I have made som changes to Freestyle Christianity, which means that you’ll have to go to Freestylechristianity.se to read the most recent posts. This is just temporary, in approximately a week the old adress will take you to the new site.
I have made som changes to Freestyle Christianity, which means that you’ll have to go to Freestylechristianity.se to read the most recent posts. This is just temporary, in approximately a week the old adress will take you to the new site.
To be in the world is to be related; to be folded together with people, nature, religions, art, cultures, architecture, languages, ideas and so on, and each moment of becoming is a unique opportunity to faithfully, prayerfully and playfully create new relations and thus new possibilities for truth, beauty, and goodness. My desire for the Church is for us to respond to God’s call to communally live creative lives in the sense that we actively connect ourselves to make possible new and positive opportunities in the world we live.
The visible unity of the Church in the world should be a manifestation of this continues process and its structures must therefore be dynamic and open ended since a static structure will by its very own idolatrous logic prevent many possibilities of truth, beauty and goodness from being actualised. To shield static Church structures is therefore to defend the self-serving walls of exclusion in order to limit the continuous unfolding of the life, death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. For this reason it is no surprise that the majority of people that adamantly defend the static structures and dogmas of the Church is the very ones that also benefits from them.
Rather than seeking unity between various Church structures, be they Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, I believe that these structures are temples that need to be surpassed so that the Spirit of the resurrected Christ can raise us up as a visible unity in Christ. We are one in Christ, that is our Christian confession, and our desire should therefore be to actively participate in the continuous process of the unfolding Christ Event by allowing for his vibrating, life giving and community making Spirit to work through our lives.
To strive for unity between the various fractions of the Church is a futile task because this aim accepts the false notion that we are not united in Christ. My firm belief is that we are one in Christ and therefore that this confession should be the vantage point of our theology, ecclesiology, missiology and so on. The Church would then be seen as an ecclesia where God is believed to speak both through all of us and to all of us and the structures and teachings continuously created and re-created by this manifold community would then be a visible manifestation of our unity in Christ instead of a static framework of it.
I believe that the Spirit of Christ has kept unfolding in the catacombs throughout history and that this vibrating movement therefore also have permeated the Church structures from below the ground. Hence I am not making the claim that God is not at work within these structures, but I am making the claim that they have prevented positive possibilities that otherwise would have been actualized while also causing conflicts between themselves and much suffering for those kept on the outside. Rather than re-building various versions of the temple Jesus surpassed I suggest that we participate in his death and strive to live lives shaped by the Spirit of his resurrection.
Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race. –Giambatista Vico
The ingenuity of creative theologians; the living artists that invents new powers and weapons, can be described as weak and irrational, while the power of the oppressors can be traced from the commonsensical; the common judgment that is distant from both reflection and the will to movement. Those who worship the power of princes and principalities are therefore the same people that reject the prophetic rhythm while complacently watching how the veil of common sense gradually grows on-and-into things. They use every possible means to suffocate the unstoppable force of the continuous becoming of the world in order to forever secure their privileges. ‘With us’, they say, ‘history has reached its final destination so put the dices away and get in line’.
To argue for a kind of irrationality should not necessarily be equated with a plea for a politically impotent relativism, rather I’m striving to promote a relational and creative way of life, which is not limited by deodorized discourses, hegemonic narratives or the frozen and oppressive logic they give rise to. People of reason and control should therefore not be allowed to rule over what our future possibilities might look like and my hope is thus that we will be able to create new, unexpected and subversive ways of communally responding to God’s subtle call for truth, beauty, and goodness.
By following the idolatrous ways of this world it is possible to become great in the eyes of the world, but such greatness is always gained at the expense of the Other, as a consequence of its inherent, sacrificial logic. Hence we are called not to conform to the ways of this world but to be baptized into the death of Christ. The cruciform power of the living artists is therefore weak; it does not follow the idolatrous logic of the world but functions prophetically from beneath and is primarily manifested when we break bread together in communities that privileges those that need it the most.
Hence, the theological discourse should not be limited to secluded spaces exclusively occupied by people who are among the privileged in our societies. Neither should we as theologians ever assume that we have arrived at the Truth. Rather, theology as a practice should always be situated within communities that acknowledges all voices and which are conscious that the church is always to be reformed in all aspects if its life. We should therefore desire to create spaces where such communities can come together, not to promote contempt for knowledge or to defend slave morality, but to invent new powers and weapons in order to peacefully struggle for events of truth, beauty, and goodness to take place in the world.
