[Well, what little time I get to write these days has been devoted to working on my thesis.  However, for those who might be interested, I thought I would provide a glimpse of what I’ve been working on.]

Paul and the Uprising of the Dead: Eschatology, Ethics, and Empires

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1. Introduction

Paul and the Anastasis of the Dead

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Of all the voices found within the Christian Scriptures, Paul’s is, perhaps, the most contested. Therefore, despite the observation that the presentation of Paul as a ‘Conservative’ and ‘Spiritual’ voice was dominant in much of Western scholarship for the latter two-thirds of the 20^th century, this understanding of Paul has always been challenged and is increasingly called into question today. Indeed, this recent emphasis upon Paul as ‘Conservative’ and ‘Spiritual’ was, in part, a reaction to Pauline scholarship in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which presented influential Marxist readings of Paul (which, in turn, were reacting against the reading of Paul that became dominant in post-Reformation Protestantism and Roman Catholicism).¹ Thus, over the last one hundred years, the pendulum has swung from viewing Paul as a leader of the revolutionary proletariat, to viewing Paul as the Apostle of bourgeois morals and respectability. Today, however, the pendulum is swinging back from a ‘Conservative’ extreme, and a presentation of Paul as an Apostle who embodied the proclamation of a counter-imperial and subversive way of structuring life together (under the ever watchful eye of the Empire) is gaining increasing prominence.

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Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, the ‘Conservative’ understanding of Paul was dominant while Christianity itself was a dominant (and Conservative – despite a brief popular flirtation with Marxism) political force in the West. However, now that the sociopolitical influence of Christianity has waned (as in most of Western Europe) or is rapidly waning (as in North America) it is interesting to note that Paul is being reread in more ‘counter-cultural’ ways. The question then is this: are we continually allowing our understanding of Paul to be shaped by our own sociopolitical contexts, or are we just now becoming resensitized to elements of Paul’s writings that we have previously overlooked, due to our rootedness within places of power and dominance? The answer, I suspect, contains at least a bit of both, although the emphasis of what follows will fall on the latter.

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In this work, I will explore some of the diverse and contradictory ways in which Paul’s theopolitical actions and writings have been understood, and I will assert that Paul presents us with a particularly creative and subversive combination of eschatology and political ethics — one that explodes the eschatology and political ethics favoured by empires, both then and now. I believe that it is crucial to engage in a detailed exploration of Paul in this way, both because Paul is a valuable resource for countering the oppressive imperial ideologies of our day, and because Paul himself has so often been co-opted by these imperial ideologies. Too often Paul has been appropriated by oppressive Powers who have placed him, and his message, in the service of Death.² Therefore, I am hoping to contribute to the recovery of the Paul who anticipated the resurrection (Gk: anastasis) of the dead, and did so by leading an uprising (Gk: anastasis) amongst those who were left for dead within the society of his day.³ Paul is the Apostle of Jesus – the crucified Lord who has triumphed over Death – and Paul spreads the good news of Jesus by developing communities of new life, whose corporate existence reveals that Death in all of its socioeconomic, political, and imperial manifestations, no longer holds sway. Behold, the dead are rising, Death is being swallowed up in victory, and the new creation of all things has begun – even here, even now!

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Today my son Charles is four months old.  This is him:

He has been a colicy baby, so my wife and I have had little sleep and have spent most of our time either entertaining him or trying to soothe him.
But that’s quite alright.  This was the sort of thing I expected when people told us that everything in life was going to change.
What I didn’t expect, was a very different change that Charles has created in me.  In fact, this change was so unexpected, so unlooked for, that it took me a good couple of weeks to figure out what was different.  I knew something radical had happened inside of me but I was unable to name it.
You see, for the last seven or eight years, I have felt like I was slowly shattering.  I felt like my journey into broken places was slowly breaking me — breaking my heart, my strength, my spirit.  With each new death, each new kid lost to drugs or mental illness or violence, each new rape, I felt like another piece inside of me broke off.
In recent years, I have felt that there were so many cracks and fissures running through me that I often wondered how long I would be able to hold myself together.
And then Charlie was born.  And the first time I held him I felt as though all of my broken pieces fused back together again.  That’s why it took me so long to figure out what I was feeling — I hadn’t felt that way in so many years.  So it’s no wonder that it hit me like a ton of bricks a few weeks later when I finally realized what it was that I was feeling: “My God.  I feel whole!”  What a miraculous gift my son has given to me.
My wife and I weren’t planning on having a child when we did.  Charlie came into our lives unexpectedly.  But the timing ended up being perfect — far better than we could ever have known.  He has been a gift from God to us.  I look at him sleeping beside me and think, “Amazing grace!”
Of course, as I suggested in my opening paragraph, there is nothing ‘cheap’ about this grace.  It is costly; it demands a lot of us.  But all of that — the sleepless nights, the exhaustion, the sacrifice of other things — is immediately forgotten the minute Charlie smiles from ear to ear and giggles at me.
I reckon this is often how things stand with God’s gifts of grace — something unexpected, something unexpectedly wonderful, something life-transforming.
I also hope to participate in this economy of grace.  I hope to give gifts to my son.  In particular, I hope to give him a gift that I have never experienced — I hope to be a loving father to him.
My own father was often violent when I was young, and my childhood was dominated by feelings of fear.  Even now, my father continues his efforts to emotionally manipulate and abuse the people close to him.  So I have never known what it was like to have a loving father.  This is not to say that my dad has never felt warm fuzzy feelings when he has thought of me; rather, it is simply to observe that his words and actions towards me (and his other sons) have usually been anything but loving.
Therefore, by committing to love my son, I am hoping to give him a gift that I have never received.  It blows my mind to think that I can offer Charles a life so different than my own.  It blows my mind to think that he will never have to know what it is like to have a father who is incapable of loving his children.  It amazes me that I can give him an experience so far from anything I have ever known.
This, surely, is a glimpse of the abundant life we find in the company of God.  This, surely, is the giving of grace upon grace.
Charles, my boy, I’ve never been so in love.  May you ever only know the economics of grace and the giving and receiving of gifts.

