For some time, I’ve been thinking about writing a post arguing that the fundamental crisis of being, in our culture at this moment of history, is that of meaning.  Specifically, how we are no longer certain, and no longer know how to be certain, that anything, or any of us, have any fundamental meaning, significance, or value.
Tonight I sat down to write this post and let my mind dive into this crisis, seeking to face it personally (as it has been a crisis that has been weighing on me more and more over the last six months), while also trying to root it in it’s particular socio-historical context, and so on.  However, as I was writing, it struck me more and more powerfully as to how this crisis of meaning is related to one’s rootedness within the milieu of the bourgeois, the wealthy, the comfortable, and the privileged.  That is to say, for the vast majority of people in history, and even in the world today, the fundamental crisis of being isn’t meaning — it’s survival.  The crisis of being, for most members of humanity, is that one is unlikely to continue to be for much longer.  The crisis is not having any food to eat, not having clean water to drink, not having an immune system that functions properly, and so on and so forth.
Consequently, I became so ashamed of myself and my crisis of meaning, that I couldn’t bring myself to finish my original post.  Instead, I wrote this.

When all was said and done, what did we see?
A mother, tired and frightened and bloody and torn.  A baby in a stable reeking of piss and shit and transients living among animals.  Living like animals.  A family far from home.  The stench of their street-feet  rising stronger than anything else in that stable, sticking to our skin.  This is what we saw.
And it is this, this, that made the angels sing.  Made them swell so brilliant that, just for a moment, the veil was lifted and we saw them.  Exultant.  And they spoke to us.  They told us to come and see this blood and piss and shit and fear and exhaustion.  They told us that here, in the midst of this, we would find our saviour.  And maybe, just maybe, we did.
Because we found someone who was with us.  With us in our blood, our piss and shit and stink.  With us in our fear and exhaustion.  With us in our poverty and helplessness.  With us in places where humans should never be, but where we our forced to go.  With us.  And if this baby is who the angels say, and if he grows and continues to remain with us, then maybe, just maybe, we will be saved.

Christmas is one of the hardest times of year for street-involved people.  Granted, it’s a time when they receive more free stuff than usual, but more powerful than the stuff are the feelings of loneliness and loss, and the many painful or traumatic memories about family, or the lack thereof, that are triggered at this time.  There’s a reason why acts of suicide and self-harm go up at this time of year.
And so, I thought I’d post a link to the “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues.  Here’s a bit of Christmas music for all the lovely motherfuckers who are going to spend Christmas eve in the drunk tank, the hospitals, and the homeless shelters.  God bless us, everyone.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff3aoSyYOVs&feature=related]

