Well...Shannon (of Erosophy) said i should move to wordpress. Her words 'its sexier'. This, of course, is a great way to make me NOT move. I mean, 'sexy', is the buzz word of teh sonsumer culture. To use that as my justification is to opt in to a system that uses its marketing notions to create zones of 'approved' and 'not approved'.
But, i do want to be sexy.
So...http://theopoetics.wordpress.com/?p=21&preview=true
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Laity as Theological Calling
In conclusion, theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have been repeatedly congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the church. (Karl Barth, God in Action, Round Table Press, 1963, pp. 56-57)
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
I found this today at Emerget Voyagour (sp?)
http://emergentvoyageurs.blog.com/616685/
"Stanley Hopper's solution for our sense of mythic vertigo is a new appreciation for the role of imagination. He recommends that we replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self. This is a theology for a period highly influenced by technology and by psychoanalysis.
"If we could make this shift, which is being forced on us by our very success in science and other areas of knowledge, we might find a more solid security, one that is not easily disturbed by the findings of science or the shifting of mores. We would realize that our conceptions about the nature of things are always provisional and therefore may best be served by a poetic sensibility that looks deep into experience. Our sense of the religious life might be less external, less factual, and less rationalistic."
http://emergentvoyageurs.blog.com/616685/
"Stanley Hopper's solution for our sense of mythic vertigo is a new appreciation for the role of imagination. He recommends that we replace theology, the rationalistic interpretation of belief, with theopoetics, finding God through poetry and fiction, which neither wither before modern science nor conflict with the complexity of what we know now to be the self. This is a theology for a period highly influenced by technology and by psychoanalysis.
"If we could make this shift, which is being forced on us by our very success in science and other areas of knowledge, we might find a more solid security, one that is not easily disturbed by the findings of science or the shifting of mores. We would realize that our conceptions about the nature of things are always provisional and therefore may best be served by a poetic sensibility that looks deep into experience. Our sense of the religious life might be less external, less factual, and less rationalistic."
Theopoetic Passion
Thoughts:
I've been reading 'Love and Good Reasons: A post-liberal approach to literature and ethics' and 'Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Biblomainia'.
'Love and Good Reasons' is approaching literature as a means of studying Ethics and Christian Ethics in particular. While I often disagree with his notion of what it means to be a 'Christian Ethic' - and hes drawing very strongly off of Stanley Hauerwas - I do agree with his approach to literature as ethical/philosophical study.
The failure of Philosophy - and much of academia - is the false attempt to create theory and ideas that are divorced from human passions. Language and idea is constructed in such a manner as to de-value the emotional life of the reader and the way in which language, image and idea evoke passion! In deed as any passionate reader will tell you many of the ways in which we know and think are in the passions that story, metaphor and narrative stir up in us.
Likewise Theories of Reading addresses the way in which the devalued reader has been exited from consideration all together. From here we can easily see the dangers of what Wendell Berry refers to as the specialization of poetry. The further the reading and writing of poetry becomes the specialized domain of a few - and the longer society allows it to exist as pretty language done by moody teenagers and over-achieving academics the longer we are able to insist that the words we say and the story's we tell have no import.
We cannot, then, evaluate the way in which Henry James sought to function as a ethicist. His work, and those who comment on it, are separated away into a specialized field. But if its true that culture is shaped and formed by stories then we have an obligation to allow story, metaphor and language to exist as discourses whos job it is to engage us in the wider realities we live in.
Scott Holland calls theology the poetry of the laity. Wendell Berry say poetry is never truly concerned with eternity but with the here and now. To insist that poetry is specialized and only a 'pleasurable exercise' instead of an 'intellectual discourse' is to say that the laity - the common people - have no ideas worth exploring.
The danger of the specialization of poetry mimics also the danger of the specialization of theology/church (see 'Theopoetic as Way Forward' for a further exploration).
But the implication is important to note: we insist on a separation of story and thought, poetry and audience, book and reader and church and state. The things that stir our spirits are specialized and removed from our daily lives. God, then, has no more relevance to us than the sunday morning stirring in our stomachs.
