Books of 2010

I was able to finish just over sixty books in 2010. It was an interesting year. I dabbled around in the horror genre for a bit, only made it halfway through Proust (when I intended to complete all of In Search of Lost Time last year) and fell just short of my goal of finishing all of McCarthy’s novels by the end of the year (I’m just now completing the Border Trilogy… which I left for last). Also, in comparison to prior years, I read a lot less theology in 2010.
In terms of my favourite reads, well, I always have trouble picking just one. In the area of biblical studies, I’ll highlight Virgil’s Aeneid. That text should be required reading for any student of the New Testament. In terms of the other non-fiction I read, I think I’m going to go with Taylor’s A Secular Age. There’s a reason why that book created so many waves (several reasons, actually). Fiction is always the hardest category to choose from but I’ll stick with McCarthy and leave it as a tie between Suttree and All the Pretty Horses.
My goals for 2011 are as follows:

continue reading one volume of Barth’s Church Dogmatics per year (I’m thinking about starting to do the same with Balthasar’s enormous trilogy);
finish up with Proust;
get into Nietzsche and Spinoza;
read at least one of the following: Being and Time, Truth and Method, and Of Grammatology (any suggestions?)
engage in a sustained amount of reading related to the current and past struggles and experiences of Canada’s indigenous peoples (anybody claiming to be inspired by Liberation Theology ought to do at least this in one’s own context).

We’ll see how that goes. Here’s the complete list of books I read (from cover to cover) in 2010:
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December Books

1. The Living Paul: An Introduction to the Apostle’s Life and Thought by Anthony C. Thiselton (Downers Grove: IVP, 2009).
Many thanks to Adrianna at IVP for this review copy!
Over the last few years, I’ve read or skimmed through a few dozen brief introductions to Paul. Given the space and content limitations imposed upon short introductory works, and given how often they appear, I have often wondered why scholars (and publishers) are keen to churn them out. I understand that developments occur in scholarship but the sort of change that really impacts an small volume geared towards lay people or first year college students does not come around all that often.
In fact, sweeping introductions to Paul often feel like college papers to me — there is some good writing, but hardly any references, and a lot of general statements that need to be supported in a lot more detail than they are in the text at hand. So, while a scholar like Thiselton may get away with writing this sort of thing, I would have a hard time imagining a publishing accepting an identical manuscript from an unknown and unaccredited person.
I’m sure the reader can tell, at this point, that I was a little bit disappointed in this book. I tried to keep in mind the limitations of the genre, but I still had higher expectations. Given the work that Thiselton has done in Pauline exegesis (see, for example, his NIGTC commentary on 1 Corinthians) and in the realm of hermeneutics (several volumes), I was hoping to see more of the strengths he exhibited in those works. However, what he ended up writings was pretty similar to most other introductions to Paul, devoting about ten pages to each of the major themes we find in Paul (biography, justification, ministry, the Church, ethics, eschatology, and so on), with a concluding chapter that relates some of Paul’s themes to the mood of postmodernism (for a lay person, or for a first year college student that chapter might be of some interest, but it was far too brief and superficial to say anything new to those who have any kind of familiarity with people like Foucault or Derrida). Thus, while I felt like this was a decent enough introduction, I also felt like it was a bit of a missed opportunity. If the reader is looking for a short readable introduction to Paul, and one that plays to the strengths of the author, I would suggest What Saint Paul Really Said by N. T. Wright or Reading Paul by Michael Gorman.
2. A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno.
I’m currently involved in a reading group that is working its way through Commonwealth by Hardt and Negri. This is my second time reading through that text and it got me thinking that I wanted to start engaging with more Italian voices and with the Italian history of resistance.
This short text is a series of lectures Virno delivered in 2001. In those lectures, he spells out his theory of “the multitude” over against the more Hobbesian notion of “the people” (a concept popularized by Hardt and Negri in second volume of their trilogy). He then looks at the ways in which the multitude has sought emancipation from the overcoding of the State and of Capital in various ways in the twentieth century. This, then, leads to his (very interesting) conclusion that post-Fordism should not be understood as a triumph of labour (as though the workers have emancipated themselves from more oppressive working conditions) but should, instead, be understood as the way in which capitalism was able to overcome the near-revolution against capitalism that occurred throughout much of the Western world in the 1960s and ’70s. Post-Fordism is thus capitalism’s way of changing it’s shape without relinquishing its original nature or goals.
I found this text to be quite interesting. I would recommend it to those who are interesting in these things.
3. Life by Keith Richards.
I’ve been going through a pretty major Stones kick for the last two years, thanks to a friend who turned me back on to them. Because of this, and because of a number of (what were to me) surprisingly good reviews, I decided to pick this book up and do a little further reading. I’ve never really done the Hollywood Star bio thing (except for a pretty good book I once read about Marilyn Monroe), but I’m glad I indulged in this one. It wasn’t just “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” along with crazy Keith Richards rumours about getting his blood changed in Europe in order to stay alive despite his drug use. Far from it. It was like sitting down and listening to Keith ramble about his number one addiction–music. And he rambles in a really down-to-earth manner. He’s not just out to tell war stories or make himself out to be the crazy rock-god that he became in the public eye. He just wants to talk about the music, the people, the music, the places, and the music he loved and loves. After I finished, instead of thinking, “it would be wild to hang-out with Keith because that man knows how to party,” I found myself thinking, “man, I’d love to sit down somewhere quiet, have a few beers and shoot the shit with this guy.” Fun stuff.
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I really enjoy Marquez but I find his prose to be really rich. Reading him is kind of like eating an expensive dessert. If you do it right, you take it in small doses and enjoy it piece by piece. However, sometimes it’s hard to avoid over-indulging, which means you go through a lot in a short time, but then you need to take a break for awhile afterward to recover. Plus, I think he’s best read when you have time to just immerse yourself in the story and the mood he creates and have no other worries on your plate.
That said, this book covers several generations of a family (of people who tend to all have the same name) in a small Latin American town. We go through the birth of a town, more than one revolution, the arrival of banana plantations, and the gradual downfall of the town. Along the way we meet farmers, gypsies, revolutionaries, colonizers, ghosts, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, parents and children and lovers. It really is a magical story. Recommended reading.