[Ben Myers recently posted ’10 theological theses on art’.  This is my response.  As you can see, I find his theses — like the vast majority of Christian reflections on art — to be problematical.]
(1) Theodor Adorno famously remarked that writing poetry, after Auschwitz, is barbaric — Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.  This, then, prompted others to explore the possibility of doing any form of theology, music, or art ‘after Auschwitz’ (i.e. after the Holocaust).  And rightfully so.  Adorno is not simply questioning poetry; he is questioning the entire web of Western culture which has now been revealed as indissolubly connected with the mass production of death.  Illustrating this point, George Steiner writes: ‘We now know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning’ and Adorno adds: ‘The idea that after this war life could go on as normal, that culture can be resurrected… is idiotic.’  Thus, Adorno and Steiner both pose deep moral challenges to our cultural or artistic endeavours.
(2) It is these challenges that are the proper starting place for any Christian discussion of art.  Why?  Because Christianity necessarily privileges the experiences and perspectives of those who are oppressed and who are not only excluded from the circles of the cultured, but from the community of the living.  This is what necessarily results from following a crucified Lord.
(3) However, to question the value and role of art ‘after Auschwitz’ does not yet take us to the depths of our current dilemma.  After all, the Holocaust is now more than half a century in our past and the world — including the world of culture and art — has gone on.  People have forgotten what happened, the survivors have slowly been dying, and we are left with little more than the sentimental representations of the Holocaust provided for us by Hollywood — precisely the sort of representations Adorno warned us about.  Thus, we have become incapable of creating art ‘after Auschwitz’ because we are incapable of properly remembering Auschwitz.  Therefore, when we visit the location of Auschwitz, as a tourist destination, we are engaging not in an act of remembrance, but in an act that illustrates our inability to remember.  Indeed, this is why aging Holocaust survivors are three times more likely to commit suicide than others — they are the ones who, unlike us, are unable to forget Auschwitz (which then leads us back to Adorno’s greater question: ‘Is life possible after Auschwitz?’  The answer, I suppose, lies in series of questions: ‘Life for whom?  The survivors?  The perpetrators?  The spectators?’ and ‘What sort of life?’ but exploring these would take us too far from the topic at hand).
(4) That said, we must immediately recognise that we are not really living after Auschwitz.  Proper reflection upon our contemporary situation should lead us to conclude that we are living during Auschwitz.  By saying this we are not suggesting that the Holocaust of the Second World War is still ongoing; rather, we are retaining an understanding of ‘Auschwitz’ as a way of referring to the mass production of death related to Western culture and its self-absorbed lust for property and power.  Thus, for example, every 200 days something equivalent to the Holocaust occurs — every 200 days another 10,000,000 people, mostly children, die due to starvation, water-borne illnesses, and AIDS.  These are just a few of the largely preventable, but largely ignored, causes of death in our world.  Causes of death, we must repeat, that are intimately linked to the web of Western culture, politics, and economics.
(5) Therefore, the question becomes, ‘what is the role of art during Auschwitz?’ and the answer, just as with the question above, depends upon whom is doing the art.  On the one hand, we have seen that, even within Auschwitz, inmates produced art.  Indeed, oppressed and persecuted peoples have always produced art, and it cannot be denied that both the act of producing that art, and that art itself, contain a great deal of life-giving-and-sustaining power.
(6) On the other hand, we must ask ourselves about the value or significance of art produced by those who are numbered amongst the oppressors and spectators during, but outside of, Auschwitz.  Here, we must become much more critical.  All too often such art is simply a contemporary manifestation of the madness and cruelty of the Roman dictator, Nero, who is rumoured to have played the lyre and sang in theatrical garb… while Rome burned.  Thus, while children starve to death, we paint pretty pictures; while children die from drinking dirty water, we analyse films; while children are destroyed by AIDS, we deconstruct classical literature.
(7) Therefore, to continue to engage in art as though Auschwitz never occured, and as though Auschwitz is not continuing to occur, is unjustifiable and immoral.
(8) Instead, art must be created or performed in such a way that it becomes a part of a life-giving process of mutually liberating solidarity with victims and survivors, the dying and those left for dead, around the world.
(9) Indeed, to think that art can ‘seek the beautiful’, or be ‘a parable of redemption’, or come into the ‘proximity’ of the ‘beauty of God’ in the ‘crucified Christ’ apart from engagement in this life-giving process of mutually liberating solidarity is foolishness.  Again, more strongly: to engage in artistic endeavours that seek the beauty of God (which is found in the crucified Christ), without simultaneously engaging the crucified Christ who is revealed in the poor people of history is, to borrow Adorno’s language, idiotic.
(10) To make this assertion is not to suggest that all art must then engage in some sort of overt or superficial didacticism.  It is simply to suggest that the Christian artist — like Christians in every other profession — stands under the Lordship of Christ and is accountable to certain basic, and unavoidable, Christian commitments.

How long, now, have we been waiting for you to come back to us?
Almost eighty generations.  Almost two thousand years.
How long, now, have we been waiting for you to come back to us?
Countless wars.  Countless plagues and famines and floods.
How long, now, have we been waiting for you to come back to us?
We are bleeding.
How long?
We are suffering.
How long?
We are dying.
How long?
Our hearts are breaking.
How long?
Our minds are breaking.
How long?
Our bodies are breaking.
We are still waiting.
For salvation.
Waiting.
For healing.
Waiting.
For redemption.
Waiting.
For liberation.
Waiting.
For life.
Waiting.
For you.
Return to us.
Our voices have grown hoarse.
Return to us.
Our eyes have grown dry.
Return to us.
Our hands have grown weak.
Return to us.
Our hearts have grown hard.
We are lost without you.
O, come.
So lost.
O, come.
So lost.
Immanuel.