Recent examples would be the foot-washing controversy in Vancouver. A church was not allowed to wash the feet of the homeless because that was a social service. Churches were only supposed to conduct religious services like prayer and worship.
The specialization of the church then prevents it from participating in the wider living-world that we find our selves embedded in. Likewise if our stories are separated from their audience (and their author) they then become another specialized field of discourse.
What does this mean for the church?
For Theology?
The THEOPOETIC is the Way Forward!
I've been reading 'Love and Good Reasons: A post-liberal approach to literature and ethics' and 'Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Biblomainia'.
'Love and Good Reasons' is approaching literature as a means of studying Ethics and Christian Ethics in particular. While I often disagree with his notion of what it means to be a 'Christian Ethic' - and hes drawing very strongly off of Stanley Hauerwas - I do agree with his approach to literature as ethical/philosophical study.
The failure of Philosophy - and much of academia - is the false attempt to create theory and ideas that are divorced from human passions. Language and idea is constructed in such a manner as to de-value the emotional life of the reader and the way in which language, image and idea evoke passion! In deed as any passionate reader will tell you many of the ways in which we know and think are in the passions that story, metaphor and narrative stir up in us.
Likewise Theories of Reading addresses the way in which the devalued reader has been exited from consideration all together. From here we can easily see the dangers of what Wendell Berry refers to as the specialization of poetry. The further the reading and writing of poetry becomes the specialized domain of a few - and the longer society allows it to exist as pretty language done by moody teenagers and over-achieving academics the longer we are able to insist that the words we say and the story's we tell have no import.
We cannot, then, evaluate the way in which Henry James sought to function as a ethicist. His work, and those who comment on it, are separated away into a specialized field. But if its true that culture is shaped and formed by stories then we have an obligation to allow story, metaphor and language to exist as discourses whos job it is to engage us in the wider realities we live in.
Scott Holland calls theology the poetry of the laity. Wendell Berry say poetry is never truly concerned with eternity but with the here and now. To insist that poetry is specialized and only a 'pleasurable exercise' instead of an 'intellectual discourse' is to say that the laity - the common people - have no ideas worth exploring.
The danger of the specialization of poetry mimics also the danger of the specialization of theology/church (see 'Theopoetic as Way Forward' for a further exploration).
But the implication is important to note: we insist on a separation of story and thought, poetry and audience, book and reader and church and state. The things that stir our spirits are specialized and removed from our daily lives. God, then, has no more relevance to us than the sunday morning stirring in our stomachs.
Recent examples would be the foot-washing controversy in Vancouver. A church was not allowed to wash the feet of the homeless because that was a social service. Churches were only supposed to conduct religious services like prayer and worship.
The specialization of the church then prevents it from participating in the wider living-world that we find our selves embedded in. Likewise if our stories are separated from their audience (and their author) they then become another specialized field of discourse.
What does this mean for the church?
For Theology?
The THEOPOETIC is the Way Forward!
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Theopoetic: Whats next for Jason
Tomorrow I will return to transcribing my thoughts from my Scholars Journal - a little black notebook containing random 'theologizing'. Soon after I am hoping to start posting an online "Theopoetic of Water". I intend to build story, poem and theology around water and water crisis.
Im still figuring out what that means. It came to me in a dream!
Here is another definition of the Theopoetic:
THEA/OPOETIC, METAPHORIC AND SYMBOLIC
METHODS
Thea/opoetics - A method of interpretation in the field of religion (mythology, theology and comparative religions) developed by Stanley Romaine Hopper and David L. Miller in the 1960's. This method is used to articulate the spiritual import or meaning of a text or symbolic object, especially, by deriving and amplifying 'radical metaphor' ('ontological metaphor'; 'antimetaphor') for 'ontic' experiences, i.e., experiences of existence, being, becoming, iterativity, or aftermath. Such experiences are 'concealed' with experiences of everyday objectness or activity in the life-world. The criteria for the validity of an interpretation is not its 'falsifiability' but its 'compellingness.' Thea/opoetics names and characterizes the divinity that manifests itself in a particular material object of symbolic sacred significance.
Im still figuring out what that means. It came to me in a dream!
