Life in the flesh is false life, life that has missed its way, life that cannot live and leads to death. Life in the Spirit is the very opposite. It is true life, life springing up from its divine source, life that leads to resurrection. This gives particular emphasis to the sphere of the flesh as the sphere of sinning, and the sphere too of death because of sin. It is not a question of an ontologically lower rung on the ladder of being, compared with the higher rung of soul or spirit. What is meant is sin and death as a field of force into which the whole person has entered, body and soul, together with (his) whole social world…Here ‘flesh’ is a total statement about human beings, and must not be restricted to their physical nature. The sin which misses the mark of life is not centered in sensuality, the drives, or so-called lower instincts. Its center is the whole person, and especially that person’s soul or heart, the center of (his) consciousness, or of his will if he is possessed by the death instinct…

When Paul sees ‘flesh,’ ‘sin’ and ‘death’ as supra-personal forces which enslave people, destroy their world, and make the whole creation beyond the world of human beings ‘groan,’ this is not a matter of unenlightened mythology. It is apocalyptic realism. The greater the hope, the more profound the exposure of misery.

 

Here’s something Christians tend to ‘language’ incorrectly: when faced with a difficult choice, or the consequences of a bad decision or an unfortunate event, you tend to hear people separate out their own identity, like an attempt to throw on a sin hazmat suit. (It’s not me! It wasn’t my fault!) Or, people will say, in effect, that their bodies got the best of them, as if “they” are some separate entity fighting for the upper hand in their own bodies. Personally, I find all of this language unhelpful. I much prefer envisioning our actions as fields of force, moving either toward life or toward death. These are not totalizing declarations about your personhood; they just honestly describe the fact that when you do something, ALL of you does it. Your body didn’t somehow put a fast one over you, like it’s working for another team. The body is not a lower form, or even a separate form, of identity. Paul was not attempting to separate us into warring chambers of soul and body. Moltmann argues that Paul intended to describe the difference between two ways of life. It’s a far better use of energy to think about which way you’re following at any given moment, rather than deflecting all failures to some strange, dualistic notion of your rebellious flesh.

And, since I’ve had zombies on the brain, it can’t go unmentioned that the phrase “death instinct” certainly lends itself to imagine all the ways the zombie is a projection of our own self-destructive tendencies. Who doesn’t fear the human monster who wants only our own destruction? As I said at church, this, coupled with their existential emptiness of purpose, is the reason why it’s so appealing to grab a skillet and knock their heads off. It’s rejection of purposelessness and self-destruction writ large.  (Does that count as a “profound exposure of misery?!”)

So Journey is doing a series on zombies, and I wanted to expand some ideas I mentioned on last Sunday’s first conversation. (If you’re completely baffled about why in the world we’re talking about zombies, read my post about it at Patheos.)

It’s quite surprising how many philosophical books, articles and papers have been written in relation to the zombie genre. I found this fantastic little quote from Zombies, Vampires and Philosophy most intriguing:

Whereas the vampire embodies a form of Nietzchean super-humanity, beyond good and evil, the zombie goes even further beyond…The zombie is sub-Nietzchean, sub-animal, really: as K. Silem Mohammad suggests it is a Spinozan force of decomposition, a completely non-moral and completely liberated interaction of matter with other matter.”

This made a whole host of things clear to me in one fell swoop.  First, about vampires:  In the vampire genre, you are almost always dealing with questions and issues of sex. (Does this now explain why vampires are so popular with teens?!) Whether certain sources deal with those issues with any sense of aplomb, I’ll leave to your own judgment and withhold my own. But vampires are enticing because they are superhuman. They are fast, and strong, and immortal, and extremely intelligent. I was having coffee with one of my favorite teenagers and he was telling me about his latest girl troubles. He said something like, “It was all going fine until she started comparing me to Edward Cullen. Then I thought, ‘I can’t take this kind of pressure!’ and I broke it off.”  Poor teen guys of today- they have to compete with Nietzchean superhumans.

Anyway, onto zombies.  In the zombie genre, you are almost always dealing with questions and issues of death. And inside death, of course, there are a host of other questions- identity, purpose, etc.- which is why there seem to be endless philosophical angles at which to approach it.

