinking about the following questions:

What determines whether or not a person or group is ‘Christian’?  Is it the affirmation of certain propositions (as many today tend to think)?  The embodiment of certain practices (as Jesus appeared to argue)?  Both?  Neither?

More generally, what role do boundaries between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ play in the formation of group identities?  Who determines those boundaries and patrols them?  What positive function do these boundaries serve?

Finally, if a person self-identifies as belonging to a certain group, is it appropriate to contest that?

I would be curious to hear how others might respond to these questions.

Some recent conversations and readings have caused me to revisit my thinking on portrayals of divine violence within the biblical texts.  Specifically, I have been asking myself: what exactly am I to make of the fact that the bible often portrays God as violent or as commanding or approving of massive acts of death-dealing destruction?

Now the reason why these texts strike me as troubling isn’t necessarily because they portray God as violent, unattractive, and evil but because this portrayal of God seems inconsistent with the God portrayed throughout most of the biblical narrative.  If this portrayal of a violent God was consistent with the rest of the bible, then it would be easy to simply close the book, and move on to better things.  However, as far as I can tell, the bible primarily presents God as the God of life, of creation, of healing, of forgiveness, of the oppressed, and so on.  Therefore, those who are drawn to this (dominant) portrayal of God are left to struggle with the texts of terror.

When approaching these texts, it is important to remember that the authors are shaped by the contexts and ideologies that they inhabit as they write.  Indeed, what I think we see reflected in these texts is the extra-biblical ideology of conquest as it is proclaimed by the triumphant or by the oppressed who unconsciously adopt the ideology of the oppressors.

Thus, for example, in the Old Testament narratives related to the conquest of Canaan, we encounter history as it is written by the triumphant.  Not surprisingly, as with most stories of conquest, we read of how the victors experienced divine assistance and, even at their most vicious (say when they were slaughtering women, children, and animals) they are portrayed as simply ‘following [God's] orders’.  Of course, such narratives are strikingly similar to the stories told by other Powers, from contemporary American narratives about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to most of the parties involved in the two world wars, to empires as diverse as the Babylonians, the Ottomans, the British, and so on.  Therefore, during the moments of history when the ancient Hebrews (briefly) enjoyed some relative military success, it is not surprising to see them relating history through lenses tinted by triumph.

Stated bluntly, this is what war criminals tell themselves (and end up believing) in order to sleep with clean consciences — which also means that the overcoding involved in these stories tends to be bullshit… regardless of whether or not they come to us from Obama or the Deuteronomist.  So, truth be told, I just don’t buy it.  I don’t buy it that God has called America to be the policeman of the world, and I don’t buy it that God called Israel (past or present!) to slaughter the people who live in the land they wish to inhabit.  The day God starts telling you to slaughter innocents, is the day that you should start looking for a new God… because the odds are the voice you are hearing isn’t God at all.

This way of thinking covers a good deal of the violence described in the Old Testament, but it still does not explain references to divine violence in the New Testament (notably references to the damnation and torment of those who are perceived of as enemies of God and God’s people), which was written, not by the triumphant, but by members of an oppressed and subversive minority.  In these instances, I think it is best that we understand references to divine violence to be an expression of one of the ways in which oppressed people end up internalizing the ideologies of their own oppressors.  This is, after all, a common thing to see — rather than finding a third way of being and acting, oppressed people often fall victim to the propaganda and the spectacle imposed by the oppressors, but simply wish that the tables were turned.  Of course, much of what attracts me about the biblical narrative is the struggle to discover, express, and act out a third way (the Way of Jesus Christ) but it is not surprising to discover that those who follow this way do so imperfectly and — despite their best efforts — still end up enmeshed in some of the violence of their times.  The same is true of any of us.

In sum, I believe that there are various and competing traditions and voices found within the biblical narrative.  Some of these traditions are more prominent and carry greater weight than others.  It is my opinion that the traditions that speak of God as the God of life, creation, healing, liberation, forgiveness and of the oppressed, outweigh the traditions that speak of God as the God of death, conquest, destruction, and of the triumphant.  Therefore, I reject such portrayals of God.  These texts of terror just might be Christianity’s ‘Satanic verses’.