Here is another definition of the Theopoetic:
THEA/OPOETIC, METAPHORIC AND SYMBOLIC
METHODS
Thea/opoetics - A method of interpretation in the field of religion (mythology, theology and comparative religions) developed by Stanley Romaine Hopper and David L. Miller in the 1960's. This method is used to articulate the spiritual import or meaning of a text or symbolic object, especially, by deriving and amplifying 'radical metaphor' ('ontological metaphor'; 'antimetaphor') for 'ontic' experiences, i.e., experiences of existence, being, becoming, iterativity, or aftermath. Such experiences are 'concealed' with experiences of everyday objectness or activity in the life-world. The criteria for the validity of an interpretation is not its 'falsifiability' but its 'compellingness.' Thea/opoetics names and characterizes the divinity that manifests itself in a particular material object of symbolic sacred significance.
"What . . . theopoiesis does is to effect disclosure [of Being] through the crucial nexus of event, thereby making the crux of knowing, both morally and aesthetically, radically decisive in time."
"[Like Rilke] . . . we must learn, with trust, to be one with, a breathing with the inhale and exhale of Being, in order that "the god" may breathe through us, and we, through the translation of its breath into song, may be . . . the eyes of becoming and a tongue for Being's utterance."
Hopper, S. R. (1967). Introduction. In S. R. Hopper and David L. Miller (ed). Interpretation: The poetry of meaning. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. pp. xix, xxi.Stringfellow/Theopoetic
Apocalypse/Utopia
William Stringfellows North American liberation theology/theology of the cross requires us to read the contemporary world through the apocalypse. In contrast to other popular views of the apocalypse Stringfellow does not view the text as a road map to the end of the world but instead as an imaginative telling of the possibility and future of the world captive to the principalities and powers he names as
The Utopia for Gutierrez exists less as an idealized future but instead as a great refusal of the present reality. To enter into the task of the utopia and the utopia dream with all of its implications for the human condition is to enter into an imaginative task that seeks to make an announcement and renouncement. The utopia renounces the current way things are and seeks to provide an announcement of the ways they could be.[1]
The utopia, like the apocalypse, moves forward. They project what can be into the future and invite the reader to participate in creating that world. Revelations is less about the way the world would be but more about the way it was and the way it might be with out prayerful action. To speak of utopia and apocalypse is to speak about a world that can only come into existence through the participation of human beings in their creation, through praxis.[2]
We can criticize the utopia for creating an impossible vision of reality just as we can criticize the apocalyptic for creating an unrealitistic vision of the end of time. But to do so negates our responsibility in engaging with these as storytelling devices of theopoetic and prophetic import in our contemporary world. To engage in utopic visioning is to engage with the crisis of our time. This utopic vision is built upon creativity and dynamism in relations to our work in the world.[3]
To participate in the utopic and the apocalyptic here understood, is to participate in the building and creation of a new humanity.[4] By envisioning a new way of telling Gods story as informed by our current context and reality we are also envisioning a new way for the human person to participate in Gods story and Gods world.
The theopoetic asks us to reclaim our religious imagery as a system of images, stories and symbols that overturn the basic assumptions of our culture and faith. In short it asks us to engage in the apocalyptic and utopian task of telling our faith as a living and present tense event in which we are all living participants. The apocalyptic was not a one time experience of poetic theology but is instead a theopoetic task used to critique the ways in which culture and church have become entwined to allow for the dreaming of a better tomorrow. The apocalyptic and the utopic exists as conversation pieces bent on drawing us into a dawning revelation of what could be in the present tense.
The theopoetic task is not another form of theology but is instead, in this instance at the least, a form of doing theology in the world. The apocalyptic imagination is dependent on our being able to envision and enact our creative commentary on the present as a religious and moral duty. A quick look at the contemporary and classic cinema scene provides more than enough evidence of this sort of thinking. Movies like “The Quiet Earth”, “Metropolis” and TV shows like “Jerhico” function not as a prophecy of the future but as an annunciation of and to the present.