When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers . . . The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. –Alfred North Whitehead
The brief Galilean vision of humility was officially rejected by the Church and its lawyers. Rather than listening to Jesus’ words about the God who desire mercy and not sacrifice the Church gave in for the self serving, idolatrous temptation to lord it over both people and God. The words ‘get behind me Satan’ was misinterpreted as a call for hierarchical structures and sacrificial practices, and thus led to a kind of blindness to differences, even within the Church’s own ranks, and God was believed to be confined by the lavish cathedrals that reached almost up to the heavens. However, this is not the entire story because the Christ-event has subtly kept unfolding in the catacombs throughout history and I believe that it still does. My hope is for his vibrating Spirit to work through our lives as we seek to situate ourselves together with those that are being sacrificed. In contrast to Peter, as he was questioned about his relationship with Jesus, we should desire to say that we know all of the least of these. This is obviously an impossible task but we should believe in impossible possibilities because we believe that with God all things are possible.
The idolatrous vision is guided by static concepts and the will to reduce the Other to a mere object in an all encompassing and closed off system. It suppresses differences and relations while desiring to consume what it sees. It repetitiously belittles both God and the world to the confines of its own limits because it is ultimately striving to rule and overtake the objects it perceives. The idolatrous vision is not curious; it lacks creativity, imagination and the ability to detect nuances. It is ruthless, violent and incapable of seeing colours and reflections. Ultimately, the idolatrous vision can only lead a people into an ever-deeper darkness because only blindness can satisfy the desire to avoid differences.
An idolatrous people is robbed and plundered, all of them are trapped in holes and hidden in prisons; they have become a prey with no one to rescue, a spoil with no one to say, “Restore!” Who among you will give heed to this, who will attend and listen for the time to come? [Isaiah 42.22-23]
The admission that I am not God is the acceptance of being a subject; a finite individual with particular features and a limited perspective, or to put it in positive terms; the acceptance of subjectivity is the admission that I am not God. However, subjectivity is born in a web of intense relationships so the experience of subjectivity should not lead us to think that we are separate entities. We are connected to one another, we exist in multiplicity; folded together in various constellations in each moment of becoming.
As Christians we confess to be one in Christ – who is in the Father and whom the Father is in. We accept that we are folded together within the divine, and thus that individuality cannot be thought of as separateness. I am therefore always with you and without you I am not. Still, I am not One with God since that would mean that you are not.
To assume Oneness with God is simply idolatry and the consequence is oppression towards the Other. To assume that God is not creates the same boundary markers since subjectivity is then understood as separateness from the Other; the ones who believe to be One with God. It is therefore not surprising that some atheists might say that religion poisons everything, since religion is believed to belong to the poisonous Other.
The rejection of the Other is a unifying force, its sacrificial mechanism binds people together, and can therefore be said to be a kind of religious practice. But it is anti-religion; it unifies people by the exclusion of the Other. Religious fundamentalists and ‘anti-theists’ therefore need one another since their separate unities are built on the common foundation of this exclusionary practice.
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The infinite demand placed upon our lives by the kingdom of heaven reveals that discipleship is costly and that we therefore should not be searching for cheap grace, rather than for lethargy, the good news of the coming kingdom is a call for responsibility and a righteous way of life. Hence, we should not let sin exercise dominion in our mortal bodies, to make us obey its idolatrous rhythm, but accept the baptism into the death of Christ so we too might walk in the newness of life, which is a motion permeated by self emptying love.
The proclamation of the kingdom of heaven is thus a call to a newness of life; a walk with a new rhythm, guided by a prophetic desire and a new vision. In contrast to the individualistic consumerism preached by the priests of our present day culture, the life of faith is subversive and therefore challenges the commonsensical in favour of a view that looks for impossible possibilities beneath the face of the deep.
If we do not have love, we are simply noisy gongs or clanging cymbals, because love is what creates impossible possibilities; love is what makes it possible to see beneath the surface. The proclamation that the kingdom of heaven is at hand therefore challenge the view that we should consume the world as it is in order to reach satisfaction. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of love and love is what moves us deeper into the infinite depth of the relationships we already have and unveils a hope for a future where all things are made new.