As far as I can tell, being honest with ourselves requires us to confess that we now live in a world where it is impossible to recognize any infallible, completely trustworthy authorities.  Or, even if we grant the existence of any such authority (as I actually do), we must confess that we have no unmediated access to that authority.  What access we have is always mediated by that which is inevitably fallible and not completely trustworthy.  Thus, we are all in the same boat, whether or not we affirm the existence of any infallible, completely trustworthy authorities.
So, for example, although I believe in a God who is, in my opinion, infallible and trustworthy (I’m willing to give God the benefit of the doubt!), I can never claim direct access to God, or knowledge of God, or God’s will, or whatever else.  Access to God is always, in some way, mediated.  Thus, things like Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience all function as mediators — but neither Scripture, nor tradition, nor reason, nor experience is completely infallible or completely trustworthy.
Let us explore this point.
Although Scripture functions as an authority for Christians, it cannot be treated in an overly simplistic or naive manner.  Sometimes Scripture is inscrutable, sometimes it is contradictory, and sometimes it’s a crap shoot as to how we are to relate to the two or four thousand year old events contained therein.  Besides, God didn’t write Scripture — people, with all of their foibles and limitations did, and no matter how fancy your exegetical footwork (Scripture in its original [but now lost] form was perfect, God actually dictated the original [but now lost] biblical texts to the authors verbatim, etc.) the point remains that, Scripture as we know it, cannot be treated as infallible.  This does not mean we must then go on to refuse to recognize Scripture as an authority.  Far from it, Christians can recognize Scripture as an authority — but it is an authority we must engage critically.
I think that the complexities involved in both understanding and applying Scripture are becoming increasingly obvious, even to those who have tried to remain rooted within premodern views of Scripture.  This, in my opinion, partially explains why Evangelicals who previously had fairly loose ecclesiologies and little regard for Church history are now becoming increasingly fascinated with Roman Catholicism and the Christian Tradition (just note all of the contemporary Evangelicals who have taken to calling themselves ‘Augustinian’!).  Thus, for various Christians, Tradition (capitalized and in the singular) is treated as an infallible and completely trustworthy authority.  However, it is worth questioning if this is really the case.  When we ask this question, it quickly becomes apparent that it is difficult to see how this could be true.  First of all, an honest look at Christian history requires us to note that there is no single authoritative ‘Tradition’; rather, there are many different, often competing and contradictory, traditions.  Consequently, any who propose a single authoritative ‘Tradition’ are engaging in a highly selective reading of history that ends up being (intentionally or not) rather dishonest.
However, the case could be made that, despite differences, there are some elements of Christianity that appear consistently throughout history.  Therefore, one might wish to argue that these elements are the part of the Christian traditions that is authoritative and infallible.  However, this cannot be the case as, for example, the oppressive use of power (in order to abuse, marginalize and oppress women, children, people with disabilities, and other minority populations) is a fairly consistent thread running through many Christian traditions over the last two thousand years.   We cannot simply appeal to majority views, as majorities (yes, even majorities within the Church, and over the course of Church history) are often mistaken.  Futhermore, the Bible itself teaches us that the majority of those who call themselves ‘the people of God’ have often lost their way.  Thus, there are constantly minority movements arising to correct the majority (for example, schools of prophets in the Old Testament and the Jesus Movement in the New Testament).
However, this does not mean that majorities are always wrong and that minorities are always right.  Indeed, I believe that the Spirit of God can move in such a way that a majority of people can — independently of one another — come to the same appropriate conclusion for any given situation.  It also doesn’t mean that minorities are always right.  Often minorities fracture off of groups and spiral into self- and other-destructive behavior.
Therefore, we are once again required to critically engage with the Christian traditions.  What we cannot do is simply accept ‘Tradition’ as a single, infallible, completely trustworthy source.
This then leaves us with reason and experience.  But neither of these can be treated as infallible, completely trustworthy authorities.
Reason, in my opinion, is the least trustworthy of all.  More than any of the other authorities mentioned here, ‘reason’ is an almost entirely amorphous cultural construct.  Simply stated, what is ‘reasonable’ is only reasonable to particular people, at a particular place, during a particular moment in history.  At different places, in different moments of history, it was completely reasonable to think of the earth as flat, as created in seven days, or as existing on the back of a turtle.  Nowadays, many people consider this sort of thinking unreasonable and find it reasonable to think of the earth as round, as coming into being over a very long amount of time, and as existing in time/space (which it is now reasonable to think of as a single ‘thing’).
Of course, by highlighting this I am not suggesting that we abandon reason as an authority.  To do so would be next to impossible, given that all of us are culturally-conditioned people, and will remain culturally-conditioned, in one way or another, regardless of our best efforts.  ‘Reason’ ends up being an authority, whether we like it or not.  However, this line of thought does require us to critically engage reason (which, by the way, is what Wittgenstein does when he encourages us to talk non-sense).
We are then left with experience which, in my opinion, actually exists in something of a privileged place, especially when it comes to how we relate to God as an authority.  After all, one may read about the God of the Scriptures, one may learn about the God revealed in the Christian traditions, and one may come to some positive conclusions about God based upon reason, but if one has no experience of God, then all of that reading, learning, and thinking, will likely be for naught.  So, by saying experience exists in a ‘privileged place’ I am not saying that it is more authoritative than these other sources; rather, I am saying that it needs to be recognized as authoritative (at least in some way) before any of the other sources can be meaningfully engaged as authoritative.
However, just as with the other authorities mentioned above, experience cannot be treated as an infallible, completely trustworthy authority.  No matter how dramatic (or traumatic!) our experiences of God, we must critically engage every experience.  What if we are mistaking something for God that is not God?  What if we are being emotionally manipulated by our environment?  What if we are mentally ill (I’ve worked with many schizophrenic people who refused to take their medication because ‘God stopped talking’ when they were on the medication — but refusing to take the medication also led these people to be trapped in cycles of poverty, homelessness and violence)?  What if we are just using ‘God’s still small voice’ to justify our preconceived notions or to allow us to indulge in harmful or selfish desires?  And so on and so forth.  Thus, although experience is an authority, it cannot be considered infallible.
Consequently, we remain stuck in the state I described at the opening of this post.  We must confess that we no longer have any infallible authorities, and even if God is recognized as just that kind of authoritiy, we must confess that we have no infallible, unmediated access to God.
What then is the result of this?  The loss of certitude.  An honest confrontation with our situation requires us to confess that we can no longer be certain… about anything.  Maybe we are eisegeting the Scriptures.  Maybe we are highlighting the wrong parts of the Christian traditions.  Maybe our reason is fatally flawed.  Maybe we have misunderstood ourselves and our experiences.  Maybe that which we have taken to be God, is not God at all.  We must confess that any and all of the above is possible.
So we must abandon certainty, and we must flee from anyone who promises us certitude lest we become lured into false comforts and a world of illusions.
This, I think, is what it means for a person to ‘walk humbly with God’ (cf. Mic 6.8).  Walking humbly with God means confessing that, hey, maybe we’ve got it all wrong.  Maybe, instead of being part of the solution, we’re part of the problem.  Maybe we’re just making one giant mess of everything.  So we pray: ‘Lord, have mercy’.
Finally, I have recently come to the conclusion that this movement into uncertainty is actually an expression of one’s maturation in one’s faith.  This goes against what I was led to believe about faith when I was growing up.  When I was younger, I though that uncertainty was a sign of ‘spiritual immaturity’ and that ‘spiritual maturity’ would be expressed in an increasing sense of certainty.  Indeed, I think many Christians were led to believe that this is how ‘spiritual maturity’ is expressed.  I no longer believe this.  I now believe that it takes a great deal of maturity to confess that one is uncertain (about everything), and the reason why we have difficulty confessing this is because we remain in places of immaturity.  This, at least, has been my own (neither infallible nor completely trustworthy!) experience: the more deeply rooted I have become in my faith, the more I have been able to abandon certitude in order to walk humbly with God — and with my neighbours as we, together, strive to do justice and love mercy (Mic 6.8, again).