To take on this sort of work recognizes that human work and life are shaped more by fables, myths, story and imagination and that it is here that any full engagement with life actually takes place.[5] This is not to say we rely on the apocalyptic in image and story to facilitate liberation as a replacement for Christian action but that we must recognize the role of these things in the shaping of identity for action.[6] The stories we tell of God, when we tell Gods story in other words, is more of a story that contains our desires and hopes for the present tense world and for the future that could be birthed. It’s a way of naming the contradictions in our culture. To name God as a weak force is to recognize in our world the way in which our own world holds on to power and has created ways in which mass scales of violence through war, economics and environment can effect the majority of human life. Likewise the middle-ages, suffering at the whims of disease, feudal powers and petty politics, viewed God as a powerful force in contrast to their own weakness in the light of these events.
The apocalypse then does not sit at odds with what was once called the Age of Aquarius. Instead it sits in conjunction with that age, entering into its imaginative discourses and listening to the voices their that need to be freed and to find freedom. The mythic hungers of our age work together with our apocalyptic impulses towards creating a new and ongoing articulation of our deepest spiritual hungers and longings. The imagination is the birthing ground of liberating apocalyptic impulses.
It is with this apocalyptic and utopic imagination that we are able to envision liberation in the world. Liberation theology tends to take the cross as its articulation of Gods liberating work, but to work with Stringfellow means that we are called to engage with the theopoetic task of speaking truth to power by way of fable, myth and story. This is the goal of the apocalyptic: to create a story that is a truth, that conveys an understanding of God story in our present situation. Stringfellow is dependent on this telling always recognizing that as society we will always be captive to ‘babel’ – to destructive forces that demand our allegiance and worship.
The Word as Event
To engage in this task is to become involved in a form of reading world and text that opens up the present. Stringfellow names this way of reading as seeing the Word as event. To do this does not mean to read the bible as literal, which Stringfellow names as a failure for exegesis. Instead we are to engage with the text as a living testament, to fail at this is to not encounter the dignity of our own participation in the text and the vitality of the very Word that invites and teaches us.[7] To see the word as event is to encounter the text as a force for revelation and conversation in our present realities and contexts. It is an event that is happening now and not just in the past.
This does not mean Stringfellow avoids the exegetical when it comes to reading and interpreting the Apocalypse. But instead he focuses on the Apocalypse as a polemic. On the one hand it functions as a theological conversation and equally as a political document. When we talk about the theopoetic as it relates to the apocalyptic and the utopia dream we are talking about this very function: conversation and political ideal are always pregnant and implied by our images and stories.[8] To tell an apocalypse, to critique the present, warn of the dangers of the future and to hope for Gods reigns, is always to come into conflict with the ruling ideologies and stories.
To read the apocalypse this way is to read it as a liberating text. It is to see the captivity to power and the role of
Hall says that the role of the apocalyptic is toward a visioning of God’s universal reign of justice and mercy. To not view the apocalypse in this sort of theopoetic daydreaming of the ‘kin/gdom come’ is to participate in a shallow dreaming of the world more intent on a lust for power and a perversion of religious institution into an instrument of crude self-centering fantasizing.[10] To envision God’s reign is an ongoing task in which the church is constantly asked to participate. We must learn to shape into story these mythic hunger for a better world. Dry rational is easily explained away. Myth and story can go straight to who we are as people and how we desire the world to be.
Even Luther was even skeptical of viewing the apocalyptic as a way of reading the end of the world. But his work suggests a theopoetic approach as well, that of viewing the text as a way of reading the signs of the times.[11] The danger we encounter here is that we may have a constant need to fit the social world that we live in into the text of our faith. This sort of thing can lead us to the cheap apocalypses of Hal Lindsey and the ‘Left Behind’ books. While Lindesy is focused on reading the times in the light of the apocalypse he is looking for an actual end to the world. He misses the opportunity provided by the apocalyptic impulse to call the world to repentance and to revelation.