Well, I’ve enjoyed a number of good conversations on blogs other than my own, over this last year, and I thought I would link to a few here (for those who are interested… and for my own reference).
The first was a conversation at Ben Myers’ blog regarding Tom Waits (see here).
The second was a conversation with Gregory MacDonald, the pseudonymous author of The Evangelical Universalist, regarding hermeneutics (see here).
The third was a conversation I began with Michael Wittmer, author of the recently published Don’t Stop Believing: Why Living Like Jesus is Not Enough, regarding original sin (see here).  Unfortunately, Mike appears to have bowed out of that conversation rather early (so it goes on blogs).
So, there are a few past conversations that have stood out to me.  I’ll mention one future conversation now as well.
On March 21, 2009, I’ll be leading a workshop at the Evolving Church Conference in Toronto.  The conference is titled “Amidst the Powers” and the keynote speakers are Stanley Hauerwas, Walter Wink, and Marva Dawn.  Other workshop speakers include the likes of Brian Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat, June Keener Wink, and many others.  I will be presenting on this topic: “Speaking about ‘the Powers’ from Places of Privilege: Challenges and Contradictions” (for those who might be interested, you can see the conference website here).

A little while back, R. O. Flyer wrote a post called “Thoughts on the Future of Liberation Theology” (see here). In this post, he highlights how experience plays a crucial role in many liberation theologies, and how the experience of the poor in particular functions as “the central criterion of adjudicating between good and bad theologies”. This, then leads Flyer to assert that liberation theology is fundamentally reactive because of the way in which it prioritises praxis over theoria.
Further, Flyer finds this emphasis upon experience to be problematical as appeals to experience are all too often made by others as well — notably those liberal theologies that have been disciplined by the logic of capitalism. However, noting that all of us are shaped by our own particular experiences and inextricably entwined in our own particular histories, Flyer asserts that the crux of the problem is this: “the specific move made by much of liberation theology… that sees experience… as more fundamental than revelation.”
Thus, based upon this understanding of the nature of liberation theology’s experiential methodology, Flyer concludes that liberation theology might well be a doomed enterprise.
So what are we to make of all this? On the one hand, I’m somewhat perplexed by what Flyer is trying to do. I’m not sure exactly how he is relating ‘liberation theology’ to ‘liberal theology’ and ‘the logic of capitalism.’ He seems to be saying that each somehow uses ‘experience’ as a primary methodological category, but he doesn’t talk much about how each party uses experience — and they certainly do use it in different ways (which leads liberation theologians and liberal theologians to often be at odds with each other).
On the other hand, it is worth revisiting the role of experience in doing theology. First of all, I find it odd that Flyer creates such a sharp distinction, perhaps even an opposition, between ‘experience’ and ‘revelation’. Flyer seems to be contrasting these things in the way in which Barth contrasts ‘natural theology’ with revelation-based theology, but this is an entirely wrong way of approaching this topic. When liberation theologians talk about the priority of praxis, they are talking about prioritising the experience of the revelation of God in particular historical realities. In this regard, the liberation theologians are actually very close to Barth’s own method. Barth writes out of his experience of being met by the living God in that God’s revelatory action, and the liberation theologians simply complement and add flesh to this approach by arguing that God tends to come out to meet us in God’s revelatory action, in certain places and people.
Secondly, I believe that the theologies of the New Testament writers are just as deeply experience-based (and therefore just as ‘reactive’) as liberation theology. That is to say, the understanding of Jesus as Messiah and Lord, in the Gospels and elsewhere, is entirely dependent upon the experience of encountering the empty tomb and the resurrected Jesus. All NT Christology is reacting to this experience. Similarly, the inclusion of the Gentiles in the people of God, without requiring them to undergo circumcision or follow Jewish food laws, is entirely dependent upon the experience of Gentiles manifesting the Spirit apart from these things. Paul’s ecclesiology is deeply rooted in experience, and is thus also fundamentally reactive.
In fact, when we get down to it, all Christian theology can be described as reactive because all we are doing in our theology, and in our Christian living, is responding to God’s gracious initiative. This is not to say that our reactions can’t also be creative — they can be — but it is sufficient to show how an ideologically loaded label (because, you know, it’s bad or unimaginative to be ‘reactive’ these days!) is actually much more neutral in this context than we might first imagine.
So, where does this leave us in terms of how we analyse liberation theology? Essentially here: we are incapable of properly analysing and criticising liberation theology unless we first enter into the experiences to which it calls us. Thus, despite the intellectual discussion that has ebbed and flowed over the years, liberation theology remains (in the West) a largely untested thesis. My suspicion is that things (in the West) will remain this way. Liberation theology is ‘doomed’, not because of a faulty methodology, but because it takes following Jesus (who was also doomed) more seriously than most other theological movements.