Recently, I’ve become increasingly fascinated with the theories and trajectories that are being expressed in contemporary physics.  Now granted, I don’t understand much of the math and notation involved, but what I am able to grasp of astrophysics, quantem mechanics, Einstein’s reflections on space/time, and so on, is absolutely mind-blowing.
However, one of the things that has struck me as I have been digging into all of this is just how much science in general, and physics in particular, are misrepresented at the popular level.  At the popular level, science is presented as though it is based upon universal laws, empirical evidence, irrefutable conclusions, and concrete ‘facts’.  Often, this is then contrasted with religious faith, which is said to be counter-intuitive, counter-empirical, and insubstantial (or unsustainable).  Science, in other words, is said to be entirely sensible, while faith is said to be entirely nonsensical.
In response to this charge many Christians, have engaged in a form of apologetics that has tried to demonstrate that faith is also a sensible enterprise based upon certain laws, proofs, empirical evidence, and other facts.  Now, I’m not convinced that any apologist of this type has actually converted his or her opposition, but I think that these apologists have probably at least convinced a few people in the public that, at the very least, people of faith aren’t complete morons.  I guess that’s something.
A more encouraging response (to me at least), is that taken by those who argue that many of these apologetic Christian approaches have allowed themselves to be dominated by the limitations and paradigms of ‘modern science’ (by that I mean science as it developed from the Enlightenment until the start of the 20th century).  As a result of this many contemporary (or ‘postmodern’ if you prefer that term) Christians now feel like apologetics that persist in that paradigm are still reflecting a type of Christianity that was overly conditioned by a particular culture and moment in history (‘modernity’).  And so, in many ways, contemporary Christianity has moved beyond this apologetic engagement with the laws, proofs, methods, and conclusions of modern science.  Instead, they have tried to make Christianity credible by living more Christianly.  I reckon this is a good step to take.
However, just as significantly, contemporary (or ‘postmodern’) science has also moved beyond the culturally conditioned reason, method, and certitude expressed within the science of modernity.  At the moment, contemporary physics requires us to move beyond certitude, beyond laws, beyond empiricism (even, in a way, beyond logic) in order to grasp the workings of the universe.  For example, the rules and conclusions of astrophysics (which works with bodies with large amounts of mass) cannot be applied in the realm of quantem mechanics (which works with bodies with tiny amounts of mass), and vice versa.  These two areas of science cannot be brought together into a single system without contradicting each other, yet each in isolation seems to provide workable conclusions for their own areas of study.  So much for universal truths or the law of non-contradiction.  Or, to take a second example, in astrophysics it seems as though a vast amount of ‘dark matter’ is required to exist so that we can explain the movement of galaxies (amongst other things).  However, the existence of ‘dark matter’ is taken on faith — we cannot (yet) prove its existence… but we can’t explain things without it.  Similarly, quantem mechanics now requires us to speak of ‘probabilities’ and not ‘laws’, while also leading us to think that there maybe be a good deal many more dimensions (11+?) than we first imagined.  Or, to provide a fourth example, Einstein’s theories require us to think of space and time as a single unit — space/time — thereby collapsing what empirically (and logically?) strike us as two distinct ‘things’.  And on and on it goes.  Examples like these could be multplied almost endlessly (string theory, anybody?).
Therefore, if many Christian apologists get it wrong because they still continue to think of Christianity in the terms established by a culturally-conditioned moment in Western history, many of those now classified as the ‘New Atheists’ get science wrong for precisely the same reason!  Oddly enough then, members of both of these opposing parties are (perhaps unwittingly) simply longing for the world (or, um, the West) as was 150 or so years ago.  Many Christian apologists seem to want to get back to a time when Christianity was in a more dominant position in our society, and many ‘New Atheists’ seem to want to get back to a time when science claimed to possess certitude.
However, probably for the best, that world has come and gone.  So now, when we listen to this or that ‘New Atheist’ debate this or that Christian apologist, we can consider ourselves lucky to witness a reenactment of what it might have been like to discuss these matters if we lived 150 years ago.  It is almost as if we get the chance to witness two dinosaurs who, unaware that they have become extinct, are putting on a spectacular show fighting each other.