This is the same Luther who taught on Genesis for 12 years. Luther always taught and worked as a biblical scholar in the light of the contemporary issues.[12] For Luther the ‘word as event’ had meaning as a living force in our own context. To live with the word was to live with the present tense, was to live at this time where we were alive and to speak of present tense as being a part of biblical revelation. Here the scripture, I would say, becomes alive in the way it is freed from the past for the liberation of the present. If we are able to, as the historical critical method tends to do, keep the scriptures as an event that lives solely in the past then we have declared that the Bible has no gift for a contemporary humanity.
But on the on the other hand if we believe that the scripture is not just an historical event that happened sometime in the past but instead view them as the imaginative and poetic response to their human realities then we can understand the way bible study in the present functions to open us up to the ways in which we tell Gods story for the liberation and empowerment of the present.
The Cross as Theopoetic
The task of liberation from a theopoetic point of view is not to assist in the toppling of the systems that cause oppression to happen.[13] Instead the task is to take on the underlying myths, stories and images that enable such oppression. By working from the apocalyptic we are able to take captive the prevailing images, whether they be freedom by way of war, capitalism or even democracy, and place them in a story structure that reveals their dark sides and oppressive natures. Part of the liberation sought here is to liberate those who participate in oppression so they might see the ways in which they have enabled apocalypse.
Working with Jurgen Moltman we can even see the ways in which the cross itself has a function that is theopoetic. If Moltman is correct in his assumptions that the religious life of the
In other words it functions as a theopoetic image that undercuts and damages the assumptions of power that are found in the emporeror and the states cultic religious practices. The early church was able to brandish this image in a way that was able to take the scandal of political power and find in it the revelation of God.
To participate in liberation theology from a theopoetic perspective is to engage in symbol and image making in such a manner that we find ways of telling Gods story as a present tense reality as it pertains to our local realties. As I’ve argued before its important that our poetic and liberation impulses are articulated in the ground realities of our local context. The downtown eastside exists in a network of images, symbols and interpretations that are specific to its context. To create a theopoetic of liberation there requires us to engage in the actual human lives, hungers and spiritual desires of that region.
If we are to believe that the power of the cross is the way it mocks and reverses the way our institutional religions and the powers of death are at work in our culture then it is to this that the cross, and any new images we create to convey the particulars of the cross, must engage with.
In his book on theopoetics Amos Niven Wilder names as cause for liberal, evangelical and secular mystic, the cause of reclaiming a theopoetic of the cross that is able to speak to all.[14] The task of the liberation theologian here then is to speak of a image and story of the cross that is not so indebted to doctrines, theologies and institutions that it cannot also speak of a freedom and liberation for all. The cross must convey a sense of freedom in the theopeotic sense that can have implications for those people at home in the church and for those who do not feel that they can honestly call themselves a Christian.
The cross then, as Moltman points out, is not a religious symbol but is instead a profane symbol. To align ourselves with the profane is to announce that the profane is the home of true holiness, that that which contradicts our assumptions, notions and bias’s of what the holy is more revealed in the profane than in our tightly controlled systems and structures of holiness.
Our apocalyptic and utopic visions are geared towards making and revealing symbols, images and stories that enable the profane to become a reality in our world. The profanity of the cross stands in contrast to our notions of salvation and revelation. The very profanity of the cross leads us to consider the notion of universal salvation that Guiterrez suggests.
Universal Salvation
Is this what Gutierrez means when he says that the liberation theologian must seek a universal salvation? To find in the cross a salvation does not mean to find a cross that takes away our suffering but instead reveals the reality of suffering and mocks the powers who cause suffering. What the world seeks to kill God reveals godself in. Salvation then is not to be saved from a certain experience or reality but saved to it. To seek a salvation then can mean more than just the ending of oppression but can also mean our global, corporate and intention confession of suffering and our deliberate entering into those circumstances and realities and becoming participants in them.
Guiterreze talks about this when he talks about our responsibility to be saved to the neighbor. Here we encounter the idea of the hidden God. On the cross the hidden God is revealed, that what we try to kill, torture and silence revels God to us. Likewise to be saved to the experiences of our neighbor is to be saved to the reality and ways in which they bring God to us. To confess to the realities of suffering and to enter into oppression and otherness on purpose is to live present with the hidden God and to make godself known to the world.