I was specifically struck by the phrase “a Spinozan force of decomposition.” The 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza has a theory called composition vs. decomposition in which he posits that when someone or something encounters another someone or something, there are two basic outcomes. Either they come together to form a more powerful whole (composition), or one of the elements dominates the interaction and decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. When seen in zombie theology terms, this makes absolute sense. (And it also, as an added bonus, gives you a great mental picture to understand Spinoza’s theory.)

Zombies are the purest possible example of Spinozan decomposition. You touch a zombie, you begin to erode. The resurrected Christ, on the other hand,  is the purest example of Spinozan composition. You encounter him, and you begin to live.

To put it even more plainly, despair is an act of decomposition, while hope is an act of composition (and recomposition, and recomposition).

When we set up the “spectrum” of humanity for the purposes of our conversation Sunday, we put zombie-hood at one end, “normal” humanity in the middle, and resurrected humanity at the other end. This is of course just to help us talk through the idea, but what I meant to communicate is that whatever zombies are, they are human minus. They are missing something- call it spirit, or soul, or life, or rational thinking. Whatever it is, they are disembodied bodies.  They are isolated matter. In the same way, the resurrected Christ is human plus. The stories of post-resurrection sightings tell us things like “He ate a piece of fish!” and “I touched his scars!” and “He just walked through the wall!” and “He just rose up into the air.” Whatever else these stories mean to tell us, they are trying to say that he is both as he was (physical, with a working stomach) and yet more than what he was (whatever it is you call that other crazy stuff).

To put this theologically, at Easter, what came together in the person of Jesus was a more powerful whole; not simply a human made alive again, but a human who became something entirely new: a resurrected human. Resurrection is the most robust composition possible, the most powerful whole. Easter is the event in which we witness the best and most extreme example of Spinozan composition: when the life of Christ came together with the force of death, what arose was not decomposition but resurrection, an entity that makes both death and life something more than it was previously.

*a brief note about the photograph above: it came from an Austin, TX news article about some pranksters who figured out how to hack into electronic road signs and change the messages. Since Austin/UT is where Zombieland’s Columbus hails, I think the prank is only fitting.

Happy Monday, all.  Today’s Moltmann minute comes from Sun of Righteousness, Arise! p.67:

The Catholic liturgy for Easter Eve enjoins the reading of the first creation narrative, Genesis 1. That is a wonderful sign:  the world begins with a ‘resurrection.’ It is called out of the darkness of chaos into the light of the living cosmos. Thus on the very first day of creation–in the midst of the old creation–the work of the new creation flashes up. In this way creation acquires an eschatological character from the beginning, for in this way it can be seen as a great ‘promise’ on God’s part. With this, its future in the kingdom of God is created. All created things are true promises of their completion. Creation out of chaos is like a resurrection, and the resurrection from the power of death is like a new creation. The God who makes the dead live is the same God who calls into existence the things that do not exist. The God who has raised Jesus from teh dead is the creator of the new being of everything created. Resurrection and creation belong together, for the raising of the dead and the annihilation of death are viewed–and rightly so–not only as surmounting the consequences of the Fall, but also as the comsummation of creation-in-the-beginning. In both resurrection and creation the negative is negated and the positive perfected.

 

I appreciate how Moltmann links creation to resurrection. We often hold them so far apart, and in so doing resurrection becomes something of a necessary house-cleaning to the fall of creation gone awry.  I hate to see resurrection limited to that, or relegated to mere clean-up. To see creation ex nihilo, out of nothingness, as God’s first act of resurrection, provides a much richer paradigm for understanding both events.  As Moltmann explains, joining them together in this way makes resurrection not just clean-up crew, but more importantly a fulfillment of a promise given in the very beginning, a fulfillment laying dormant in creation itself.  That promise is beautifully described by imagining the negative being negated and the positive perfected.  Isn’t that a fantastic line for understanding the coming future of God?  That Moltmann. Zingers under his sleeve at all times.

When we talk about Christ’s resurrection from the dead we are not talking about a fact. We are talking about a process. We are talking in one and the same breath about the foundation, the future, and the practical exercise of God’s liberation of men and women, and his redemption of the world. So what we can know historically about Christ’s resurrection must not be abstracted from the question of what we can hope from it, and what we have to do in its name.”