A little over a month ago, the kind folks over at Bridging the Gap invited me to participate in a ’synchroblog’, wherein various contributors would reflect in one way or another on matters related to Christianity and homosexuality.

At that time, I decided to abstain because, to be honest, I’ve got a bit of shortfuse with (mostly Conservative and Evangelical) Christians when it comes to these things.

However, I find myself compelled to engage these Christians on this topic and here is the reason why I do so:

In my ten years of working with street-involved and homeless youth, I have gotten to know a good many youth who were physically and sexually abused and then abandoned (or driven to run away) solely because of their sexual orientation.  Further, I know that this experience is not unique to homeless and street-involved youth — I have many friends in the LGBT community who have had similar experiences, but who had other supports in their lives, and so were able to avoid the street.  The catch is that most of those engaging in the abuse of non-heterosexual youth appear to be Conservative or Evangelical Christians.  Almost every kid I have known who has come to the street due to abuse related to his or her sexuality has told me that s/he comes from a Christian family.

This is what compels me to dialogue with Evangelicals and Conservative Christians about sexuality.  Just as we will always need John Schools (to teach men about the realities of sex work), we will always need those willing to tell Evangelicals and other Conservative Christians that it is not okay to beat, rape and abandon your children — no matter what their sexual orientation.

For the most part, the wheel of history grinds on as it always has.  Empires rise and fall and power balances shift, but always there are the wealthy and privileged few living off of the broken bodies of the poor and hungry multitudes.  Always there is apathy and injustice and everywhere we look we encounter the triumph of death.  It surrounds us and fills the air we breath like a plague we have lived with for so long that we have forgotten what we are losing and what we have lost.  So we live our lives — we work, we eat, we drink, we fuck — vaguely sensing that something is missing, longing for we don’t know what, and making the best of the only option we feel that we have.

***

But perhaps there is another option.  Although we will never stop the wheel of history from grinding on, perhaps we can change its course.  In the end, it comes down to the question of what price we are willing to pay in our pursuit of a history marked not by apathy and injustice, but by love and justice; permeated not by death, but by life.  This, I believe is what Albert Schweitzer saw in Jesus:

[Jesus] lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close.  It refuses to turn, and he throws himself upon it.  Then it does turn; and crushes him… The wheel rolls onward and the mangled body of [Jesus] is hanging upon it still.  That is his victory.

Perhaps this is what is required of those who claim to follow this person.  Perhaps this is the pearl of great price (cf. Mt 13.45f).

In the same way that religion may be considered the opiate of the masses, the Arts should be considered the opiate of the middle-classes.

Here we are:

1. Galatians and the Imperial Cult: A Critical Analysis of the First-Century Social Context of Paul’s Letter by Justin K. Hardin.

 In most counter-imperial readings of Paul, Galatians tends to be a bit of a neglected letter.  Therefore, I was thrilled when I first stumbled across Justin Hardin’s reading of Galatians (even if it did take me awhile to track down the book and convince myself that it was worth what I had to pay for it).  The book did not disappoint my expectations.

What Hardin does is establish the (quite significant) presence of the imperial cult in Galatia and the way in which the imperial cult was deeply woven into the civic, political, and religious areas of the lives of the Galatians (of course, within first-century Galatia it’s pretty anachronistic to speak of the civic, political, and religious as though they are distinct areas of life, when in fact they were not).  From this, Hardin then draws the highly probably (IMO) thesis that the persecution that Paul’s opponents in Galatia were trying to avoid was social and civic persecution based upon their unwillingness to participate in matters related to the imperial cult.  Thus, for example, when Paul talks disparagingly of those who observe special days and weeks, he is speaking of Roman cultic celebrations (and not of the Jewish calendar).  Therefore, over against the gospel of Caesar as Lord found in the imperial cult, Paul reaffirms the gospel of Jesus as Lord and encourages the Galatian churches to stay firm in their radically subversive lifestyle.

Not surprisingly, I like what Hardin has to say.  Recommended reading.