If I ought to tell them that I pray, and describe how that could happen, according to what idiom and what rite, on one’s knees or standing up, in front of whom and what books, for if you knew, G., my experience of prayer, you would know everything, you who knows everything, you would tell me to whom to address them to. –Jacques Derrida
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida once wrote that he rightly passes for an atheist. What for many people seem to be a contradiction is that he also claimed to be ‘a man of prayers and tears’. When asked to whom he prays he answered that if he knew the answer to this question he would know everything.
Taking as our point of departure Derrida’s statements about prayers I think it is correct to say that many people, maybe even all, who claim theistic beliefs also assume to know everything. Derrida’s ‘circumfession’ is thus an acceptance of the limitations to what he knows – he rightly passes for an atheist because he does not know everything. A further consequence of Derrida’s atheism, of his admission to not know everything, is that he does not claim to rightly pass for God; if God knows everything.
A common critique against the post-modern [sic] acceptance of not knowing everything is that such an admission by necessity leads to relativism. Many people – some of them theists, some of them atheists – therefore reject this kind of ‘weak’ reasoning in favour of some form of rigid absolutism. This is unfortunate because the close ally to absolutism, ironically enough, is the very relativism its advocates allegedly are attempting to avoid.
The confession that I do not know everything, that my truth is not absolute, that I am not God, is also an acceptance that God is not confined by me; that God is not One with my nationality, social status, gender, culture, sexuality, creed, reason, skin colour, etc., or as Paul famously explains in the letter to the churches of Galatia: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ [Gal 3.28]
All of us are one in Christ Jesus, without exceptions, that is our Christian confession. The idolatrous temptation is thus to assume that God is confined by me and hence that the boundary markers, which Paul denied validity, are still in play. The admission that I do not know everything, that I am not God, is therefore a move towards justice because if I assume to be One with God I also assume that the Other is not.
The Church is to be an alternative community, an ecclesia, which has opened itself up to be disrupted by the coming of the kingdom and thus accepted both the infinite demands and the impossible possibilities contained within it. From this follows that we, as the community of believers, should not define our faith by negating that of the empires of the world. We are an alternative community to the empires but we are not their binary opposite, rather we should be understanding our communal being in the world on an entirely different plane since the kingdom is not from this world and we should therefore express our faith positively. Unfortunately we have all too often failed miserably in doing so and the consequence has been a religiosity, claiming to represent Christ, which is a simple reflection of that which we are called to be an alternative to. Communities shaped by this reactionary spirit is thus crafted into imperial images and its actions are as excluding and oppressive as those that nailed Jesus to the cross. As followers of Christ, who on the cross became the excluded one for the sake of the excluded, we should be looking for a more narrow road.
The kingdom of heaven is at hand and it places an infinite demand upon our lives; it calls us to freedom from the shackles of having our hearts turned upon themselves and towards a communal life permeated by love, even for our enemies, and thus to become an alternative community to the empires of this world. The weight of this demand discloses that the life of faith and discipleship is costly but it should not be seen as unattainable, rather it unveils the possibility of the impossible since it breaks open the finite world in which a genuine love for our enemies is impossible and introduces us to the infinite possibilities hidden beneath the face of the deep. This is, I believe, how God calls into existence the things that do not exist and it allows for us to hope against hope. Let anyone with ears listen!
Far too often has the Church lost its rhythm and been led astray by the imperial desire to lord it over people rather than to serve them. All too frequently have we failed to hear the voices of the excluded ones as an infinite demand upon our lives. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and we said, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ He was hungry and we gave him no food, he was thirsty and we gave him nothing to drink, he was a stranger and we did not welcome him, naked and we did not give him clothing, sick and in prison and we did not visit him.
The kingdom is always at hand but it can never be possessed and we can never say; look, here it is, or there it is, and still it demands everything from us. So rather than becoming a possession of the Church, something that we can own or sell, the kingdom should be allowed to open up a space within our lives where the impossible becomes possible, where we hear the call and give up everything for the sake of the oppressed and the outcasts of this wretched world, where we serve the poor and clothe the naked, and where we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.