A Meeting with Thanatos: A Real Life Superhero in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

I. 12:20am, The Cemetery
Just after midnight on December 30th, with the temperature lingering at a few degrees below freezing, I found myself waiting for Death in one of Vancouver’s oldest cemeteries. As I finished the last drag of my cigarette, I heard the tread of boots on the pathway. A silhouette emerged from the darkness between the graves and gradually a tall, broad-shouldered man came into view. He looked like this:

Raising two fingers to the brim of his hat, he just barely tipped it and said, “Well, good evening.”
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The Bourgeois Appropriation of Marginality

The “persecution complex” maintained by Conservative Christians in North America is a widely noted and rightly criticized phenomenon. By employing this method those with power — and those who wield that power in a way that is oppressive and death-dealing — attempt to paint themselves as embattled victims or martyrs serving the cause of goodness and truth. By attempting to establish a certain framework around our sociopolitical discourse, they seek to claim the high ground and make their position unassailable.
Of course, Conservative Christians are not the only ones acting this way. Within North America, they provide but one (glaring) example of the ways in which a “culture of victimization” has spread so that everybody lays claim to the moral authority and the lack of accountability, not to mention the sympathy and assistance, that is supposedly (or supposedly supposed to be) the domain of “victims.”
It is interesting to note this feature of our culture given that we are actually the most death-dealing, violent, and oppressive gathering of people that has existed to date in history. No other culture comes close to equaling the amount of damage that we are doing not only to other human beings but to our plant and to life itself. However, people with guilty consciences have been playing the victim card in order to avoid taking responsibility for their actions since at least the beginning of the biblical stories — Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the Serpent (and God blames all three of them!) — so I guess this shouldn’t surprise us.
Be that as it may, the particular element of this that set my wheels spinning is the way in which those who criticize Conservative American Christians for their persecution-complex, usually end up reworking that same complex to their own advantage. The obvious twist is that these people — who often come from a background of some sort of close relationship to Conservative Christianity — claim that they are the ones persecuted… by the Conservative Christians. You see this a lot in the “Christian Radical” or “new monastic” or “Emergent” circles. Essentially, you have a group of predominantly middle-class, well educated, white males claiming that they (and not the other middle-class, well educated white males) are actually the ones who can occupy the high ground.
Take, for example, the blog Religion At the Margins (NB: I have nothing against those who post there, but chose this blog as an apt example of this phenomenon). Here you have eight contributors (six white males, one white female, one non-white male, all well educated) laying claim to the discourse of marginality. Thus, they define their blog in this way:

Religion at the Margins is a space dedicated to the exploration of marginalized perspectives in religion, politics, and culture. “At the margins” might refer to a class or group of people, or a heterodox theological perspective, or to those who find themselves on the margins of a faith that was once central to their lives. In any case, the theme here is marginality—however we feel like interpreting that at any given moment.

As far as I can tell, this means that we have a bunch of bourgeois writers who, despite their ongoing intimacy with privilege and power, lay claim to “the margins” because they aren’t as close as they used to be to Conservative Christian doctrines or communities (I’m open to being wrong about this, but the authors’ bios certainly suggest this conclusion).
Now, as the passage quoted above makes clear, the notion of marginality is somewhat vague. Really any person at any time and any place could lay claim to being on the margins of something. For example, I could claim to be “on the margins” of the fast-food industry (although I long ago gave up on places like McDonald’s, I still buy the occasional sub from a chain store down the street from my work), or I could claim to be “on the margins” of working with female survivors of sexual violence (since I do work with some survivors but do not work, and am not permitted to work, at the sort of female-staffed space that does the best work in this area). However, it should be apparent that, while technically true, these are pretty banal statements that don’t carry a lot of weight. Generally, people easily recognize that some spaces of marginality and some experiences of marginalization are more significant than others (in fact, it is this recognition that is at work in those who criticize the persecution complex of some Conservative Christians — while it may be true that they are more marginal than they used to be to the functioning of the American Empire, the assumption is that this relative marginality doesn’t carry any moral force). Therefore, when people do employ the language of marginality it is usually done as a discursive power-play in order to gain the benefits I mentioned above (claiming the high ground and all that).
Unfortunately — and here I’m going to make my discursive power-play — the people who genuinely suffer debilitating forms of marginalisation are the ones who end up being forgotten and neglected in all of this. When one group of bourgeois Christians lays claim to marginality over against another group of bourgeois Christians, then the significance of the death, dying and exploitation of other people groups is minimalised or completely forgotten (this despite the fact that one group of bourgeois Christians may like to read and write about those people groups). Therefore, I think that is time that we all reconsidered the ways in which we deploy the language of marginality, why we employ that language, and what the repercussions of that deployment may be.
This poster has made its rounds through the theology blogs:

But we may want to consider something like the following images.
Marginalised:

Marginalised:

Not Marginalised:

An Interview with Roland Boer (On Marxism and Theology)

[As I stated in a prior post, I recently completed reading Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology which the author, Roland Boer, very kindly sent to me as a gift. I very much enjoyed the book and have also enjoyed his blog, so I was very pleased when he consented to be interviewed for this blog. I started with a handful of questions more or less related to what he had written and then sent a number of follow-up questions to him. As you can see, things got a little out of hand and we ended up having a rather lengthy exchange but I hope that the reader will find it as interesting as I did. Thanks again, Roland, I very much appreciate your willingness to share. In what follows, my “questions” are in bold and Roland’s responses are in the regular font.]

People on both sides tend to treat Marxism and Christian theology as opposing and contradictory ideologies. I’m curious to hear about your personal journey and what has lead you to be interested in (and critically sympathetic towards) both of these areas of study. Care to share?

The connection first arose explicitly in a course I took on liberation and political theologies in about 1986 at the University of Sydney, while studying for a Bachelor of Divinity degree – which eventually led to ordination in the Presbyterian Church of Australia. One question with which I ended the course was: instead of reading these theologians on Marx, why not read Marx himself. Which I did, after an honours thesis on the riveting topic of Melchizedek in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Nag Hammadi and Qumran. So, for my Masters degree in theology I wrote a long thesis on Marx, Hegel and theology. Ever since then, I have been interested at a scholarly level in both areas. The idea for the Criticism of Heaven and Earth series first arose in 1992, so the completion of the fifth volume of that series a year ago was the fulfillment of that idea almost two decades ago.

But that is to focus on the intellectual history and you asked about the personal side. I came from a very religious family of (Dutch) reformed persuasions and I shared those convictions, although not without a continual critical spirit that annoyed my father to no end. At high school I used to joke about how things would be far better under communism, mostly to those in authority as they desperately tried to tell me how communism was another form of totalitarianism and how good capitalist parliamentary democracy really was. Even then, I was politically convinced that the centre-left was the best option (my parents voted consistently for Christian democrat or conservative parties while [I] opted for our social democrats, the Labor Party). Since then I have become more radical, on the far left, as they call it. As that happened, it became clear to me that within Christianity there is a strong tradition of political and theological radicalism, which I continued to explore personally. Reformed or Calvinist theology did not seem to sit easily with that interest, so I spent many a long year rejecting that tradition, only to realise later that Calvin himself was torn between the radical potential of elements in the Bible and his own conservative preferences (I eventually wrote a book about it, dedicated to my father, which he was able to read weeks before he died in 2009).

It also became clear, slowly, that not all the Bible or the various theological traditions are at their core or overwhelmingly radical, since they have sat and continue to sit comfortably with some of the most oppressive forms of power. It’s that basic ambivalence that continues to fascinate me, for which Marxism provides some unique insights. Add to that the fact that Marxists since Engels have been perpetually intrigued by the Bible and theology, often writing extensively on it in a way that has profound implications for their thought.

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Book Giveaway… Or Trade

Okay, it has been awhile since I’ve done one of these and so I thought I would, once again, give away some books.
Here are the books I’m offering:
1. Christian Theology (Second Edition) by Millard J. Erickson.
2. Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart.
3. In the Ruins of the Church by R. R. Reno.
4. From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya by Ruth A. Tucker.
5. Community That is Christian by Julie A. Gorman.
However, I’m going to change the rules a bit. There is a book I want — Documents and Images for the Study of Paul by Elliott and Reasoner — so I’m going to also offer a trade. Basically, it goes like this. Anybody is eligible to receive the free books. Anybody who expresses interest gets their names put into a hat for a random draw to determine the winner.
If, however, you have a copy of the Elliott and Reasoner book that you would be willing to trade, or if you simply want to buy me the Elliott and Reasoner book in exchange for the ones I’m offering, then only those who make this offer will have their names put into the hat. If only one person makes the offer, then that person gets the books. If nobody makes the offer, than everybody goes into the draw.
The draw will be held in about a week and I will notify the winner.

