Late as usual (but also longer than usual):
1. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek .
In this book, Žižek explores the collapse of capitalist liberal democracy first in the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001 and then in the farcical events of the global financial meltdown in 2008 (Sept. 11 is only mentioned in passing and the economic events of 2008 remain the enduring focus).  In exploring these events, Žižek also points to the Left’s failure to exploit the situation in order to create an alternative and so — instead of supporting the views of those like Klein or Hardt and Negri — Žižek proposes a return to communism with its concomitant exercise of force (here wielded primarily in solidarity with those who are excluded and assigned to ‘the place of no place’ within global capitalism).
As with most things Žižek is writing these days, I found this book to be both enlightening and entertaining.  I particularly enjoyed his (ongoing) exposition of propaganda, fetishism, and ideology and remain convinced that this is the sort of argument that any ‘person of faith’ should employ in order to think about his or her own belief system.  I also enjoyed Žižek ‘s focus upon the centrality of those who are excluded, a thought that he as continued to develop since In Defense of Lost Causes, and a thought that has many parallels in liberation theology.  More off topic maybe, but I also enjoy that way in which he (and Badiou) write about ‘the Event’, as I think that this is an almost perfect description of Pauline apocalypticism.  My only main objection to this book is that Žižek ends up leaving his form of communism as rather vague and undefined (in this regard, he reminds me of Hauerwas’ writings about the Church — it’s all very beautiful and inspiring but when you look for where the rubber hits the road you end up a little confused and a little disappointed).  So, yep, recommended reading.
2. Hatred of Democracy by Jacques Rancière.
In this short book, Rancière explores the ways in which modern Western, or parliamentary, democracies are actually sustained by very anti-democratic beliefs and practices.  Thus, members of the ruling class are motivated by a very deep hatred of democracy, for it is genuine democracy that challenges their so-called right to rule.  Or, as Rancière puts it, from the perspective of the ruling class “there is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization”.
Genuine democracy, then, is one that refuses to privilege any group of people with some sort of preordained right to rule (whether through wealth, or familial connections, or title, or whatever else).  It is hear that Rancière looks back (with admiration) to some of the Greek poleis that Plato criticized.  Here, representatives of the people were selected through the drawing of lots.  Rancière comments:

If the drawing of lots appears to our ‘democracies’ to be contrary to every serious principle for selecting governors, this is because we have forgotten what democracy meant and what type of ‘nature’ it aimed at countering… the drawing of lots was the remedy to any evil at once much more serious and much more probable than a government full of incompetents: government comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning… good government is the government of those who do not desire to govern.

Thus, what democracy means when it speaks of “the power of the people” is “not that of the people gathered together, of the majority, or of the working class”; rather, it is the power of “any one at all” to govern and to be governed.
Personally, having spent a lot of time thinking about how to organize within a particular community of people (and having had many negative experiences of the practice of power, representation, and leadership in a multitude of communities), I find this thesis to be quite fascinating and compelling.  I wonder what would happen if we started organizing ourselves based upon this principle?
3. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger.
Originally published as two separate but connected stories, Franny and Zooey tells the story of two siblings coming of age and negotiating the space between a messed-up world that is not as it should be and the hubris that comes with being raised with intelligence, taste, and privilege.  Mostly it consists of three prolonged conversations (the first between Franny and her boyfriend, the second between Zooey and their mother, and the third between Franny and Zooey), and it builds to a great conclusion.  In fact, I got goosebumps on the final page and a half, and I can’t remember the last time the climax of a novel did that to me.  Recommended reading.
4. Gertrude by Hermann Hesse.
My wife owns a whole bunch of Hesse novels and I’ve kind of poked away at them over the years.  I remember not being too impressed with Siddhartha, but Narcissus and Goldmund was fabulous.  Anyway, on a whim, I pulled this book off the shelf and opened to the first paragraph:

When I consider my life objectively, it does not seem particularly happy.  Yet I cannot really call it unhappy, despite all my mistakes.  After all, it is quite foolish to talk about happiness and unhappiness, for it seems to me that I would not exchange the unhappiest days of my life for all the happy ones.

Wow.  After reading that I was hooked and quickly read through what turned out to be a story of unrequited love (it has been awhile since I read one of those).  Of course it is also more than that and deals with the ways in which we unintentionally harm the people around us and with other themes like maturity, sacrifice and humility (another quote: “Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others”).
Then again, this book also got me thinking about the theme of unrequited love and the cultural shift that seems to have occurred in this regard.  Once upon a time, this was a dominant theme amongst ‘people of culture’ (just to name a few, think of the way it shows up in literature from Hugo’s Hunchback, to Leroux’s Phantom, to Rostand’s Cyrano, to Goethe’s young Werther).  However, in our contemporary context, it seems like the theme of unrequited love belongs almost exclusively to teenage pop culture (the Twilight Series being the most recent blockbuster to exploit this theme).
So how is it, I wonder, that the theme of unrequited love has moved from being a favourite topic amongst the cultural elite, to being a favourite topic in one of the most looked-down-upon pop cultures of our day?  I’d be curious to hear any theories that people might have about this.  Personally, I wonder if it is because we have given up on love and have ceased to believe in it the way in which people once did.  Indeed, it is almost as though giving up on love becomes part of the rites of passage that we face as we move from childhood to maturity.  Instead of seeing love — including unrequited love — as inherently worthwhile, noble, and beautiful, we learn to temper our views with cynicism, pragmatism, and the desire to avoid any pain or loss.
Anyway, all this is rather tangential to the book at hand.  Recommended reading.
5. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.
I have been thinking about this book for the last several months even though I haven’t read it since highschool.  Basically, I kept coming back to Biff’s final confrontation with his father:

Biff: Pop!  I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you! … I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you.  You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like the rest of them!  I’m one dollar an hour, illy!  I tried seven states and couldn’t raise it.  A buck an hour!  Do you gather my meaning?  I’m not bringing home any prizes any more, and you’re going to stop waiting for me to bring them home! … Pop, I’m nothing!  I’m nothing, Pop.  Can’t you understand that?  There’s no spite in it any more.  I’m just what I am, that’s all.

Basically, I went back and read this play because I’ve been trying to internalize that message — to be able to confront my own insignificance and failures but to do so without any spite.  It is a difficult line to walk.  On the one hand, I am filled with a longing to see something more in life — to see new life, new creation, new love bloom in places of death, destruction and despair — but, on the other hand, I have also seen how my efforts to pursue those things have ended up harming others and leaving me constantly disappointed.
There is a quote from Rilke that a friend of mine taught me some time ago: “I’m afraid if my demons leave me, my angels will take flight as well”.  When he said this, Rilke was talking about why he rejected (Freudian) psychotherapy, but I’ve always understood this quote as pointing to more than that — as fitting well with what Paul says about power being perfected in weakness and with what Jesus says about losing life to find it.  Perhaps both our brightest and our darkest aspects are two indivisible sides of the same coin.
But if that’s the case, then one wonders if we need to throw away the coin.  In fact, it seems to me that this is exactly what most people do — they give up both their hope and despair to live in the now; they give up both their love and their hate to live with indifference; they give up both their angels and demons to get through their bullshit 9-5 jobs.  This is how people learn to survive this gong-show that we call life.  Me, I’ve been clinging to my hope and despair, my love and my hate, and my angels and demons… but I don’t know how sustainable that is anymore.
Anyway, this is also tangential to the book at hand, but these are the things I getting thinking about when I read.  I recommend this play (also, in light of this tangent, it is interesting to note how it is the final in-breaking of love, into the life of Willy, that leads to his ultimate act of self-destruction — Willy can only survive as long as he does not know that his son loves him).
6. Prints and Drawings of Käthe Kollwitz selected and introduced by Carl Zigrosser.
As I’ve stated before, I’ve never connected much with the visual arts.  This is partly why I’ve been so stunned by the works of Kollwitz — they caught me completely off guard and struck me speechless.  I honestly don’t know how to describe her work, but I very much enjoyed (if that’s the right word) this book of prints and drawings, as well as the essay providing background information on Kollwitz herself.  So, instead of trying to describe the art, I’ll just link to a few examples:  Death and Woman, Poverty, Woman with her Dead Child, and Sleeping Mother with Child.