 

One of the (many) problems with modern theology is that it tends to get tied up in factual questions, spending all energy proving or disproving something while overlooking the reason why the event means something in the first place.  I have no problem discussing my view of the factual reality of the resurrection (it happened–really and truly) but I do think Moltmann puts us on the right path by talking not about fact but about process.  What God put into play that Easter morning was a story of redemption that went further than we had imagined before. It brings hope to the past, present and future of history.  As communities of faith gather around Eastertide stories of Jesus showing himself to the disciples, we can get off track and talk about what kind of body he had, or we can talk about what we can hope from the story of Christ’s resurrected body, and what we are now called to do in response.  Seems to me a much more interesting and productive question.

Happy Easter, everyone!  Ah, how I missed my German friend!  And what better way to celebrate than to share some of his words on the resurrection from The Way of Jesus Christ:

Seeing history in the perspective of resurrection means participating through the Spirit in the process of resurrection.  Belief in resurrection is not summed up by assent to a dogma and the registering of an historical fact.  It means participating in the creative act of God.  A faith of this kind is the beginning of freedom.  If God reveals himself in the raising of the Christ crucified in helplessness, then God is not the quintessence of power, such as the Roman Caesars represented. Nor is he the quintessence of law, such as the Greek cosmos reflects. God is then the power that quickens into life, that makes the poor rich, that lifes up the humble and raises the dead. Faith in the resurrection is itself a living force which raises people up and frees them from the deadly illusions of power and possession, because their eyes are now turned towards the future of life.

I love Moltmann’s elegantly simple description of how the  resurrection speaks of  a very certain kind of power, one that in its very nature stands over and against other, lesser forms of power (might, law, possession, etc.).  I also am very fond of the definition of resurrection as a process, a creative act of God, a quickening into life.  I envision resurrection as a turning away from one direction of seeing life down a narrow and closed path and toward an entirely new and open direction where the future of life extends brightly ahead of you.  The process of resurrection is the act of looking up and out, ahead and beyond.  I think this is what Wendell Berry means when he urges us to practice resurrection.

It is necessary to reflect theologically on the mission of the community and every individual Christian, and on the congregation’s order and special ministry for before anyone actually speaks and acts in the church or in its name, the church has already spoken and acted through its very existence, its visible organization and its public functions. The form of its fellowship and public functions, and the shape of its order and its ministries, are not merely externals and inessentials; they are no less important than the word and the sacraments. The church’s institutions and its traditional congregational forms can become a stumbling block for many people, even if–and especially if–they do not thereby make the things of Christianity itself a stumbling block. People demand the ‘witness of existence’– and rightly so. Through its order, its ministries and its organizations the church either confesses or denies the thing that it has to represent. So it cannot leave its visible form to the power of the state or the requirements of its particular social order, if it wants to be recognizable as the church of Christ as as the people of the coming kingdom. It is of course true that every historical form the church takes also bears the stamp of its particular environment. But that is not a reason for accepting that stamp passively and for leaving it to external influences. As the church of Christ, the congregation with all its own powers has to realize the social, political and cultural potentialities of a particular period in a way that is in accordance with the cause it maintains; so that through its physical and public profile as well people will be confronted with the freedom of Christ and will be invited to the messianic kingdom.

- p.290

When as a seminary student I read the sentence I put in bold above, I felt bowled over by all its implications for the Church today.  I felt at the time, and I still do to a large degree, that the current forms and ministries of the Church more accurately confess particularly American markers- extreme individualism, a corporate definition of success, a monetized form of popularity, and a charity-cloaked form of selfishness.   I say this not to berate (or at least, not entirely) but to stand in front of the mirror that is the American church landscape and allow it to reflect honestly back.  Regardless of whether some of these assumptions or conclusions are false or oversimplifying, they have become part of our “image” and they are, therefore, our concern.  For our task, as Moltmann reminds us, is to reconcile all the potentialities of our particular period in a way that manages to live in accordance with the cause of the messianic kingdom.  If our image is reflecting otherwise, we have work to do.

As a pastor, that one sentence is enough to keep me up at night.  Through Journey’s structure and gatherings and events and small groups, we are either going to confess or deny the very thing we seek to represent.  And I’m certain there are plenty of places where we’re denying it, despite our deepest intentions to the contrary.  This is where our only recourse is to pray for boldness enough to face the mirror, to have a posture that allows you to acknowledge your own reflection, and to have the guts to change what needs changing.