November Books

Well, November was a heavy writing month, so not a lot of reading was done. Here’s what I got:
1. Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology by Roland Boer.
Roland was kind enough to send me a copy of this book after this post prompted this exchange over on his blog. He has also continued to extend that kindness and has agreed to be interviewed about this book on my blog, so hopefully that will be posted in the (near-ish) future.
In this book — the first in a series of five — Boer looks at the ways in which theological themes or biblical reflections impact the writings of eight prominent “Marxist” scholars: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Henri Lefebvre, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Slavoj Zizek, and Theodor Adorno. The first two he refers to as “biblical Marxists,” the next four as “catholic Marxists” and the final two as Marxists who exhibit a “Protestant turn.”
As with any book exhibiting this kind of scope, some chapters are better or more exciting than others. With some (notably Althusser and Lefebvre) it seems as though Boer is digging pretty hard to meet the demands of his project. With others, however (notably the chapters on Bloch and Gramsci), the writing really is quite captivating. I also found the chapter on Zizek to be of quite a bit of interest. I’ve read a lot of Zizek but not a lot of what has been written about him, and so it is interesting to read what others are saying who have stepped back and taken the time to study his entire project. Boer is also quite critical, probably more so of this author than any of the others mentioned, to it is interesting to see Zizek’s praise for Boer’s work on the back cover.
All in all, quite a good read. I would like to pick up the other volumes in the series (or maybe Roland could mail them to me, along with that case of beer and carton of smokes he still owes me…), and would recommend them to others who are interested in this sort of thing.
2. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.
This is the first volume of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy and it is fantastic–right up there with my other McCarthy favourites (Blood Meridian, The Road and Suttree, although it feels deceptively gentler than each of those novels). It is something like a coming of age story, something like a love story, and something like Scripture. Recommended reading (if you want a detailed plot overview, see here, but I would suggest just jumping in blind).
3. The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy.
This is the second volume of the Border Trilogy. It is not as good as the first — it lags for about the first 100pp, but then it gets back up to McCarthy’s standard for story-telling (the first part of the book has been compared to Moby-Dick so that may be why I found it slow!). Oddly enough, it was in this book that I encountered one of the better possible descriptions of my own “apocalyptic” life experiences that led me to the faith I live. Here’s the quote, with some context thrown in to make sense of it:

He carried within himself a great reverence for the world, this priest. He heard the voice of the Deity in the murmur of the wind in the trees. Even the stones were sacred. He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.
There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay in his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair.

That, I reckon, sums up a lot of my journey. Also recommended reading. (Aside: there are a lot of quotable passages in this book. As I was looking back through it to write this, I came across several that could inspire posts of their own.)
4. As I crossed a Bridge of Dreams by Lady Sarashina.
Since I was having a lot of fun reading the Norse and Icelandic sagas, I thought I would try something different and so I decided to read this book, which was written by a woman who lived in Japan during the 11th century (which means it dates to around the same time as the sagas). I have concluded that it is far, far more exciting to read about Vikings than ancient Japanese women who write poems to each other, or to trees, or who get excited to go on a trip to nowhere to do nothing. So, while this book is interested just for the glimpse it provides into a world that is dead and gone, the woman who lived in that world sure lived one helluva boring life.
5. Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald.
I grabbed this play out of a free book bin and read it at the bar one night after I got too tipsy to read anything heavier. It is a pretty clever feminist reading of Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Lots of wordplay, lots of innuendo, mimicking the bard and all that. However, I was never a big Shakespeare fan (although I did once send my wife to a sketchy hotel to buy a $10 leather-bound complete works of Shakespeare from a big sketchy dude… sorry, wife!), and I never was really able to get into reading plays, so I feel pretty ho-hum about all this.