Well, I’ve had a couple weightier tomes on the go for awhile now, but I wasn’t able to finish them last month… so just fiction and lit. on the list.
1. The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner.
This is the second novel I’ve read by Stegner and I think he is growing on me.  His writing reminds me of Steinbeck and Hardy… but not quite as good.  Of course, Steinbeck and Hardy set the bar impossibly high, so don’t be put off — this is still a very enjoyable book.
In it, Stegner tells us the story of Elsa and Bo Mason — from their youth on through to their old age, which also takes us through from the childhood to mid-life of their sons, Chester and Bruce.  The story is set in North America in the early twentieth-century and it speaks of the struggle to survive, the challenge of conflicting desires, accepting the consequences of one’s choices, and living in light of that which is beyond one’s control.  Recommended reading.
2. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
Well, I continue to chip away at McCarthy but I think that this is my least favourite of the books I have read by him.  Perhaps it was because I had already seen the movie and so the plot did not pull me in as much, as I knew what to expect (speaking of the movie, after reading the novel, I think they did an excellent job casting the central characters).  Of course, all this is not to suggest that this was a crummy novel.  It’s a good book.  The characters are very well crafted, the various narrative voices are well employed, and the ongoing action or tension causes the reader to press on.
(I’m not actually mentioning the plot because I’m assuming most people are familiar with it from the movie.)
3. Blindness by José Saramago.
Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book about an epidemic of (white) blindness that suddenly descends upon an unnamed town (and presumably spreads to the rest of the world).  What then results — first the quarantine imposed upon the blind (as they are isolated within an old insane asylum) and what happens there, and then the general collapse of society as everyone is stricken blind — is probably a fairly honest portrayal of how humans tend to react to crises.  Some band together to try and care for each other, some band together to exploit others, everyone’s hands get dirty and, at the end of the day, most everybody is just trying to stay alive (no matter what that might end up costing others… including loved ones).
Saramago also has an interesting writing style.  He never uses proper names for characters (but calls them “The Doctor’s Wife”, “The Girl with Dark Glasses” and so on), he writes massive run-on sentences (using commas as periods) and often doesn’t distinguish in-text dialog from commentary (ensuring that the reader must pay attention to who might be talking and when).  Generally I’m not a fan of this style of writing but I found that it worked for me in Blindness and drew me into the story.
4. Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke.
As I’ve been more and more impressed with Rilke (see item #5), I was happy to find a great German/English copy of the Duino Elegies (which some people have called the greatest piece of poetry written in the twentieth-century) and The Sonnets to Orpheus.  The Sonnets didn’t do much for me, but certain passages from the Elegies rate amongst the best writing I’ve read.  Ever.  This is what poetry should be like — it should knock the wind out of you and leave you full of wonder and longing, sorrow and gratitude.  For example, read the opening lines of the first elegy:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence.  For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us.  Every angel is terrifying.
Or look at this from the conclusion of the fourth elegy:
But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.
There is so much more I could quote, but I’ll just go with one more, from the ninth elegy:
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us.  Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing.  Just once; no more.  And we too,
just once. and never again.  But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
My God.  My God.
5. The Disasters of War by Francisco Goya.
Well, I’m not sure if this really counts as “reading” but, um, I did read the two page intro (and all the picture captions!) so, what the hell, I’ll add it to my list.  Basically, this book presents the reader with a series of prints Goya made based upon the Spanish insurrection (against the French) that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth-century.  The pictures are stark, brutal and devastating — portraying everything from the mutilation of corpses to (what is about to become) gang rape — and act as a condemnation of war and the violence that people practice against other people.
I originally picked up this book, because I was doing some research for a piece of art I’m getting done.  The Disasters of War is certainly a powerful series but, in terms of my own interests, I find myself even more strongly attracted to the work of Käthe Kollwitz.  Sometimes I wonder why I’m so strongly drawn to such stark portrayals of death in art…

Well, my wife and son were away visiting family for most of this month so I was able to catch up on a bit of pleasure reading (not to mention thesis writing!).  Here are the latest:
1. The Political Theology of Paul by Jacob Taubes.
There is always something interesting about reading so-called ‘outsiders’ perspectives on Paul (i.e. the perspectives of those who fall outside of the narrow guild of New Testament and Pauline studies).  Often, I think, such ‘outsiders’ are able to grasp essential points that many ‘insiders’ miss because of their own rootedness within particular traditions and their own dogmatic upbringings.  So, coming to Taubes, I think that his lectures on Paul are very close to the mark — certainly on the political level, where he reads Paul has dramatically and subversively political — and the way he reads Paul in dialogue with voices like Barth, Schmitt, Nietzche, and Freud is very enlightening (I believe that it was also Taubes who was responsible for leading people like Badiou and then Zizek to look at Paul).
I also appreciate the way in which Taubes presents his material — he speaks with humility, brushes off a lot of issues that are unimportant to him, and frequently employs humour… but does all of this in a way that still cuts deeply into the discussion of Paul.  I would recommend this book to anybody who is interested in the nexus between Paul, politics, and philosophy.
2. The Folly of Prayer: Practicing the Presence and Absence of God by Matt Woodley (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009).
Many thanks to Adrianna at IVP for this review copy!
This year I decided to begin reading some more popular-level Christian books, just to get a feel for what is going on out there.  As a part of doing that, I read Holy Fools by Matt Woodley and was happily surprised by how good it was (see my review here).  Consequently, I came to this book (another popular-level book) with expectations I would not have had otherwise.
Unfortunately, they were disappointed.  While I continue to appreciate Woodley’s tone and the way in which he raises difficult questions around matters like godforsakenness, I found that most of his suggestions or solutions lacked the depth I had found in his prior book.  Don’t get me wrong, I am very glad that Woodley honestly confronts the experience of being abandoned by God, encountering nothing but silence from God, and lamenting and crying out to (and, perhaps, even against) God, in light of these things.  I imagine that a good many Christians may find this to be liberating (as I did, the first time I started to explore the notions of godforsakenness and lament).  However, when compared to Woodley’s other book, a lot of the content contained in this one felt… fluffy.
Anyway, just to give y’all an idea of the content of this book, Woodley explores twelve different models of prayer.  Prayer as: (1) guttural groaning; (2) skin, trees, blood, bread and wine; (3) desperation; (4) mystery; (5) absence; (6) an argument with God; (7) a long, slow journey; (8) dangerous activity; (9) paying attention; (10) feeling God’s heartbeat; (11) love; and (12) praying.  Ultimately, of course, his goal is that the reader would journey into the act of prayer itself (instead of just reading about prayer) and this is surely a good thing.
3. Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy.
Many critics have described Blood Meridian as Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece — indeed, as one of the masterpieces of American literature.  I have not read enough McCarthy to know if it his best work, but I certainly agree that it is a great novel, and amongst the best that I have read.  There is something about McCarthy’s voice that entrances me.  I find it difficult to describe… some sort of apocalyptic blend of both the violence and beauty of the world, yet presented in such a way that one never feels as though judgment is being passed on any of it.  As if to say: “This is the world in which we live… it’s a bloody clusterfuck, but it’s goddamn beautiful.”
Anyway, Blood Meridian tells the story of a teenager called ‘the kid’ who joined the Glanton Gang in mid-nineteenth century America — a gang of low-lifes and brutes who made money by scalping indians for the bounties offered by the local civic authorities.  Prominent amongst this group of fellows is ‘the judge’ — a fellow of mythic proportions.  Thus, as the gang travels through small towns, deserts, mountains and wastelands — with one violent episode chasing the heels of another — the focus remains mostly upon the (unspoken and unread) thoughts of the kid and the actions and pontifications of the judge.  Really, though, no review or summary is going to do this story any justice — go read the book.
4. Gunnar’s Daughter by Sigrid Undset.
After thoroughly enjoying Undset’s Kristen Lavransdatter trilogy, I thought I would continue reading her writings.  Gunnar’s Daughter is a much shorter and, in some ways, terser, story that mirrors the themes and writing style of the great Icelandic Sagas.  It is the story of Vigdis Gunnarsdatter, how she is courted and then raped by Ljot Gissurson, how she then bears a child, and what follows after.
As with Undset’s larger trilogy, Gunnar’s Daughter is full of fascinating historical details and vividly portrays a world that is now lost and gone.  Furthermore, the characters — their passions, their longings, and the ways in which they self-destruct — strike me as a very real portrayal of people as I imagine them to be.  This is recommended reading.
5. Uncollected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke.
It has been a very long time since I’ve read any poetry, and it has been even longer since I’ve enjoyed reading poetry (when I was younger I really wanted to like reading poetry because I thought it would make me ‘cultured’ but I finally had to give up because it almost always bored me out of my mind).  However, a friend of mine had recently sent me a couple of excerpts from Rilke, and they almost knocked the wind out of me.  So, I decided to go out and pick up a Rilke book.  I’m glad I did.  I find his imagery and voice to be… I don’t know… apocalyptic… devastating and beautiful.  Here are a couple of samples:
Do you still remember: falling stars, how
they leapt slantwise through the sky
like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles
of our wishes–had we so many?–
for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere;
almost every look upward was wedded
to the swift hazard of their play,
and the heart felt itself a single thing
beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance–
and was whole, as though it would survive them!
and
You don’t know nights of love? Don’t
petals of soft words float upon your blood?
Are there no places on your dear body
that keep remembering like eyes?
6 & 7. Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia, Vols. 1 & 3, edited by Danzig Baldaev et al.
Over the last little while I have become increasingly fascinated by the multitude of subcultures and lifestyles that people inhabit — from people who are into ‘Live Action Role Playing’ (cf. this movie), to guys who develop personal relationships with sex dolls (cf. this movie), there appear to be endless alternate worlds in which people live and, ultimately, find their deepest sense of identity and value.  Anyway, as I’ve been digging around in this things, I happened to stumble onto Alix Lambert’s documentary on Russian prison tattoos (cf. ‘The Mark of Cain‘).  What I found interesting about this art, is that the images tattooed onto the bodies of the inmates, actually often told their whole life stories, and their entire criminal history — but did so through a series of symbols and (often) through the coded use of religious iconography (where the number of towers on a cathedral represent the number of terms or years served, where a virgin with child means ‘I have been a thief since birth’, where Jesus on the cross represents ‘the king of thieves’, and so on).  This led me to do some more research into this (now pretty much dead) subculture, and led me to Bardaev’s encyclopedia.  The set contains many beautiful pictures, hundreds of sketches, a couple essays on the topic, as well as several stories related to the life lived by the inmate who sported the tattoo at hand.  If you are interested in seeing a sample of the pictures contained in this book you can click this link (but be warned, although some of the tattoos are fascinating or beautiful, a good many are extremely vulgar, sexual, and violent).