2. Pacifism as Pathology by Ward Churchill.

Within the North American context, discussions related to violence and nonviolence tend to mostly take place between those in dominant positions of ower (who, surprise, favour violence) and those in places of resistance to the Powers (we tend to favour nonviolence).  In these discussions, I have consistently sided with the ‘pacifists’ (or ‘nonviolent activists’ or whatever you want to call them).

However, this book brings a very different angle to the discussion of violence.  Churchill writes as a member of what could be termed ‘the radical Left’ and so he writes as a person who is also unconvinced by the standard Statist or Right-wing arguments regarding violence.  However, he also wants to avoid the ‘pathological’ aversion that those on the Left seem to exhibit around violence.  Thus, he argues that we must be willing to pursue all possible avenues to change — violence and nonviolence can both be appropriate at different moments and different places in the same struggle.

Now what is especially good about Churchill’s book is the way in which he demonstrates how nonviolent movements, when they are effective, are reliant upon other violent movements.  Thus, for example, the nonviolent wing of the American Civil Rights movement gained the attention the media and the other Powers, not because of anything integral to that wing, but because the Black Panthers were also rising and arming the ghettoes.  Similarly, Gandhi’s success in India was also premised upon the violence that had devastated the British Empire during the two world wars and other areas (notably in the Middle East) that were rising more violently.  And so on.

In the end, Churchill drives home that point that nonviolent ‘resistance’ (if it even deserves that name), tends to be little more than impotent (and self-righteous) posturing by people of privilege.  This particular criticism hits home several times, and I ended up agreeing with Churchill on this point.

Therefore, I can only conclude that Christians that go on and on about nonviolence aren’t worth a damn unless they bear on their own bodies the brandmarks of Christ (cf. Gal 6.17) – for those are the marks borne by those who truly resist the Powers and enter into solidarity with the crucified.  Any resistance that leaves the resisters (or the Powers!) unscathed is probably not worth mentioning. 

Regardless, I recommend that others read this book and decide for themselves about these things.

3. The Cross by Sigrid Undset.

This is the third book in Undset’s Kristen Lavransdatter trilogy and, as Halden stated in a comment below, the trilogy is ‘fucking amazing.’  This is a genuinely epic series — and I use the word ‘epic’ advisedly (I hate the way that word has been popularized and every bon mot or humourous episode or whatever else ends up being labeled as ‘epic’).  Anyway, this series is a fantastic portrayal of people as people.  No heroes.  No villians.  Just people longing to love and be loved… but ending up, more often than not, hurting each other and trapping themselves in places of self-destruction (yep, that’s pretty much the way I understand people).  It is also a marvelous and captivating portrayal of life in medieval Norway.  I highly recommend the trilogy to those who are willing to read 1000+ pages.

Culture is what we do when politics ceases to be an option.

In the penultimate verse of ‘Georgia Lee‘, Tom Waits channels the voice of Georgia and sings the following:

Close your eyes and count to ten
I will go and hide but then
Be sure to find me, I want you to find me
And we’ll play all over
We will play all over again

To me this is the most devastating verse in the song.  To me it speaks of the betrayal of innocence and of godforsakenness.  Why is this?  Because Tom Waits is singing of a little girl who becomes lost and then dies.

But this isn’t just some sort of tragic accident, or some sort of misfortune caused by blind fate.  No, Waits directs his charge to God and the refrain of the song is this:

Why wasn’t God watching?  Why wasn’t God listening?  Why wasn’t God there for Georgia Lee?

This is why, when we come to the penultimate verse, one does not simply think that Georgia is speaking to her parents or her playmates.  Rather, one imagines a small child trusting in God, in the goodness of the world, wanting to run and play, hide and be found.  But God is not trustworthy, the world is not safe, and the child is found much too late.  Here, innocence is not simply lost — it is killed.

I have been thinking a lot about this song over the last few weeks.  Playing with my infant son, I have been reminded of when I used to be innocent — when I used to believe in the fundamental goodness and beauty of the world, when I used to believe that God would come and save us all, and when I used to believe that love conquered all.  Hell, I was even eager to seek out the darkest places I could find because I was so convinced of the truth and efficacy of these things.