The New Testament and Violence. Part Two: The Nonviolence of Paul

[This is the second part of my ongoing series. For Part One, see here. I will turn to the Sectarianism of John in my next section, before offering some concluding remarks in a final post.]
The Nonviolence of Paul
You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the assembly of God and was ravaging it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many contemporaries in my nation, being far more of a zealot for my ancestral traditions ~ Gal 1.13-14.
The turn from Jesus to Paul leads to what some may consider to be an unexpected reversal. Having noted the violence of Jesus, it is interesting to note how Paul develops the Jesus tradition in a more thoroughly nonviolent, or pacifist, manner. Just as our assumptions about “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” have been challenged, so also our assumptions about Paul, the man blamed for legitimizing the sword of the State along with a host of others evils, end up being reworked in light of what the texts actually do and do not say.
Of course, like Jesus, Paul has not entirely escaped from the ideologies of the triumphant that seek to impose “legitimate” violence upon one’s enemies. Like Jesus, Paul sometimes speaks of a coming moment of cataclysmic divine violence and judgment (cf., for example, Ro 2.5-11; 2 Cor 5.10; Gal 1.8-9; Phil 3.18-19; 1 Thess 1.9-10, 2.16). Also like Jesus, he is not beyond verbally abusing his opponents – even wishing that some of his opponents in Galatia would go ahead and castrate themselves (Gal 5.12 – Paul refers to a comparable group as “dogs” in Phil 3.2)! However, it is worth noting that in relation to both of these areas, Paul seems to exhibit more grace than Jesus. In relation to violent divine judgment, Paul focuses God’s wrath upon the here-and-now, with God’s wrath simply being God’s refusal to intervene and prevent the inevitably tragic end result of a people’s self-chosen sinful activities. When speaking of final judgment, however, Paul does not have a lot to say and, in fact, he refuses to cast any sort of judgment upon either those outside of the assemblies of Jesus (cf. 1 Cor 5.9-13) or the enemies of those assemblies (cf. Ro 12.14-21). Even when Paul does find it necessary to pronounce an exceedingly harsh judgment upon another Jesus-follower, something he describes as handing a person “over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,” Paul still limits this judgment to the temporal realm, so that the spirit of this man “may be saved on the day of the Lord” (1 Cor 5.5; see also 1 Cor 3.12-15). Finally, not only does Paul limit his reflections upon some final divine act of violence, but he also leaves the door open for a great final act of universal salvation. Thus, he writes, “for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ” (1 Cor 15.22) and again, “just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all” (Ro 5.18 – some tantalizing results are also produced when Phil 2.10-11 is read in conjunction with Ro 10.9!).
Turning to the second parallel, having noted that Paul sometimes loses his temper and verbally abuses his opponents, it is still worth noting that Paul is much more focused upon redefining enemies as non-human structural, cosmic and spiritual Powers. Again, in this regard, it seems to me that Paul demonstrates more grace than Jesus – not only holding out the possibility of final salvation for the worst offenders and for his opponents, but also shifting the focus of one’s warfare or hatred to the non-human realm. This emphasis comes through especially strongly in the Deutero-Pauline epistles of Colossians and Ephesians (which remain much more faithful to Paul than the Pastorals), but it is already found in the non-contested Pauline letters. Thus, in Ro 13.12, Paul calls the Jesus-followers to put on armor, not of metal in order to battle other people, but of light in order to battle darkness and the vices of the flesh (a metaphor further developed in Eph 6.10-17). Thus, while some of our contemporary bourgeois pacifists may express discomfort with Paul’s usage of warfare imagery here or elsewhere, the point is that Paul has shifted the terrain of the war from the personal to the spiritual and structural realms.
Therefore, when we compare Paul’s rhetorical violence to that of Jesus, we discover a Paul who is much more gentle, meek, and mild than Jesus. This difference is only heightened when we compare Paul’s actual actions to those of Jesus. For, unlike Jesus, we are hard pressed to find any sort of violent action employed by Paul as God’s ambassador to the nations.