Well, as always, these are long overdue and far too brief for the attention that some of these books deserve (especially the one by Jennings).  So it goes.
1. Reading Derrida/Thinking Paul: On Justice by Theodore W. Jennings, Jr.
As the title says, this book is a reading of both Derrida and Paul in relation to the subjects of justice (those dikai- root words in the New Testament, which are commonly and perhaps deceptively translated as ‘righteousness’), law, grace, gift, debt, duty, and hospitality.  Most of these subjects exist in something of an aporetic relation to one another (duty and gift, justice and law, etc.) and Jennings spells out the ways in which both Derrida and Paul negotiate those relations.
This a rich text and provided a lot of food for thought.  What I really appreciated about Jennings was the way in which he expounded Derrida.  Unlike most Derrideans I have encountered (who tend to get off on speaking their own argot), Jennings writes with precision and clarity and actually made me want to read Derrida some more (and that’s saying something, as he has been my least favourite of the Continental philosophers I have studied).
Recommended reading.
2. Violence by Slavoj Žižek.
For some reason, I can’t seem to get away from Žižek.  I’ve got a list of ‘books to read’ that is about a mile long, but then I always seem to just end up picking up another title by this crazy Slovenian.
However, I’m glad I did.  Of the Žižek books I have read (seven now), Violence is probably the most readable (I can’t tell if he is getting better at structuring his thoughts — hell, in the epilogue of this book, he even summed up  his argument in its various stages! — or if I’m just getting better at understanding what he is talking about… it might be a bit of both).
Anyway, what Žižek does in this book is explore some of the facets of the structural or objective violence that undergirds our contemporary world of global capitalism.  That is to say, instead of understanding violence simply as immediate subjective outbursts (one person strikes another, somebody flies a plane into a building, etc.), Žižek looks at the ways in which violence lies at the foundation of our way of life, our economics, our ideologies, our language, and so on.  So, violence is not something that bursts into a previously ‘neutral’ environment; rather, violence already suffuses our environment and the outbursts we see manifest that.
One of the points that ends up being hammered home is the inescapability of living violently.  Therefore, Žižek concludes that we must engage in a form of redemptive violence.  For him, this amounts to doing nothing (which can be the greatest form of violence — where violence is understood as a force that actually creates a change… which is also why Žižek can say that the problem with people like Mao or Stalin or Hitler is that they were ‘not violent enough’… i.e. they continued to practice the type of violence that didn’t really create the space for a genuine change [or Event, or Novum, or whatever language you want to use for that]).  Now, I may not agree with Žižek’s understanding of redemptive violence, but I do agree that violence is inescapable and am left thinking that our choice is not between being more or less violent, but between two kinds of violence.
Recommended reading.
3. How Nonviolence Supports the State by Peter Gelderloos.
I am now convinced that it is the anarchists who most urgently need to gain a voice in the Church — and particularly amongst Christians who are seeking ‘alternate’ ways of living Christianly in today’s world (those involved in New Monasticism, the Emergent Church, Sojourners, whatever).  Seriously, these people are showing us the Way (of Jesus Christ).  So, if you’re asking yourself ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, I think you’ll find your answer amongst the anarchists… and I don’t think I’m overstating my case by saying that.
Anyway, in How Nonviolence Protects the State, Peter Gelderloos continues Ward Churchill’s daming criticism of the ideology, impotence, and perversity of nonviolence.  He demonstrates how a good many of the heroes of nonviolence relied upon violence or spoke approvingly of it in other contexts (King, Gandhi, Mandela), he demonstrates how nonviolence regularly fails to attain its goal (such as the worldwide protests against the Second Iraq War… while violence, like the train bombings in Spain did prove efficacious), and he drives home the point that nonviolent means of resistance are almost always a way in which people of privilege alleviate their own guilt for continuing to live as (oppressive) people of privilege.  Therefore, nonviolence actually becomes a means of maintaining current structures of power, rather then being an avenue for change.
I strongly recommend this book and, true to anarchist principles, it is available for free online.
4. The Just by Albert Camus.
I know I just read this play recently but I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit and decided to reread it.  Last time I read it in French, but I was able to find a free English version on line (see here).  Of course, the English isn’t nearly as good (yep, I’m looking down my nose while saying this!), but it’s okay.
What I love about this play (which is based upon the true story of the bombing of the Uncle of the Tsar in Russia in the late 19th century) is all the questions it raises.  What constitutes a truly ‘revolutionary’ act?  Can poetry be revolutionary are only bombs revolutionary?  What does love require of us?  Can taking the lives of some constitute and act of love for the many?  When one begins to kill out of love, where does one draw the line?  Further, when our love of ‘the people’ prevents us from being able to love the ones we are actually with, what does that say about our love?
I would like to use this text in a discussion group.  Recommended reading.
5. A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews.
This book was lent to me by a co-worker and, given that I don’t read a lot of contemporary, popular fiction, I didn’t have very high expectations.  However, I was very pleasantly surprised and enjoyed the book.  It’s the story of a misfit girl growing up with her dad, abandoned by her mom and older sister, in a small Mennonite town — and it contains a lovely swirl of beauty, laughter, and heartache (a bit like The Brothers K that way… although not as good).  Good fun.
6. Black Hole by Charles Burns.
It has been awhile since I read any graphic novels.  I’ve been hesitant to go back to that genre.  My problem was that I stumbled onto (what I consider to be) the best works first — Blankets by Craig Thompson, Maus by Art Spiegelman, Epileptic by David B — and everything else I read ended up feeling like a let down.  So, having lowered my expectations, this book was recommended to me (it tells the story of teens in the seventies who start contracting a strange plague-like disease and then spirals off from there).  There’s some pretty rad horror- or apocalyptic-type art in the book, and it was fun enough to read, if you’re in the mood for something mindless.

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.