Now I don’t know if I believe any of them anymore.  Now, while I am still often overwhelmed by the beauty and goodness of our world, I am also, or perhaps even more often, overwhelmed by the brokenness of our world.  Now, while I am still waiting for God to come and save us, I have grown accustomed to the experience that, for many (perhaps even most of us), God never shows up.  Now, I have seen things that are stronger than love — so while love can conquer all, it only rarely actually does so.  More often, death prevails.

Mostly, then, I think we awaken to the brokenness in our world and in ourselves and discover that we are alone.  We awaken to a world without God or, even if we continue to believe in God (as I do), we awaken to the realization that, when it comes to God, we have all been betrayed; we have all been abandoned.  We are, all of us, Georgia Lee lost and dying in a lonely place, waiting for the God who never comes.  Or who comes too late.

So one can believe in God or not.  In the end, it doesn’t seem to make any meaningful difference.

[NB: this post, more than many I write, is an exercise in thinking aloud.]

It is probable that most of us have been taught to assume that truth is something that is expressed in language or in sentence (I reckon a good many of us began identifying ‘true/false’ statements in quizzes at a fairly young age).  At worst, this assumption is incorrect.  At best, it is deceptive.  Such an assumption makes the fatal mistake of assigning truth to the disembodied realms of semiotics and linguistics, thereby creating a disconnect between truth and being or truth and doing.  It is this disconnect that we must overcome.

In order to do this, we must begin by realizing that language is nothing more than the manipulation of sounds (when it is verbalized) or signs (when it is written) within the framework of previously established rules and limits.  That is to say, any truth value found within language is one that we a priori and arbitrarily assign to it.  In and of itself, language has no meaning and expresses no truth.  Even if we find it convenient to pretend that it is meaningful or truthful, all language is actually tautological.

So, for example, let us imagine the following.  Let us create a language game wherein all objects possessing a certain characteristic (let’s call it ‘X’) also possess a certain other characteristic (let’s call it ‘Y’).  Let us now examine an object (let’s call it object ‘A’).  Let us assume that object A possesses characteristic X.  We can then conclude that object A also possesses characteristic Y.  Within this scenario, we might be tempted to say that our conclusion is ‘true’.  However, this type of truth is then something we have arbitrarily created — based upon the rules of our language game and our manipulation of signs — and this truth consequently has no connection to any reality external to our game.  Truth, in this case, is not stranger than fiction — it is fiction.

Or, to take another example, let us take the statement that ‘1 + 1 = 2′.  Once again, what we have are signs that we have arbitrarily manipulated and slotted into a particular language game (mathematics).  Within that language games those signs have a particular meaning, leading to a statement that produces a supposed truth — but, once again, that truth only has value within the boundaries of that language game and it tells us nothing (true or false) about the world outside of that game.  This truth is also fiction.

Now, I take the time to dwell on these (somewhat dull) examples because we need to understand that a great deal of what goes on in scholarship — in theology, philosophy, social theory, and our so-called quest for truth — is little more than this manipulation of signs and language games in order to create systems that are, perhaps, logically rigorous or aesthetically pleasing, but whose truth values have no relationship to any reality external to the games being played by the scholars.

This is why we must not judge scholars and their scholarly proposals on the logical force or aesthetical appeal of the arguments that they produce.  Instead, we must judge scholars on the basis of how they live their lives.  Therefore, I entirely disagree with Seth who commented on my last post and stated:

If the essay has truth in it but doesn’t necessarily translate to the truth in the author’s life I would not discount the truth of the essay.

The point is that no essay has truth in it.  All essayists are doing is manipulating signs.  Therefore, what matters is not the essay but what the essayist actually does with his or her life.  Unfortunately, Seth’s argument is used to justify the ongoing existence of academicswith high status and comfortable lifestyles who say a lot of things they don’t actually mean or understand (otherwise we would see that meaning genuinely reflected in their lives and actions).  Thus, contemporary structures of power and privilege are perpetuated, regardless of the ‘radicality’ of the argument constructed by these scholars.

Consequently, truth, if it is to be something concrete, or a-thing-that-is, must be sought in being and in doing.  It is the truth that is found in these things that possesses significance and meaning.  The truth that is found in language is ever only fictional — truth that is sought in being and doing is historical and material.