[The Pharisees] tie up heavy loads and put them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them… Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. (Mt 23)

When approaching passages such as this one, it is crucial that we identify ourselves with the Pharisees who are being challenged by Jesus. Unfortunately, I suspect that we tend towards letting ourselves off the hook and glossing over remarks directed at the Pharisees because we assume that Jesus is confronting their Jewish ‘righteousness based on works’, whereas we all know that we are Christians saved by grace through faith.
However, this way of thinking grossly misrepresents the Pharisees and the Judaism(s) of Jesus’ day. The Pharisees, and the Jewish people in general, did not affirm a ‘works-righteousness’. Rather, they practiced a grace-based form of faith — by God’s gracious election they had been born into the people of God and now they acted in certain ways, not to ‘earn their salvation’ but to demonstrate their membership within that people. Thus, to use an oft-quoted phrase, the question confronting the Pharisees, just like the question confronting the recipients of Paul’s epistles, is not that of ‘getting in’ but that of ‘staying in’. In both cases, one is saved by grace and, in both cases, one remains in that grace by responding appropriately.
All that to say, I hope that this helps the contemporary Western Christian reader to begin to identify more closely with the Pharisees in the Gospels. Other factors strengthen this identification process — rootedness within places of privilege, and comfort; claiming high religious status for one’s self in relation to others; drawing strict boundary lines between members of the in-group and those outside; shunning many who are labeled as ‘impure’ or ‘sinners’; and so on.
Consequently, when we read of Jesus accusing the Pharisees of piling unbearable burdens upon the shoulders of others we should ask ourselves how we engage in this sort of activity.
Sadly, I believe that Christians on all ends of the spectrum do this all too frequently. Let’s take a few examples from opposite ends.
First, let us take the way that Evangelicals and Conservative Roman Catholics focus on the issue of abortion. It seems to me that a good many, perhaps the majority, of those who are outspoken in this issue are approaching it in the Pharisaic way that Jesus condemns. Without regard for that which motivates a person to have an abortion, the dominant Conservative Christian approach appears to be one that simply condemns abortion, and creates a sharp division between the high-status righteous (who are ‘pro-life’) and the low-status sinners who have had abortions.
Unfortunately, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, abortion is primarily a symptom of (at least) three root causes: (1) poverty; (2) a lack of respect for the lives of the disabled (NB: anywhere between 80-95% of babies-to-be with Down Syndrome are aborted in the Western world); and (3) the pursuit of a lifestyle that prioritises one’s own comfort, status, and goals above all others.
Therefore, unless Christians are seriously addressing and responding to these core issues, there is a good chance that all their talk about abortion is simply placing unbearably heavy loads onto the shoulders of others. Unless Christians are genuinely journeying alongside of poor women and families, unless Christians are demonstrating a commitment to the disabled, and unless Christians are pursuing lives of sacrifice focused upon others, then there is a good chance that Jesus’ words in Mt 23 apply to those who speak against abortion.
Second, moving across the spectrum of Christian positions, let’s take the example of so-called Christian radicals, and those committed to alternative Christian lifestyles. Here, I’m thinking of those who buy locally grown organic foods, fair trade coffee, clothes not made in sweatshops, and those who avoid shopping at places like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and so on. Now, while this is all well and good (I also try to live this sort of lifestyle — so this section of my post is directed at myself), it is absolutely crucial that those who live in this way don’t just tell others that they must try to live in this way; them must empower them do the same. After all, these things are much easier to do if one has a certain amount of wealth (to be able to afford more expensive fair trade or local items), a certain amount of life skills (to know how to prepare healthy meals), and a certain amount of education (to be able to discern which corporations and structures are corrupt and corrupting).
Therefore, if one simply pursues this lifestyle, as some sort of better way of living, without also helping to empower those who lack the requisite wealth, life skills, and education, then one has simply become like the Pharisees. Once again, one places unbearable burdens on the backs of others and replicates sharp boundaries between the high-status and privileged righteous (who live conscious of these things) and the low-status and poor sinners (who participate in evil structures).
Therefore, if Christians on all ends of the spectrum wish to avoid the damning criticisms of the Pharisees, raised by Jesus in Mt 23, we must engage in a public moral discourse that simultaneously analyses, invites, and empowers.

You know, I try to avoid just posting quotations from whomever I happen to be reading, or links to other blogs but, dangnabbit, sometimes somebody just really, really nails a topic.  In this case, it’s Tim Minchin and I think he’s got a great perspective on charity.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGas0D9_zgI]