Well, overdue as usual, but better late than never.  Pardon the typos; I’ll edit later.
1. Paul, Poverty and Survival by Justin J. Meggitt.
Over the last one hundred years, the study of the socioeconomic status of Paul and his churches (including the members therein) have moved from an ‘old consensus’ to a ‘new consensus’.  The ‘old consensus’ is represented by the likes of Karl Kautsky and Adolf Deissmann who proposed that Paul and his churches were representatives of a revolutionary community arising from the proletariat — the poor and oppressed masses of the Roman empire.  For awhile, this argument gained a great deal of credibility amongst scholars — hence, the language of ‘consensus’.
However, this consensus was challenged more and more as time went on, until scholars like Abraham Malherbe, and (most especially) Gerd Theissen began to gain a wide reading and convinced many that Paul was actually a person with relatively high status and wealth (given his Roman citizenship, his ability to travel, his mention of wealthy supporting patrons or patronesses, and the way in which he is said to have rubbed shoulders with some influential people) and so Paul’s churches were now understood to contain a mix of people — some poor, some rich, some influential, some not.  Indeed, even within this mix, it was proposed that the rich and influential few were actually likely the ones responsible for leading and sustaining Paul and his churches.  This, then, became a new consensus — one that continues to operate today.
It is this consensus that Meggitt challenges and, in my opinion , actually refutes (scholars like Robert Jewett, Peter Oakes and Neil Elliott have been convinced by Meggitt’s thesis, so I’m in good company here!).
Meggitt convincingly shows the way in which current proponents of the ‘new consensus’ tend to rely upon out-dated arguments that do not factor into consideration our increasing knowledge of the Roman empire, and the socioeconomic milieu of Paul and his churches.  Instead seeing Paul as a person with relatively high status and wealth and instead of seeing Paul’s churches as relying upon a wealthy and influential component, Meggitt argues that Paul and his churches were poor — living mostly at or just above or below the subsistence level (i.e. damn poor!) — and devoid of influential members.  Consequently, Paul and his churches are able to survive because of their reliance upon a radical and concrete network of economic ‘mutualism’ (most powerfully demonstrated by Paul’s focus upon the Collection).
Of course, all of this has significant implications, not only for how we understand Paul, but for how we might  go about following in Paul’s footsteps today.  I suspect that these implications are a large part of the reason why Meggitt’s book has been ignored in certain scholarly circles.  Just as with other ‘political’ or ‘counter-imperial’ readings of Paul (although all readings of Paul are political!) those who hold power and influence find it easier to ignore Meggitt than to recognize his work and engage him.
2. Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) by Bart D. Ehrman.  New York: HarperOne, 2009.
Many thanks to Mike from The Ooze Viral Bloggers for this review copy!
This is my first time reading a book by Ehrman (although I did reflect upon his debate with N. T. Wright on the theme of suffering [see here]).  He is quite articulate and, despite what his (largely Evangelical) critics have to say, he comes across as a gracious dialogue partner.
This book is largely dedicated to explaining (at a popular level) the ways in which an historical-critical reading of the Bible problematizes a good many (popular level ) assumptions about the Bible as a sacred text.  Thus, Ehrman highlights matters related (a) historical and theological contradictions between various books in the New Testament; (b) the authorship of the various NT documents; (c) an alternative understanding of the ‘historical Jesus’ (over against C. S. Lewis’ understanding of Jesus as a ‘liar, lunatic, or lord’, Ehrman presents Jesus as an apocalyptic Jewish prophet, who never made any claims to be divine — and whose earliest followers also never understood him as divine); (d) matters related to the formation of the canon; and (e) the influence of latter voices — especially the ‘proto-Orthodox’ church — upon the formation of Christianity and the ways in which the Bible is mis/read.
In all of this, Ehrman isn’t doing anything particularly new — nor does he claim to be doing anything new.  Rather, Ehrman is simply following in the footsteps of the Jesus Seminar, and continuing to get that message out.
For the most part, I didn’t find Ehrman’s book to be too troubling (as ‘Conservatives’ might) or too exciting (as ‘Liberals’ might).  I have already accepted a lot of what Ehrman is saying — there are contradictions in the Bible, the Christian tradition has always been marked by conflicts and competing views on pretty much everything, and so on and so forth — but, as Ehrman says many times, the acceptance of these things hasn’t really disturbed my faith.  Certainly it has problematized my own relationship to my faith tradition(s) and my Scriptures, but my faith was never grounded in any of the things that Ehrman (mostly rightly) wants to deconstruct.
That said, there are some places where Ehrman’s argument is fairly weak.  For example, Ehrman argues that contemporary readers should not try to coordinate the different accounts found in the four Gospels.  To do so, Ehrman writes, is to create a fifth, completely fabricated, Gospel.  Instead, we should simply read each Gospel on its own, and let is say to us, what it wishes to say.  Now, I’m all for reading each Gospel on its own in that way, but to read the Gospels together — even to step towards a ‘fifth Gospel’ — isn’t such a bad thing.  Indeed, Ehrman does precisely this himself!  He, too, engages in some historical reconstruction and speculation, postulating a certain series of events around some of the Gospel stories (like Judas’ betrayal of Jesus).  Thus, Ehrman creates his own (historical-critical) fifth Gospel and ends up doing precisely what he urges others not to do.
To pick a second example, we could look at the way in which Ehrman gets around commenting on the miracle stories in the Gospels.  Historical criticism, he argues, cannot speak about the so-called miracles because miracles, by definition, fall outside of historical-critical discourse.  Now, there is something a little humourous going on here.  Ehrman is, in fact, playing a game with definitions.  First, he defines historical criticism as the study of past events based upon ‘the relative probability that they occurred’ and then he defines miracles as events that are virtually (if not actually) impossible, and therefore almost never occur.  So, if one’s study is based upon the relatively probable, one cannot comment upon the almost impossible.  Now that’s a well and good… accept if we employ a different definition of a ‘miracle’!  I see no reason why a miracle must be defined by the likelihood of it happening.  If we do that, then we can’t so easily skip over the miracle stories.
To take a third example, Ehrman claims to be representing scholarly opinion on the matters under discussion, but he seems to be woefully unaware (or deliberately ignorant?) of the ways in which discussion of these matters has developed since, oh, the early nineties.  In discussing the Christology of the early disciples, Ehrman seems to present a position that has been, if not refuted, then significantly challenged, by the likes of Larry Hurtado.  The same goes for Ehrman’s discussion of the authorship of the Gospels — has he really not heard of Richard Bauckham’s recent book on this subject?  Yet, Ehrman simply repeats old arguments without developing them to address new (and rather devastating) challenges.  So, while Ehrman claims to be teaching members of the public ‘secrets’ that have been kept from them, it seems like he is keeping a few secrets of his own!
Anyway, all that to say that I enjoyed this book — it was a quick read and it let me see what is going on in other areas of discussion (while also reminding me of some debates that I have mostly avoided) — even if I didn’t always agree with it.
3. Evangelicals and Empire. Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo. Edited by Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel.  Forward by Nicholas Wolterstorff. Afterword by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008.
Many thanks to Robert at Baker Academic for this review copy — I usually stay away from books that are compilations of essays, but I was very keen to read this one!
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s collaborative works on the current empire of global capitalism and the multitude that is (and can) rise up to confront it, are two of the most interesting books I have read over the last few years.  Consequently, I was quite excited to discover this collection of essays written in response to Hardt and Negri.
However, as with any collection of essays, the material is rather hit and miss.  I was a bit disappointed by the degree to which some authors engaged Hardt and Negril.  Jim Wallis, for example, doesn’t engage Hardt and Negri at all, nor does he say anything that differs much from what he has said a thousand times before (was he just included in the collection because he is a big name right now [I noticed that Wallis’ essay is a reprint of a piece first published in 2003]?).  I was also a bit disappointed with, um, how dull some of the essays were (notably Corey D. B. Walker’s piece).  To write dull responses to Hardt and Negri is surely a betrayal of their project, which is anything but dull!  Worst of all, however, was the elitist and dictatorial bullshit penned by John Milbank.  His essay is only useful in that it provides us with an illustration of everything that Hardt and Negri stand against (as they should).
There were also some essays that would have excited me quite a bit in the past, but which now seem to be of questionable value.  In this regard, the essay by James K. A. Smith stands out the most.  What Smith does is argue that Hardt and Negri’s criticisms of empire are insufficient because they are operating with a (libertarian and value free) conception of freedom that is intimately connected to empire.  Therefore, Smith proposes that we return to a more Augustinian conception of freedom as teleological and bound to the common good.
Now this is all well and good (apart from Smith’s participation in recent acritical appeals to Augustine… who, it should be noted, wasn’t afraid to wield power in a dictatorial and death-dealing way, regardless of what he wrote about ‘freedom’ and ‘the common good’), but where does this end up leading us?  Does Smith’s lovely conception of freedom end up making Smith more free than anybody else?  Does it lead Smith to engaging in any sort of concrete liberating activity?  Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the answer to both of these questions is ‘no’.  Smith, despite his lovely ideological angle on these themes, continues to be just as deeply immersed within the disciplined and disciplining industry of the Academy — he remains rooted in close proximity to places of status and privilege, and continues to perpetuate the structures and systems of a society that is anything but free.  Indeed, it seems to me that — even if Negri’s thinking on freedom is flawed — at least he has been far more committed to a liberating praxis (and, it should be noted, has paid a much greater price in his pursuit of both freedom and the common good).  So, if the proof is really in the pudding, then there must be a fundamental flaw in Smith’s way of thinking.  Either that or Smith doesn’t actually believe what he himself says.
Anyway, these points of criticism aside, there were also half a dozen excellent essays in this collection, most notably those by Mark Lewis Taylor (on empire, ethics and transcendence), Amos Yong and Samuel Zalanga (on empire and multitude in relation to pentacostalism, North America, and Sub-Saharan Africa), and Mario Costa, Catherine Keller and Anna Mercedes (on theopolitics and love in the context of empire).  These were fascinating engagements that took Hardt and Negri seriously while also extending or challenging their writings.
All in all, a pretty decent collection of essays.
4. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism by Alain Badiou.
I found this book to be an absolutely fascinating reading of Paul.  Badiou may be misreading Paul on multiple points, but I think that he gets a lot correct and, even more intriguingly, I find that he perfectly accurately describes the reason why I, myself, am a Christian.  Apart from the (apocalyptic) Event — which, for Paul, was his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus — being a Christian doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.
That personal note aside, Badiou reads Paul as a revolutionary anti-philosopher, who sets out to overturn both Greek wisdom and Jewish law (which, by the way, makes Nietzche Paul’s rival not his enemy), and bears witness to the Event, in order to form a new subject that bears both truth and liberating power.  This subject then, continues to exist as a revolutionary against all the structures of this world, in order to be an agent of the new.
Now that all sounds rather dry and perhaps a wee bit ho-hum, but the truth is that this is an exceptionally interesting book that deserves to be read not only by those who are interested in contemporary French philosophy, but also by those who are interested in studying the New Testament.  (The truth is that this is the last book review I’m writing in this post and I’m too tired to go on about it in detail!)
5. Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.
In this book, Baudrillard spends quite a bit of time developing and illustrating his thinking regarding society, simulacra, and nihilism.  Personally, I found the first and last chapters (‘The Procession of Simulacra’ and ‘On Nihilism’) to be excellent, but the rest was a bit more mixed.
Inhe first essay, Baudrillard develops his thinking on our current post-spectacular society — the society of the simulacra.  I refer to this as ‘post-spectacular’ because it seems to me that Baudrillard is drawing on Debord’s thoughts on the society of the spectacle (wherein all relationships are mediated by images) but also pressing beyond Debord in his understanding of all images as simulacra — copies without originals — and all relationships as simulations (wherein one feigns to have what one does not have).  Thus, Baudrillard traces the following phases of the image:

1. it is the reflection of a profound reality;
2. it masks and denatures a profound reality;
3. it masks the absence of a profound reality;
4. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

He then comments on these phases and writes:

In the first case, the image is a good appearance–representation is of the sacramental order.  In the second, it is an evil appearance–it is of the order of maleficence.  In the third, it plays at being an appearance–it is of the order of sorcery.  In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.

Thus, then, leads to something of a total crisis of representation and the collapse of metaphysics and (access to) meaning.  Therefore, we mass produce simulacra — which cannot even be called ‘illusions’ because ‘the real is no longer possible’ — in order to hide the fact that ‘the real never was’.  All we have are simulacra and simulation.
No wonder, then, that Baudrillard is left with the embrace of nihilism.
6. Child of God by Cormac McCarthy.
Because I happened to be reading this book at the same time as Sigrid Undset’s trilogy set in medieval Norway (see 7 & 8 below), I was struck by the thought that McCarthy could well be writing contemporary fairy tales.  Undset reminded me of how people used to tell stories about evil kings who would live in the mountain and kidnap the daughters of the local farmers, and so on.
I thought of this because McCarthy’s story is about a homeless and not altogether right in the head fellow (‘a child of God much like yourself perhaps’) who lives on abandoned farms and then in a cave (in the American South), and who haunts the locals much like a troll or the old mountain king.  I don’t want to say too much so as not to spoil the story, but I continue to be captivated by McCarthy’s narrative voice — quite literally, I find his writing to be entrancing.  Just as with The Road, I ended up reading this (small) book from cover-to-cover in a single day.
I would be interested in hearing more of what others think of McCarthy.
7 & 8. The Wreath and The Wife by Sigrid Undset.
These are the first two books in Undset’s trilogy about Kristin Lavransdatter.  The are set in Norway in the 14th century, and tell the story of Kristin — from childhood to old age — and all the people around her.  Because I am currently reading the third book, I save my remarks about this series until next month (when I should be done).

Review

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Within the second major section of The God I Don’t Understand, Christopher Wright focuses upon the Hebrew conquest of Canaan in order to explore issues related to portrayals of divine acts and approval of violence within the Old Testament. He notes that for many ‘the God I don’t understand’ is the violent God of the Old Testament and, given the scale of the violence involved in the conquest of Canaan, it seems that this is an appropriate place to turn to explore this God.

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Wright begins with a chapter describing three dead ends – three ways not to approach this issue – and then, in the subsequent chapter, turns to three frameworks that Christians might find helpful when they turn to the conquest.

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Beginning with the dead ends, Wright first rejects the position of those who argue that the unpleasant parts of the Old Testament (OT) – notably the parts involved divine acts of mass violence – are rejected and corrected by the New Testament (NT). Wright notes that such a position requires an highly selective reading of both Testaments. It neglects the large amount of OT teachings focused upon God’s love and grace, and it neglects the large amount of NT teachings focused upon God’s wrath and terrifying acts of judgment (indeed, NT expressions of judgment are, according to Wright, even more terrifying that OT acts, for while judgment in the OT is harsh, it is temporal and limited; however, in the NT, the torment of the condemned is made eternal).

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The second dead end rejected by Wright is the position taken by those who argue that the Israelites thought that they were doing God’s will but were mistaken. According to Wright, this view fails because the bible never records God correcting this so-called misinterpretation. Indeed, both the OT and the NT consistently affirms the conquest and sees it “placed firmly within the whole unfolding plan of God” (83).

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The third dead end rejected by Wright is the view that the conquest is only intended to be read as an allegory for spiritual warfare. Obviously this view does not take any account of the genre of the text at hand, and fails to recognize that the primary form of the recital of the conquest is historical narrative and not allegory.

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Having noted these dead ends, Wright then emphasizes that there is really no satisfying solution to our exploration of this issue. However, he goes on to say that, by putting these events into the framework of the whole bible, we can speak of these things in a way that is helpful to the Christian faith (even if it doesn’t resolve the problem).

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The first framework Wright employs is the framework of the OT story itself, placed within the context of Ancient Near Eastern culture at a particular moment within history. At this time, holy wars, wherein all the plunder was reserved for the deity, were not unique to Israel. Such wars are not waged for profit, by efficient war-machines wreaking havoc upon their personal enemies. Rather, they presupposed the deity as the one waging the war upon that deity’s enemies, and no plunder is allowed as total destruction is required. Therefore, by waging such a war, Wright wonders if God may have accommodated Godself to the fallen human reality of that day: “In view of [God’s] long-term goal of ultimately bringing blessing to the nations through the people of Israel, the gift of land necessitated this horrific historical action within the fallen world of nations at the time” (89).

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However, having said that, Wright quickly notes his own discomfort with this answer, but adds that although he feels uncomfortable with God’s accommodation to any harmful action (divorce, slavery, etc.) real accommodation does seem to be portrayed in the bible.

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Thus, Wright seeks comfort in pointing out that, even within the OT, the conquest of Canaan is a limited event – a single event pertaining to a single generation – and it must neither be seen as an archetypal OT war, nor as a model for future generations. Which, Wright goes on to say, is why Jesus can prohibit violence while not condemning the OT stories.

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Finally, while still taking into account the Ancient Near Eastern context of the conquest narrative, Wright notes how conventional Ancient Near Eastern rhetoric regularly exceeds reality. Perhaps, he suggests, there is a little comfort to be found in this observation.