However, it is important to note that this refusal of violence comes after Paul’s encounter with the resurrected Christ on the road to Damascus. Prior to that apocalyptic event, both Paul and Luke claim that Paul was engaged in violent actions – arresting and imprisoning some, seizing property, and even assisting in the executions of others. Here Paul’s references to his allegiance to “Judaism” (a term coined to express opposition to “Hellenism” and highlight separation from other nations), to being a “Pharisee” (meaning a “separated one”), combined with the mention of his “zeal,” all lead to the hypothesis that Paul, before his encounter with Christ, was a member of a Pharisaic group that modeled itself after the likes of Phinehas and the other “heroes of zeal” in the Hebrew Scriptures—people whose unconditional commitment to the distinctiveness of Israel was exhibited in a willingness to use violence, even against other Judaeans. For Paul and other zealots (i.e. others who were “zealous” for Israel), zeal was “something you did with a knife” (to borrow the words of N. T. Wright).
Therefore, one of the ways in which Paul’s call produces a significant conversion in his work post-Damascus is the way in which it moves him from violent to non-violent actions. Instead of violently purging the people of God, Paul embraces non-violence in order to suffer with Christ and extend the offer of the peace of God to the members of all the nations. Paul’s zealous violence has given way to zealous love which now manifests itself, not in the willingness to kill but in the willingness to die. Of course, Paul does not completely break with his old behaviours – in Acts 13.6-12, for example, we read of Paul temporarily blinding a sorcerer named Elymas – but the transition is a very significant one.
Does this mean that Paul understands the conflict between that which is life-giving and that which is death-dealing in a different way than Jesus? Do his different tactics reflect a different agenda? I do not think so. It seems to me that Paul is just as deeply committed to the pursuit of life, and the worship of the God of Life, over against Death and the death-dealing Powers of his day. Paul’s embodied proclamation of the good news of Jesus’ lordship, still runs completely against imperial modes of domination. Thus, Paul urges economic mutuality, along with the emancipation of slaves, and the equal status of all – men and women, Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free people, within the assemblies of Jesus. Yet almost nowhere does he engage in the same sort of violence against private property exhibited by Jesus. I can only think of one example of Paul engaging in an illegal action of that nature.^¹ While in Philippi, Paul and Silas encounter a female slave who is possessed by a pythonic fortune-telling spirit. This slave, Luke tells us, made a great deal of money for her masters. However, Paul ends up casting this spirit out of her, thereby enraging the owners who end up getting Paul and Silas stripped, beaten, flogged and imprisoned by the magistrates (cf. Acts 16.16-24). By casting out the spirit, Paul has damaged the value of the slave-owners property (the female slave was legally considered a thing, not a person). Thus, he destroys “property” in the service of life. Of course, Luke frames this act as though is arose spontaneously on Paul’s part (Paul became too “annoyed” to properly control himself), but it actually fits in rather well with Paul’s entire trajectory regarding slavery, wherein slaves were to be treated as people, as equals, as siblings, as citizens of heaven, and as children and heirs of God.
This is just one area that demonstrates Paul’s desire to create alternative communities of life within central places of the Empire. For Paul, this is such a crucial and dangerous task that he tries to “fly under the radar” rather than jeopardize his mission in any other way (indeed, even without any outright actions of violence against property, Paul is still executed by the Roman imperial powers, an observation that demonstrates the degree of risk involved in his work). Therefore, what we see when we compare Jesus and Paul are different tactics employed in the pursuit of the same goal. While it is tempting to psychologize the differences between the two – perhaps by suggesting that Jesus was better equipped to ably employ violence whereas Paul needed to more wholeheartedly avoid this realm of possible actions due to the violent nature of his past – I do not wish to press that point. I simply want to observe that the tactics of both are different but legitimate options available to those who seek to follow Jesus and imitate Paul.