For the last 200 years Western industrial society (and now modern society in general) has experienced one thrust towards individualization after another. The last of them bears the name ‘postmodern’. The opportunities for choice open to individualized men and women are enormously increased, and anyone who has the means can also take advantage of these opportunities. But this power is paralleled by the growing powerlessness of the individualized people, who can certainly look on at events and the world through the media, but can do nothing to change them. An individual is not a person, but–as the Latin word individuum says–something that in the final analysis is indivisible; it means the same as the Greek word ‘atom.’ As the end-product of divisions, the individual has no relationships, no attributes, no memories and no names. The individual is unutterable. A person, unlike an individual, is a human existence living in the resonant field of his social connections and his history. He has a name, with which he can identify himself. A person is a social being. The modern thrusts toward individualization in society promps the suspicion that a modern individual is the product of that age-old Roman principle of dominance: divide et impera- divide and rule. Individualized people can easily  be dominated by political and economic forces. There is only resistance for the purpose of protecting personal human dignity if people join together in communities and decide their lives socially for themselves.

These few pointers may suffice to show the public relevance of the trinitarian concept of God for the liberation of individualized men and women, and the relevance of the trinitarian experience of community for the development of a new sociality.

- Experiences in Theology, p.333

Anyone who gets involved with Jesus gets involved with the Kingdom of God. This is an inescapable fact, for Jesus’ own concern was, and is, God’s kingdom. Anyone who looks for God and asks about the kingdom in which ‘righteousness and peace kiss one another (Ps. 85:10) should look at Jesus and enter into the things that happened in his presence and that still happen today in his Spirit. That is obviously and palpably true; for who is Jesus: Simply the kingdom of God in person.

The two belong inseparably together: Jesus and the kingdom of God–the kingdom of God and Jesus. Jesus brings God’s kingdom to us human beings in his own unique way, and guides us into the breadth and beauty of the kingdom. And God’s kingdom makes Jesus the Christ, the savior and deliverer for us all. So if we want to learn what that mysterious ‘kingdom of God’ really is, we have to look at Jesus. And if we want to understand who Jesus really is, we have to experience the kingdom of God.

-Jesus Christ for Today’s World, p.7

Most of us are familiar with the concept of Jesus being the Word incarnate, as the Gospel of John tells us.  He is the word made flesh, the words of the prophets and the judges and the kings fully realized in human form.  ”And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).  I love that Moltmann expands this idea to its theo/logical conclusion.  Jesus is not only the Word made flesh, but is also, simply, the kingdom of God in person.  In this one person, we see the fullness of God’s realm.  And from his kingdom fullness, we have received “grace upon grace.”

There’s always a lot of debate about the kingdom in theological circles–what it is, where it is, how it is, and perhaps most ardently, what we should call it–and perhaps this is why I’m so drawn to the elegant simplicity of Moltmann’s words.  All of those things are worth discussing (and of course M himself does so at more length in other places) but it’s very helpful to start by reminding ourselves that this idea is not some abstract strange possibility looming in the universe.  It has come to us through the person of Jesus, who definitively showed us what it is, where it is, and how it is.  If we want to get anywhere at all in our discussions about the mysterious kingdom, we have to look at Jesus.

“Reflection on embodiment as a central Christian topic prompts mistrust of a Western Augustinian theology which begins with the fall instead of creation and the pleasure which God took in this creation.  It does not see sin as a general fate which is suffered as a matter of principle, and which for many theological traditions is still rooted in sinful human flesh, in the structure of its drives.  It does not fail to recognize the potential for destruction in human beings, but sees this far more strongly as the problem of a lack of relationship, beginning in an earlier phase of life, a lack of relationship between human beings, between human beings and animals, between human beings and their environment.  Sin must be made clear and identified in particular, different conflicts.

A theology of embodiment mistrusts all abstract spirituality which is dissociated from the body, life, earth and social relationships.  It trusts all embodiment which speaks from a concrete, involved spirit.”