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The second framework Wright employs for understanding this event is the framework of God’s sovereign international justice. In this regard, Wright objects to the application of the word ‘genocide’ to the event under discussion but the word carries overtones of vicious self-interest, ethnic cleansing, and oppression. According to his narrative portrayal, the conquest is none of these things but is ‘divine punishment operating through human agency’ (92). Specifically, it is the coming to full fruition of God’s judgment upon moral and social degradation. According to Wright, this understanding of the conquest as an expression of God’s sovereign international justice:

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does not make [the conquest] less violent. Nor does it suddenly become “nice” or “OK”. But it does make a difference… Punishment changes the moral context of violence… There is a huge moral difference between violence that is arbitrary or selfish and violence that is inflicted under strict control within the moral framework of punishment (93).

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Thus, Wright argues, there is a fundamental difference between a spanking a child and abusing a child, or, to switch analogies, between imprisoning a criminal and taking a person hostage. Of course, using violence at all ‘may be problematic’ but we must distinguish between these forms (94).

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Therefore, understanding the conquest within this framework, means that it must not be taken as a sign of the Israelites’ righteousness as there is no correlation between triumph and the goodness of the victors. Thus, military success cannot be taken as a sign of God’s favouritism; nor must being defeated in a conquest – even the conquest of Canaan – be confused with what is to come at God’s final judgment.

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Finally, given that we are so unsettled by placing the conquest within this framework, Wright questions if we would be less upset if the conquest had occurred but had not been commanded by God. After all, if God is sovereign over all nations, and if all things happen in some way in accordance with his will then we should not create such a sharp distinction between what God decrees and what God permits.

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The third and final framework Wright brings to the matter at hand is the framework of God’s plan of salvation. He stresses that we need to read the conquest as a part of God’s plan – evident in both Testaments – of bringing peace, blessing and salvation to all the nations. In this regard, Wright highlights how the bible sees no contradiction between God’s general plan and his specific actions in Canaan.

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In the end, however, Wright returns to the point that none of these frameworks offers a full, adequate or satisfactory resolution to the problems presented by the conquest of Canaan. This, then, leads him to conclude with these words:

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I may not understand why it had to be this way. I certainly do not like it. I may deplore the violence and suffering involved… But at some point I have to stand back from my questions, criticism, or complaint and receive the Bible own word on that matter. What the Bible unequivocally tells me is that this was an act of God that took place within an overarching narrative through which the only hope for the world’s salvation was constituted (107).

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Response

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Throughout this section, Wright rejects the views of those who, in one way or another, appeal to the OT conquest of Canaan in order to engage in acts of conquest and violence today. In particular, he seems to be implicitly refuting contemporary Christians who support the tyrannical use of force exercised by both the United States and by the State of Israel. This is an important point to make – we cannot appeal to the OT in order to engage in violence today, we cannot mistake victory for righteousness or loss for damnation – and I am in complete agreement with Wright on this matter.

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Furthermore, while struggling with the conquest narrative, I think that Wright is correct to draw attention to some of the broader frameworks operating within the biblical narrative – this is a key element of any responsible reading of the bible. However, unlike Wright, I do not think that an awareness of these frameworks assists the reader in resolving questions related to stories of divine violence. Far from it, I think that it is these frameworks that create the problem for us in the first place – remembering God’s overarching goals of bringing peace, justice, blessing, and salvation to all is precisely that which makes us question the conquest. After all, if the God of the bible was simply another tribal, nationalistic God, then the conquest would make good sense. It’s only the prior affirmation that God is actually committed to caring for the well-being of all of creation that makes the conquest a problem for Christians. Thus, Wright offers that which creates the problem at hand as (partial) solutions to that problem! No wonder, then, that I found this section to be the most disappointing part of the book.

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My disappointment was only further deepened because of the way in which Wright uses the specificity of the conquest of Canaan in order to avoid addressing overarching questions related to biblical portrayals of God as extremely violent. Granted, the conquest of Canaan is just one particular event at one particular moment of history, but the OT is also full of other stories of God approving of violence and even acting violently – from the Flood, to calling the Assyrians and Babylonians to punish Israel, to allowing Elijah to summon bears to devour a street gang, and so on – and while Wright uses NT references to divine acts of violence (particularly, passages related to hell, which Wright seems to understand as a place of eternal torment) in order to blunt the edge of OT descriptions of divine violence, he never addresses the fact that this then leaves us with a God who appears to be brutal, vindictive, and willing to torture people forever. So, while Wright seems to say, “Hey, let’s not get overly focused on this conquest, since it is just one (violent) moment within an overarching plan of salvific love,” he seems to forget that the bible contains many other problematical portrayals of God’s relation to violence.

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Indeed, the question of how a supposedly loving God, committed to rescuing creation and all creatures from the violent power of Death, can engage in any sort of violence or death-dealing, lies at the heart of this problem. Wright tries to dance around this issue in a few others ways… all of which I find equally unsatisfactory.

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For example, he suggests that the observation that the conquest is performed as a type of punishment for evil and oppressive behaviour “changes the moral context of violence” but I would contest that this is so. First of all, it is impossible to make the case that all of the men, women, children, infants, and animals that were slaughtered in the conquest are actually guilty and deserving of any sort of punishment (let alone a death sentence). Secondly, I am not convinced that violent punishment is fundamentally or morally different than any other violent action. I find Wright’s examples in this regard to be unconvincing. Granted, punishing a child through spanking is a different sort of action than arbitrarily hitting a child, but that does not make spanking a good moral action. In both cases, a child is being struck violently and frequently, from the child’s perspective, there is no discernible difference between the two acts (I write this as a person who was both spanked and physically abused as a child). Allow me to provide a counter-example: consider a man who rapes his partner because his partner was unfaithful to him, and a man who rapes a stranger. In the first case, the violent act is performed as a form of punishment, in the second case it is performed arbitrarily, but in both cases the violent act is morally wrong. The same, I think, goes for hitting children or any form of violence exercised as punishment.

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To take a second example, Wright reminds us that the rhetoric involved in the narrative of the conquest is likely over-inflated and exagerated. Now, this is a fine point to make in order to establish a proper reading of the story, but to suggest that this observation somehow blunts the edge of the challenge that this genocide presents to the Christian faith is absurd – it makes no difference if God was involved in slaughtering thousands, rather than tens of thousands, of children. The same fundamental objection remains, and to even make this point within this context suggests to the reader that the author doesn’t really understand the matter at hand.

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Now speaking of rhetoric, and having employed the term ‘genocide’ in the last paragraph, it is interesting to note the rhetorical game that Wright plays with that word. As I noted above, Wright admits the technical accuracy of applying the term ‘genocide’ to the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, but he then chooses to marginalise and not apply the term because of other connotations that it carries within our contemporary context (those of ethnic cleansing, and so on). Now, to me, this looks like a word game employed to try to downplay the gravity of the situation. It seems to be part of a strategy of avoiding a full and honest confrontation with the matter at hand.

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Finally, the third and most unsatisfactory way in which Wright dances around this issue is by arguing that God may be constrained to accommodate himself [sic] to some less than ideal short-term goals in order to accomplish his [sic] long-term goals. To once again cite the passage quoted above: “ In view of [God’s] long-term goal of ultimately bringing blessing to the nations through the people of Israel, the gift of land necessitated this horrific historical action within the fallen world of nations at the time”(89; emphasis added). What Wright appears to be arguing here is that there is only one plan of salvation available to God and so God must follow that plan, no matter the cost at any given moment of history. Thus, God’s plan ends up standing over and above God, trapping God within a deterministic framework that requires divine accommodations to (a more pleasant expression than other available terms like ‘compromise’ or ‘complicity with’ or ‘responsibility for’) fallen human realities like divorce, slavery and, in this case, genocide.

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Now this is a decidedly odd point to make because it places severe contraints upon God’s sovereignty – an attribute of God that Wright defends at length in this book. If God is constrained to act within history in this way, and in this way only, then I wonder how exactly God can be said to be sovereign.

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Speaking of this attribute, Wright makes another odd point when he explicitly relates the conquest narrative to the proclamation of God’s sovereignty. Because he understands God’s sovereignty to mean that he is somehow involved in every single event that occurs in history (permitting everything to occur, working everything into God’s greater plan, and so on), Wright downplays the difference between ‘God’s decretive will’ (when God decrees something – like the conquest of Canaan) and ‘God’s permissive will’ (when God simply permits one nation to conquer another by not intervening or whatever). Of course, even operating within Wright’s understanding of God’s Sovereignty it is easy to see the difference between, on the one hand, how God might limit God’s interaction with the world’s violence out of respect for human freedom and, on the other hand, God actually initiating violence. Yet Wright fails to see any significant difference between these two things – the decretive and the permissive. Therefore, what this point highlights, to me at least, is not that the conquest wasn’t as troubling as we might first imagine (which is the point that Wright is trying to make) but that Wright’s notion of divine sovereignty is terribly problematical.