1There is one great act of Christian property destruction in Acts, when the sorcerers at Ephesus burn their books, which had a combined approximate value of 50,000 drachmas – however, while this fits into the general trajectory of supporting the destruction of property that is idolatrous and death-dealing, it was a voluntary action performed by the owners of the property and so no crime was committed. Cf. Acts 19.17-20.

Beyond the Life of the Beloved

[I have been thinking about the subject of this post for quite some time. I’ve tried to sit down and write it more than once but am having difficulty expressing myself in this regard. In fact, it has been sitting near completion in my Drafts file for over a month.
The only way I can think of communicating this thought is through the telling of a story, parts of which I’ve already written here, so I apologize for the repetition and I apologize for the length of time it may take me to get to the point. This is the story of how I have moved beyond the life of the beloved.]
In my life, I have gone through roughly three major stages of self-identification. The first stage spanned from my early childhood until my late teens. The second stage spanned from my late teens until my late twenties. I am currently in the third stage.
Stage One: Fear, Guilt, and Shame
When I was young, I was deeply impacted by the bourgeois, conservative morality of North American Evangelicalism and the (concomitant) presence of violence, or the threat of violence, within my family home. I lived in constant fear — fear of not being good enough, fear of not being “man enough”, fear of being punished for things I knew I had done wrong, and fear of being punished for reasons I did not understand. When I was around twelve years of age, the doctor thought I might actually be developing stomach ulcers from laying awake at night and worrying about the next day. The only way I could still my mind was bouncing my head of the pillow and counting (1, *bounce*, 2, *bounce*, three, *bounce*, up over one thousand… although I learned to turn my head every one hundred bounces so that my neck didn’t lock up).
In such an environment, it is difficult to develop any strong sense of identity or self-worth. It was, to be blunt, traumatic. Now, the thing about trauma is that it profoundly disorients us — it shatters our understanding of the world (what was safe is no longer safe, what we believed no longer makes sense, and so on). However, when one is born into a traumatic situation, then one has not had the opportunity to develop an understanding of the world or a sense of what to believe or not believe and so the world appears to be inherently tumultuous, chaotic, nonsensical, and dangerous.
Growing up in this world, I came to believe that I was a bad person. If I was abused, I was to blame. If things didn’t go well, it was because I had done something wrong. All of this culminated, then, in the events that occurred when I was seventeen when my father kicking me out of my family home (“You’ve got an hour, get your stuff and go.” “Should I phone?” “No, get out of my life.”).
The hardest thing about that experience was seeing my mother — a gentle and loving person who, alas, allowed my father to abuse her and his family because of her understanding of her role as a “Christian woman” — sobbing submissively as I packed and left. I thought I was the son who broke his mother’s heart. I thought it was my fault for getting kicked out. I thought I was a piece of shit and sometimes, at night, I would walk around looking for guys who wanted to start trouble because I thought I deserved to get shit-kicked.
Stage Two: The Life of the Beloved
However, shortly after being kicked out, I had an experience that completely changed my life, my understanding of myself, of God, and of others, and this experience has actually dictated the course of my life from that point onwards. To make a long story short, I had what could be could be called a “mystical religious experience” (a “road to Damascus” sort of “Event”) that functioned as a major trauma for me. However, this trauma was a good one — the trauma of unexpected beauty, joy, wonder and love invaded my life and completely changed the world in which I found myself. Instead of viewing myself as a a source of shame, I now believed myself to be source of delight, instead of feeling worthless, I felt valuable, instead of being an outcast, I felt beloved. To me, this was the experience of new life rising out of the context of death. It felt like new creation, resurrection, that sort of thing.
This, then, marked everything about my life from that point on. I wanted to throw myself into loving and being loved. I wanted others to know this abundant life. I wanted others to know their own overwhelming goodness and breath-taking beauty.
I did this because it simply made sense to pursue this trajectory. After coming to know myself as beloved — despite everything, and at my lowest point (to date) — this was simply how I saw others. I suppose this was the realization of what Christian theologians refer to as “grace.” I did not believe that I had earned my experience or done something to merit the title “beloved.” Rather, it came to me as a gift.
However, the experience of this “grace” wasn’t quite in accord with many theological formulations related to it. Having come to know myself in this way, notions of being “sinners” or “wretches deserving of hell and damnation” no longer made sense to me as I thought about myself or others. Rather, having experienced this gift, I came to believe that I was beloved simply because I was. Thus, I came to view others not as sinners in need of grace or as depraved folks in need of salvation, but as people who already were good, beautiful and lovely, simply because they were people. The experience of grace made the status of the beloved an ontological category for me (and, I should note, having a son now has only confirmed this way of thinking to me — we are born good, beautiful, lovely, and pure — albeit vulnerable — and we only later learn to break ourselves and others).
Thus, I began to love exuberantly. And I began to see the transforming power of love in the lives of others. I saw a close friend discover new life after having undergone some unspeakably violent traumas. I saw two other friends overcome the most severe crack addictions I have ever encountered. I saw people who were consigned to death on the streets — by even the most admirable social workers — come into new life as they also came to know themselves as beloved. That was a wonderful time in my life.
Stage Three: The Lives of Others
However, over the last few years, another major shift has occurred. I find it difficult to articulate this well, so you’ll have to bear with me. Basically, I have moved from being centred in an awareness of myself as beloved to being centred in an awareness of the lives of others — specifically, the suffering and dying of those who are marginalized and godforsaken, both in my own city and around the world. As a result of this shift in focus, it has mattered less and less to me how I identify myself “in and of myself.” Therefore, although I would still consider myself to be beloved, the point is that I don’t really care about myself all that much anymore. My happiness or sense of peace, no longer hinges upon me but hinges upon the experience of others.
Indeed, the experience of the form of grace I described above, leads naturally to a focus upon others. Grace being both a gift and a simple recognition of who we are, is something that is fundamentally outwardly focused. The God of grace is a God that is not absorbed in herself, but is defined by a reaching out or drawing near to others. Thus, to live in grace is to have one’s life oriented in the same way.
The catch is this: there are many who are longing to encounter this experience of themselves as beloved but who never have this desire satisfied. I have known so many longing to love and and be loved, but others death-dealing powers have dominated their lives instead. Those who have cried out to God but who only received silence in return. Those who have sought love from others, only to be rejected. Those who have tried to make good but whose identities were far too shattered by abuse and violence to be able to recover. Those for whom the love I and others have tried to offer has not been enough.
Reflecting upon this in light of my own experiences, it is difficult to understand how this can be the case. Grace does not always rupture the fabric of our world. Love is not always enough. Time runs out. Other things are stronger. Often, the nightmares win. For me, the great mystery of my life is why I would have this experience and why others would not (after all, it’s not as though merit or effort on my part produced the experience). Thus, the trauma that shatters me is not one that I experience directly in and of myself. Rather, I am increasingly shattered by the traumas encountered by others. I feel godforsakenness because, fuck, we’re all in this together and for any of us to be godforsaken means that we all are. I am reminded of a famous quotation from Eugene V. Debs:

years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

The only thing to add to that is this: as long as there are those who are abandoned by God, I am forsaken.
Therefore, while knowing myself as beloved became a crucial element in my journey, it is not the end-point that I once thought it was. Instead, I now believe that it is but one stage along the way. Knowing myself as beloved has, for me, been that which has given me an understanding of myself that now permits me to move beyond myself. I am content in myself now. My conscience is not tortured. Although I know the deeds I have committed and continue to commit, I am not particularly concerned about them, good or bad. At least, I am not concerned about them in relation to myself. I am, however, very concerned about these deeds in relation to others. Simply stated: I have found life. Now, what matters, is sharing life with others, especially those who have had it taken away from them. I’m not what matters.
Perhaps I am having trouble articulating this and am repeating myself because this is a relatively new stage for me. I’m not sure what will follow (good or bad or, more probably, both in different ways). However, I am very curious to see how things go. I am happy to move beyond the life of the beloved. Happy to move into the lives of others. Although, again, the language of happiness is deceptive here. A better way to express that may be to say I have made my peace with sharing the godforsakenness of others — even though I cannot make my peace with the godforsakenness of others. For others, I will cry out to God. For myself, I am content.

October Books

Bit late… bit distracted by a chapter I’m writing on the socioeconomic status of Paul and the members of the early assemblies of Jesus (and the implications of this analysis for various political readings of Paul)… so here we go:
1. Paul and the Roman Imperial Order edited by Richard Horsley.
This is a really excellent collection of essays written by scholars who are extending counter-imperial readings of Paul from various trends in the Roman Empire more broadly to a more detailed analysis of each of the specific locations to which Paul is written. In my opinion, the strongest essays here are those by Robert Jewett (who examines how Paul’s talk about the corruption of nature in Ro 8.18-23 acts as a counterclaim against the imperial assertion that nature had been redeemed via the epiphany of the Caesars), Abraham Smith (who engages in a postcolonial analysis of 1 Thess) and Erik Heen (who reads Phil 2.5-11 in light of the imperial cult as it was specifically manifested at Philippi). Simon Price, who wrote one of the essential texts on this topic (Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor — a must read for anybody interested in this subject) also pens a helpful response to the essays. This is recommended reading.
2. The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Churches Conservative Icon by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.
It seems like John Dominic Crossan likes to pair up with different authors and write close to the same things about Paul over and over. Thus, in this book, we find the same material that Crossan and Reed covered in their earlier book, In Search of Paul (and that Crossan had already repeated in God and Empire… seriously, kinda makes me wonder if Crossan is just exploiting this trend to make some cash and boost his brand-status which, given the nature of the subject at hand, would be something of a betrayal). The major additions to the earlier writings are a more sustained analysis of the theopolitical vision of Rome and how Paul counteracts that vision. As usual, however, the points of contemporary application seem a little pale in comparison to what Paul was doing (i.e. there’s more going on here than simply calling contemporary liberal Christians and conservative Christians to get along with each other).
All in all, I suppose that this book would be a decent popular-level introduction to some of the broader themes of counter-imperial readings of Paul. However, for those who are already familiar with this subject, there is nothing new here.
3. Civil War by Lucan.
Lucan was a Roman writer, a friend of Nero’s (for awhile anyway), and this book is his unfinished epic account of the civil war that raged between Julius Caesar, Magnus Pompey, and Cato the Younger in the middle of the first century BCE. What comes through in Lucan’s text is just how appalling and traumatic the civil was was to Roman sensibilities. That Romans were killing other Romans (instead of killing members of other nations) was seen as absolutely immoral and an act that threw all of the cosmos into a state of disorder and chaos. Understanding this helps the reader to see why Augustus was treated as a divine Saviour-figure when he brought an end to the civil wars and reestablished peace (peace being the time when Romans get back to killing other nationalities instead of each other).
Thus, Lucan’s text ends up serving the purposes of the imperial ideology, but there are ways in which it also challenges that ideology. Thus, for example, Lucan’s portrayal of Julius Caesar — as a bloodthirsty, power-hungry, treaty-breaking, immoral tyrant — falls outside of the standard imperial treatments of that personage. However, such criticisms of the imperial ideology are couched in such a way that they rebound back to strengthen that ideology — thus, Lucan writes that all the horrors of the civil war are worthwhile because, at the end of the day, they lead us to Nero who is portrayed as an even greater Saviour than Augustus (this sort of criticism rebounding back to strengthen the ideology of Rome is visible in other texts that have been transmitted by the Roman elite — for example, in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis the recently deceased Claudius is viciously mocked but the now-regnant Nero is highly praised, as is the deified Augustus).
Recommended reading for those interested in these things.
4. Hope in Time of Abandonment by Jacques Ellul.
Last month I mentioned that I was taking the time to reread a few books that had really jumped out at me when I first read them several years ago. I reread Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved and was surprised by how little it resonated with me (I’ve got a follow-up post I’m almost done writing about that, but I can’t quite seem to express myself at the crucial part of the post and so I’ve been stalled on it for weeks now). I also decided to reread this book by Jacques Ellul as I remember it really kicking my ass in good ways when I first read it about ten years ago. At that time I was burying myself in Moltmann’s writings and Hope in Time of Abandonment provided a very important shift of emphasis in my thinking: while Moltmann emphasises that God is with us in the experience of godforsakenness (the crucified God, etc.), Ellul brings to the fore the reality of the experience of godforsakenness in and of itself.
The book did not disappoint this time around. In fact, I think this really is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Seriously, this is a very rich text. Ellul, more than any other I know, expresses what I take to be our contemporary situation in relation to God. If you only ever read one book I recommend, this would be a good one to choose.
5. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
This is an extremely well written book (that kind that makes me despair of ever being a decent storyteller), and it has been called one of the great American novels. However, it is also the kind of book that makes me completely depressed. What Franzen does is tell the story of a couple and their three children who grow up in the Midwest and end up moving on to other places, people, and things. As Franzen takes his time, shifting his focus through all the characters, he ends up providing a moving and authentic-feeling snapshot of the lives and struggles, joys and sorrows, of the contemporary middle-class. And this is why I find the book so depressing — everybody, no matter how wonderful they are or could have been, is caught in small lives, petty struggles, trapped in shitty circumstances, negotiating stupid family politics to try and keep everybody happy… and it makes me think, “my God, is that all there is? Is this the kind of life we are all bound to live?” Scares the bejeezus out of me (much like Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series).
Recommended reading (given that others who read this book actually seem to find it quite humourous and not so depressing… it really is very well written).
6. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger.
I’ve never been a fan of short stories (not sure why that is), but I’ve been enjoying Salinger lately as have a few of my friends and so I thought I would read these stories. All in all they weren’t too bad. Salinger certainly has a way of presenting dialogue that captures how people actually speak (or used to speak). We also see the return of some of the members of the Glass family (written about in Franny and Zooey and elsewhere) and I especially enjoyed the story that dealt with them (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”). The other story that I liked a fair bit was “Teddy”. Interesting, given the similarities that exist between those stories. Anyway, decent reading.