This is one of the most succinct and clear descriptions of why I have a problem with the doctrine of original sin.  It negates the power of God’s goodness in the creation accounts by assuming that a bite of fruit can somehow override all that goodness and impose upon the image of God an indelible blemish that gets passed down forever.   I don’t care what theological gymnastics someone tries to do to counter that conclusion.  Original sin devalues God’s declaration that creation is good.  Secondly, it places sin inside our own bodies, which can lead to all kinds of unhealthy responses and rebellions and misunderstandings and miserableness, rather than seeing sin as something that arises in the context of our relationship with others and with the world.  This is no small distinction.  If we are the faith that is founded upon an embodied God, any doctrine that pulls us away from our bodies or keeps us from relating to our bodies in a way that is life-giving is BAD. NEWS.  As Moltmann-Wendel says, none of this is to say that sin isn’t real, or true, or consistently present among us.  It is to say that if we care about facing sin honestly, it’s far better to do so in the context of “particular, different conflicts” than some blanket wish-washy statement about some hidden blemish we all have.  Thirdly, original sin has the characteristic of being dissociated and abstract, two things no good theology should ever have said about it.  Talking about sin is of critical importance, which is why we shouldn’t be sloppy about the way we talk about it.

However, I have been positively stewing over the foreword, written by John Bowden, for days now.  I know nothing of Boden other than what I learned through Google; he is an Anglican priest, the former Editor and Managing Director for SCM Press, and has translated many books, including this one, from German into English.  What I can definitely tell you is how I feel about what he wrote in his foreword.

Bowden described how he can’t help but compare his experience at this symposium with his first trip to Germany nearly 30 years prior, where as a publisher he met with Rudolf Bultmann, Gerhard von Rad, Hans Conzelmann, Ernst Kasemann, and other well-known biblical scholars and theologians.  He made two observations about what he has seen that has changed.  First, the symposium’s theologians were far more personal in their work, using stories from their lives and describing how theology intersected with their own senses of identity.  He said this kind of personal rapport between the speakers and the audience would have been “unimaginable” in relation to the first group.  He said this with a benign sort of interest, but I got the feeling that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it.   I find it to be a step in a hugely positive direction, because in my estimation the single worst element in biblical studies or theology is lack of spirit, or presence, or vitality.  Every reader knows it when a scholar is approaching the text like a surgeon rather than a friend.  Personally, I have a hard time giving weight to arguments of people who seem so apparently bored and disdained by what they are studying.  (I realize there are generational cultural factors involved here; my point is that I see the prevalence of “deeply personal accounts” in theological studies as a good thing, and not a bad one.)

Secondly, he bemoaned what he called “the retreat from biblical criticism.”  He said, “This absence of the critical method still troubles me.”  Certainly, compared to Gerhard von Rad and Rudolf Bultmann, everyone has left the building of biblical criticism entirely.  I don’t personally lose ANY sleep over this.  This is a classic example of academic modernity assuming that other forms of academic inquiry are somehow less intellectual, informed, or important.  I run into this assumption more often than I’d like, but that still isn’t what infuriated me most.

The zinger came in the very last line:  ”Will a future generation see again the like of those appearing here?”

Look, we all know I think Moltmann is one of the most fantastic people walking the planet.  (Because he IS.)  And I don’t expect there will be anyone else like him.  However, it irritates me to no end when I hear people in academic theological circles bemoan the end of all the great thinkers of our time.  Did people not think the early church fathers were the best thinkers we’d ever have, and that Aquinas was the last great theologian, or Calvin, or Barth?  And were any of them right?  (Well, no doubt some of you would argue yes.)  My point is:  The mere assumption that just because systematic theology may be dead (dear God, please) and that disinterested, from-a-distance biblical studies may be dead (oh Lord I hope so), we are resigned to some  horrible fate of a future with endlessly bad ideas and small thinkers…well, that’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.

When has the world ever been that stagnant?  When has the Spirit ever been THAT uninspiring?

John Bowden may be right that we will not have some huge symposium in Tubingen in 50 years to celebrate the next generation of (German) theologians.  But that is because, in my estimation, theology has now gone viral, and has extended beyond the confines of the ivory towers of our seminaries, and is now being done, thoughtfully and creatively, by a whole slew of people that will for the most part remain unknown.   When I look into the future, I still see some academic scholars and theologians doing creative work.  But I also see moms, artists, authors, church planters, new monastics, justice-driven entrepeneurs, bookstore owners, nonprofit workers, public service officials, and a lot of other everyday people who are doing the most important work of theology there is:  living a well-intentioned and thoughtful life.