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In this response to Wright I hope that I have simply applied the same standard to Wright’s work that he applies to others who offer us dead-end solutions to these problems being explored. To be honest, given Wright’s commitment to counter superficial and self-serving solutions, I was surprised that a number of the points he made were so facile and easily countered. I cannot help but wonder if Wright’s self-proclaimed pastoral intent (which I mentioned in my initial post in this series) is getting in the way of honest engagement with these issues.

[Some time back in January, I began a review and discussion of Christopher J. H. Wright’s book, The God I Don’t Understand (see here for Part 1).  At that time, I was discussing the book with my brother Judah, who espouses a different faith than I do.  Since then, posting has been delayed because of my brother’s schedule which has how, unfortunately, led him to pull out of this discussion.  I will, therefore, continue this review on my own.  Here is Part 2.]

Summary: What about Evil and Suffering?

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After his introductory remarks, Christopher Wright turns to the intertwined topics of evil and suffering and the ways in which these things present a challenge to faith in the Christian God. Once again, as throughout the rest of this book, the humility of Wright’s tone is notable. He rejects easy answers and asserts that there really are no answers, at least for now, to this challenge. Simply stated, one cannot make sense of evil and suffering. However, having affirmed this, Wright goes on to emphasise three things: the mystery, the offence, and the defeat of evil (he devotes a chapter to each).

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Beginning with the mystery of evil, Wright explores the question of how evil could have come into existence in light of the biblical narrative and the affirmation that the God of the bible is both loving and sovereign. Ultimately, despite various digressions, he argues that the bible provides us with no answer to questions of evil’s origins. Thus, Wright argues that the bible compels us to accept the mystery of evil.

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Yet accepting evil as a mystery is not the same thing as accepting evil. Indeed, Wright implies that labeling evil as a mystery is a way of rejecting evil, for we cannot allow evil to make sense. Thus, he writes:

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Evil has no proper place within creation. It has no validity, no truth, no integrity. It does not intrinsically belong to the creation as God will ultimately redeem it. It cannot and must not be integrated into the universe as a rational, legitimated, justified part of reality. Evil is not there to be understood, but to be resisted and ultimately expelled (42).

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Further, Wright stresses that, although we may not know anything about the ultimate origins of evil, we do know that the vast majority of evil and suffering is the result of human actions. Consequently, he concludes that ‘the suffering of the human race as a whole is to a large extent attributable to the sin of the human race as a whole’ (32). Therefore, Wright has little patience for those who ‘like to accuse the God they don’t believe in’ of failing to address evil when they themselves are frequently doing nothing about the fact that, for example, thousands of children are dying every minute of preventable diseases (31). Thus, to those who reject God because God appears to be doing nothing about such things, Wright responds by saying, ‘What are you doing about those things?’

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However, Wright does not raise this point in order to shut down all protests against God. Far from it, in the second chapter of this section, devoted to exploring the offence of evil, Wright argues that the bible encourages us to respond to evil and suffering with lamentations, protests, and anger. Indeed, this type of response is precisely the sort of reaction we see displayed in the biblical characters who ‘loved and trusted [God] the most’ (51; emphasis removed). Thus, Wright is hoping to see the language of lament and protest restored to its proper place within the church

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Wright views this response of grief and anger as one especially suited to our encounters with what he calls ‘natural evil’ – disastrous non-human, natural events, like hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis, that occur and cause great suffering. Further, while exploring ‘natural evil’, Wright emphasizes that there are two answers to this problem that Christians must reject. First, they must reject the notion that such events occur as an ongoing expression of God’s curse on the ground in Gen 3. Wright argues that God’s curse refers to a fundamental functional breakdown in the relationship between humanity and the soil, resulting in toil in labour, and that the curse does not refer to any sort of ontological altering of creation (after all, affirming the perspective of evolutionary science, Wright notes that things like natural disasters, meteors, death and predation, existed in the natural order long before humans did). Second, Wright argues that Christians must reject any understanding of these natural disasters as some sort of divine judgment upon sin – as though those who suffer in these events are being punished by God. Here Wright is adamant that we must refuse to cast this sort of judgment upon others for, even though the bible speaks of some natural disasters as acts of judgment, it does not speak of all disasters in this way, and no one among us has access to a divine perspective that would allow us to make this judgment call about any particular disaster that occurs in our time.

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Finally, in the third chapter of this section, Wright speaks of the defeat of evil and notes that ‘theologians try to explain evil, while God’s plan is to destroy it’ (56). Thus, rather than dealing with evil and suffering as an intellectual puzzle, Christians are called to rejoice in the coming total victory of God over evil, while holding onto three key affirmations: (1) the utter evilness of evil; (2) the utter goodness of God; and (3) the utter sovereignty of God. Of course, it is here that we arrive at the crux of the challenge of evil – how can we affirm all three of these statements without, in some way or another, comprising one or more of them? Wright argues that it is the cross, and the understanding of Jesus as both the slain lamb and the Lord of history, that points the way forward. Drawing on a study of Revelation 4-7 (which he sees as describing constant realities of human life – war, famine, sickness, death, etc. – and not some sort of ‘end times’ cataclysm), Wright argues that Jesus is sovereign over all of these powers but the ‘absolutely pivotal, vital point to grasp’ is that ‘Christ’s power to control these evil forces is the same power as he exercised on the cross’ (67). Specifically, God’s sovereignty over evil is shown in God’s ability to simultaneously absorb and defeat it, or, as Wright says, ‘[t]he cross shows us that God can take the worst possible evil and through it accomplish the greatest possible good – the destruction of evil itself’ (69). Thus, we live now with hope and joyful expectation.

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Response

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Once again, there is much that I appreciated about how Wright approaches the topic at hand. I appreciated his tone, his honesty regarding a lack of understanding, and his ability to see through many of the false alternatives that have been offered by Christians in their efforts to cling to certainty. I also appreciated Wright’s emphasis upon protest and lament and his desire to see these things retored to the church Further, I found Wright’s argument that evil cannot make sense because it cuts so deeply against the grain of the universe to be both useful and interesting – a suggestion I don’t remember encountering before.

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However, without going overboard (as this is, in my opinion, the most significant challenge to faith in the Christian God), there are a few things that I would like to respond to in a little more detail. First, I wish that Wright had continued his thinking regarding the greatest cause of suffering – human actions – and pressed the same point in his chapter on the defeat of evil. If it is human activity that causes the great majority of suffering in our world, then surely it is human activity that also has the greatest potential to bring about healing, reconciliation, and peace in our world. Furthermore, I found it odd that Wright so strongly emphasises that God will defeat evil, while neglecting the Christian belief that, because evil has already been defeated at the cross of Jesus, it can now continue to be defeated in the human actions taken by (amongst others) those in the Christian community. So, while Wright talks about God’s triumph over evil at the cross, he neglects to mention how the community of those who follow a crucified Lord can proleptically embody the defeat of evil in the present moment… until the day when death and hell are finally destroyed once and for all.

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Secondly, I’m not entirely sure what to make of Wright’s impatience with atheists or agnostics who scorn the Christian God because of the presence of evil and suffering in the world. On the one hand, this impatience makes sense if those who claim the moral high ground over against a seemingly inactive or apathetic God, do not then go on to actively address evil and suffering. However, on the other hand, Wright’s impatience, even in this regard, doesn’t have to make sense or be reasonable to those who do not adopt a Christian paradigm. For people with other paradigms, it might be perfectly consistent to scorn God and ignore the suffering of strangers, or even scorn God and further the suffering of others, or whatever. Furthermore, Wright uses this particular focus (those who scorn God but who are also inactive) to handily sidestep addressing the fact that many of those who reject the Christian God are precisely those who are actively working to address issues related to justice and suffering within our world. Consequently, Wright seems to miss the point that evil and suffering are actually a very, very good reason to reject the affirmation of any God who is said to be both good and sovereign. Indeed, I myself would probably reject faith in God for precisely this reason… were it not for experiences that I believe to be experiences of God in Jesus Christ. Thus, my basis for faith is entirely experiential and, although this may dismay a good many Christian apologist, I tend to think that experience is the only valid basis for faith (at least it’s the only valid basis I’ve found). In other words, while encounters with the massive presence of evil and suffering might compel me to not believe in any sort of loving and powerful God, other encounters do not allow me to not believe. So it goes.