Sometimes I wonder if those who barricade themselves within certain interpretations of ‘Traditional’ or ‘Orthodox’ or ‘Conservative Evangelical’ Christianity are actually doing so because they are desperate to believe in God… but have never actually tangibly experienced God-as-Event (in Badiou’s sense of the word ‘Event’).  When ‘Tradition’ is all that you have of God, then it is no wonder that challenges to ‘Tradition’ (or how that ‘Tradition’ is narrated and interpreted by this contingent) appear to be so threatening.
I sometimes wonder this, not because I think that these so-called ‘orthodox’ Christians are more closed to God than the rest of us, but because I spent 7 summers working with teens and young adults who came from Conservative Evangelical families.  During those 7 summers, I discovered that, although Conservative Evangelical kids are taught to speak of having a ‘personal relationship with God’ almost all of them have never actually encountered God in any meaningful, transformative or concrete way.  I remember when I first awakened to the observation that I was actually an oddity for believing I had actually had such experiences and this so surprised me that my first thought was: “Well, why the heck are you guys Christians then??”
Not surprisingly, it turned out that many of these people only identified as Christians because their parents had trained them to do so.  Consequently, when they moved on to independence and to other environments, their Christian faith (sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually) disappeared.
However, others could not face the trauma of walking away from their faith and so, in the absence of a lived encounter with God, went on to immerse themselves in apologetics, and the history and doctrines of various (in this case, Reformed or Evangelical) Christian denominations.
Several of these people have ended up within the walls of the Christian Academy.  Consequently, it does not surprise me that Christian academics often end up speaking condescendingly of those who talk of having a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus or, to provide another example, those who speak of the notion of exploring ‘God as a lover’.  Thus, those who have never experienced God-as-Event end up building theological systems that downplay the significance of one’s personal encounter with God (i.e. one’s personal experiences are not to be trusted or treated as any sort of authority), and end up overemphasizing the history of Christian doctrine (although it should be noted that this narration of history is almost always fraught with value judgments and acts of exclusion in order to end up confirming previously established views).
However, those who have encountered God-as-Event cannot view this (fictional!) Tradition with the same urgency or authority.  Granted, the various streams of Christianity, and the multiple traditions that trace their way throughout the last two thousand years, are an important witness to the activity of the Word of God in history… but one has now been freed from the need to desperately cling to one particular ideological interpretation of that history — in fact, one can even more critically engage with these things because, after the Event, one’s faith in God will remain regardless of what one discovers in the traditions or in Christianity’s many orthodoxies.
Thankfully, this at least was the experience of a minority of the people with whom I worked for those 7 summers.  Awakening to the realization that God could be known as Event, these few were lucky enough to look for that experience, and to be found by it.  Would that we were all so fortunate!

Mel, Charles and I are back from our travels and getting settled in, once again, to life in Vancouver.  That means I can now return to my ongoing book giveaways (which I’ve initiated as one way of celebrating the birth of wee Charlie).  Just to remind everybody of how this works — if you want the books listed below (and you have to want all of them) just leave a comment and I will put your name in a random draw.  If I draw your name, I will mail the books to you, free of charge.  Simple, right?  Here are the books up for grabs this time:
1. Joyful Exiles: Life in Christ on the Dangerous Edge of Things by James M. Houston.
2. The God I Don’t Understand: Reflections on the Tough Questions of Faith by Christopher J. H. Wright.
3. Can God Be Trusted? Faith and the Challenge of Evil by John G. Stackhouse Jr.
4. Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
5. Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve by Lewis B. Smedes.
6. A Tale of Three Kings: A Study in Brokenness by Gene Edwards.