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Finally, the aspect of Wright’s argument that strikes me as the most difficult to understand (or, perhaps, accept) is in his assertion that all the evil forces in history are still subject to God’s sovereignty and are only able to act with God’s express permission (and even assistance!). Now, to be clear, I do agree with what Wright says about God being able to absorb and conquer evil (by even creating new life out of events that would otherwise have simply been death-dealing), but I think that one can affirm this without pressing this point as far as Wright does. It seems to me that Wright’s argument ends up making God too complicit with evil (although he himself argues that we cannot view God in this way). In essence, it seems to me that Wright tries to say too much on this point and oversteps his initial acknowledgment regarding the mystery of evil. Granted, I believe that the cruciform life and death of Jesus point us towards some sort of resolution of the interaction between God’s goodness and sovereignty, and the evilness of evil, but I don’t think we can go so far as to say that Jesus, as the risen Lord, is now directing and arming the powers of pestilence, war, and famine in our world (which is what Wright says in his exegesis of Rev 4-7). In my opinion, it is better to say nothing than to affirm this suggestion.

Well, I’m just barely keep my head above water with my reading.  Here are last month’s books.
1. John and Empire: Initial Explorations by Warren Carter.
In my estimation, Warren Carter is one of the best New Testament scholars writing today.  His knowledge of the New Testament, as well as all of the various contextual and intertextual possibilities related to it, is exceptional and makes for fascinating (dare I say ‘required’?) reading.
This is well illustrated in John and Empire, a study of the Gospel of John.  Carter takes a Gospel that is generally perceived of as more ‘spiritual’ than ‘historical’, and places it firmly within the context of the Roman Empire in general, and Ephesus in the late first-century more specifically.  Thus, the reader comes to understand John’s Gospel as a call to a particular way of negotiating the imperial realities of one’s personal and communal existence.  In particular, Carter demonstrates that the author of John’s Gospel is calling the readers to create more distance between themselves and the values, ideologies, and structures of imperial powers (which, of course, has implications for the contemporary Western reader).
I highly recommend this book.
2. The Power of the Poor in History by Gustavo Gutierrez.
This book is a collection of essays written by Gutierrez.  They reflect upon the historical development of liberation theology (within Latin America), and upon some of the major themes of that theology — notably, the transformative power of poor people and the importance of solidarity with them.
While reading this book, I was struck by the distance that has grown up between the original Latin American liberation theologians and many of those in the West who have adopted the rhetoric of liberation theology.  It seems to me that many Western copies pale in comparison to the original.  Specifically, while those like Gutierrez call us to the lived experience of poverty, concrete movement into places of oppression, and solidarity that is expressed in all areas of one’s life, Western voices have taken the language of Gutierrez and used it to support a more bourgeois, liberal democratic focus upon matters related to equality and inclusivity.
Of course, things like equality and inclusivity aren’t bad things, but the way in which these things are pursued tend to be quite superficial in comparison to the depth of the commitments of the Latin American liberation theologians.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the means by which these theologies are developed.  Latin American liberation theology is developed out of concrete solidarity at ‘the underside of history’ whereas Western appropriations tend to come out of places of privilege and power over history.
Thus, I persist in thinking that liberation theology continues to be an untested thesis in the West.  It is not the sort of theory that one can simply engage cerebrally.  To truly test the thesis of liberation theology requires the inquirer to engage in an embodied active experiment.  Sadly, I know of very few Western theologians who have been willing to do this.
So, I recommend reading Gutierrez, but I even more strongly recommend trying to live in alternative ways, so that one can properly read Gutierrez.
3. Fugitive Writings by Peter Kropotkin.
Hot-diggity-damn, this is one helluva good book.  It is a collection of essays written by Kropotkin on the theme of anarchism (its vision, principles, philosophy, ideals, morality, and relation to the State) and if you are not open to being an anarchist after reading it, then I might be inclined to think that you are also not open to being a Christian!  Indeed, it is precisely because I am a Christian that I am drawn to anarchism in general, and to Kropotkin’s expression thereof in particular.
Now, I could rant and rave some more about this collection, but perhaps a few quotes might be more helpful.
From the essay, “Anarchist Morality”:
[T]his principle of treating others as one wishes to be treat oneself, what is it but the very same principle as equality, the fundamental principle of anarchism?  And how can one manage to believe himself [sic] an anarchist unless he practices it?
We do not wish to be ruled.  And by this very fact, do we not declare that we ourselves wish to rule nobody?  We do not wish to be deceived, we wish always to be told nothing but the truth.  And by this very fact, do we not declare that we ourselves do not wish to deceive anybody, that we promise to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, the whole truth?  We do not wish to have the fruits of our labour stolen from us.  And by that very fact, do we not declare that we respect the fruit of others’ labour?
By what right indeed can we demand that we should be treat in one fashin, reserving it to ourselves to treat others in a fashion entirely different?
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By proclaiming ourselves anarchists, we proclaim beforehand that we disavow any way of treating others in which we should not like them to treat us; that we will no longer tolerate the inequality that has allowed some among us to use their strength, their cunning or their ability after a fasion in which it would annoy us to have such qualities used against ourselves.
Of course, what makes this so different than so much bourgeois rhetoric is the way in which the anarchists realise that this belief is tied to pratical solidarity (just like the Latin American liberation theologians).  Thus, I quote from the essay, “Must we Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal of a Future System?”:
The necessary and primary condition of any success whatsoever… is the full renunciation of any signs of nobility, the lowering of one’s material circumstances almost to the level of that milieu where one intends to act.  And one must work, do actual work, which each worker and each peasant can understand precisely as work… A person unable to renounce these comforts when he [sic] sees the usefulness of such renunciation, is not capable of presistent, tedious labour, and never will be capable of persistent revolutionary activity.  He might be the hero of the moment, but we have no need of heroes; in moments of passion, they appear of themselves, from amongst the most ordinary people.  We need people who, once having come to a certain conviction, are for its sake ready to withstand all possible deprivations day in and day out.  But activity amongst the peasants and workers demands precisely this rejection of every comfort of life, a lowering of one’s prosperity to a level attainable by the worker.
Of course, many people are unable to hear these words because they are afraid of the word ‘anarchy’ and have confused anarchy with ‘disorder’.  Kropotkin addresses some of these fears in the essay, “Anarchist Communinism: It’s Basis and Principles”:
We know well that the word “anarchy” is also used in current phraseology as synonymous with disorder.  But that meaning of “anarchy,” being a derived one, implies at least two suppositions.  It implies, first, that wherever there is no government there is disorder; and it implies, moreover, that order due to a strong government and a strong police is always beneficial.  Both implications, however, are anything but proved.  There is plenty of order–we should say, of harmony–in many branches of human activity where the government, happily, does not interfere.  As to the beneficial effects of order, the kind of order that reigned at Naples under the Bourbons surely was not preferable to some disorder started by Garibaldi; while the Protestants of this country will probably say that the good deal of disorder made by Luther was preferable, at any rate, to the order which reigned under the Pope.
Yet isn’t the anarchist vision one that is too ‘utopian’ and impossible to work out in real life, due to the fallen nature of humanity?  Kropotkin reverses this challenge in “Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal”:
Far from living in a world of visions and imagining men better than they are, we see them as they are; and that is why we affirm that the best of men is made essentially bad by the exercise of authority…
Ah, if men were those superior beings that the utopians of authority like to speak to us of, if we could close our eyes to reality and live like them in a world of dreams and illusions as to the superiority of those who think themselves called to power, perhaps we also should do like them…
All the science of governments, imagined by those who govern, is imbibed with these utopias.  But we know men too well to dream such dreams.  We have not two measures for the virtues of the governed and those of the governors; we know that we ourselves are not without faults and that the best of us would soon be corrupted by the exercise of power.
Another book I strongly recommend.
4. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov.
This is Goncharov’s story of Oblomov, a member of the Russian gentry who has good intentions but never seems to get around to doing anything meaningful.  Indeed, Oblomov is the superfluous man, and functions as a representative of Goncharov’s generation (as perceived by the author).  It’s a decent story and one that should be rewritten for my generation.