A universal salvation then is to be constantly turning toward the other as a way of discovering the hidden God and of being saved to that persons experience. This hidden God reveals the folly our attempts at controlling salvation and the process by which salvation needs to be saved. Garcia critiques liberation theology as being more interested in saving society than souls. To be saved to the other – to undergo a process of conversion to the realities of the other – is to encounter a type of salvation of the soul, a salvation of spiritual alignment which will enable us to save society.
A universal salvation does not negate the soul but nor does it stop there. The theopoetic seeks to help enable the various forms of salvation by asking us to tell Gods story in such a way that our souls, our personal selves in relation to God and world undergo a transformation, can then work out its revelation in the world.
This search for God in the other then asks that the theopoetic imagination take up the task of telling Gods story as it exists in the manger, among the dirty, the forgotten and the vulnerable. For us to tell Gods story as entering the world in the dirty and with a head that you can crush with the palm of your hand has implications for the church. When we tell this story we must ask of the ways in which the vulnerability of God is welcomed among us as institutions and what to whom our identity as people formed around this vulnerable God are brought to.
The Church as Theopoetic
Too often the church has told Gods story in relation to the power it seeks or has in its own possession. The cross has been used to promote the glory of earthly kingdoms instead of as a way of undermining the symbols of power and power worship that are used to dominate our world. We have tended to turn the scandal of the cross into a scandalizing event, one that imprisons and condemns instead of frees.
Part of the theopoetic task is to reimagine the church as it exists in our world today. The theopoetic seeks to tell a story to the church that reimagines the way the church can be and exist and how it serves the cross. To seek to serve the cross as a place interaction with the world is to seek to find a new story of the church. The reality of the churches confluence with cultural powers and allegiances.
By agreeing with Hall that the church is to be a suffering polis and that the world teems with those who have been oppressed and discriminated against then we are given the option of saying something new about the very nature of the church. The church, the ecclesia or called out, then can be seen as being made evident in the mangers of society. Church then is not we Christians who have responded to the call of God in Christ who constitute the church but instead the whole of humanity in their variety of situations who are a church active in the world, are a suffering polis. Church is anywhere and everywhere the incarnation of God comes to us as the other, the outcast and the foreign.
To engage in a view that encounters the entire world as an event of church then is to move beyond rigid church hierarchies and into a view more akin to Gustavo Gutierreze which asks us to view out neighbor, our surroundings and even our life situation, as a sacrament. If we are saved to the other and are seeking an universal salvation then every moment is a sacrament. Let us move beyond Gutierrezes concept of the neighbor as sacrament and into a new idea: the sacrament of the ordinary.
In this I envision the very work of world and church as being to announce that every ordinary object, event and person – like the elements of the Eucharist – are ordinary things made extraordinary. To be church in this sort of mindset is to be a church beyond institutions and is to participate in the holiness of that which we have announced as profane to the world. If we can view ordinary bread and wine to have extraordinary existence, in whatever theological model we choose to view it, then we are equally called to see average people, situations and institutions as having extraordinary lives. I take this to be the definition of the priesthood of the believer.
But to say this is not to say this and to recognize in the suffering of the other the churches true vocation is not to say that the church must suffer, or that we receive glory and validation by suffering. As Hall points out there has been serious critique of our fixation on suffering, death and violence.[15] But to enter into the sacrament of the ordinary and the suffering is to view the call of Christ as one who knew that a life of compassion, mercy and justice would result in suffering.[16] To save the world from its brokenness is to be subject to the violence of that which you are trying to save it from.
This is the ordinary that we must view as sacred. The ordinary suffering of humanity, the world that teems with the everyday reality of suffering and oppression and loss. It is here that the holy one of God is revealed to us, is incarnate. We as church seek our own destruction so we can better be on the side of those who are marginalized and left outside by our institutions. We say God is revealed here in the manner in which revelation in suffering upsets our safety nets, our security and our self identity.
Conclusion
The apocalyptic and utopic provided us with a theopoetic way of enacting liberation theology in our world and lifestyle. To do so requires us to engage with the hungers and desires that are present our age as being visions of reality that contain the seeds of a new way of being human in the world. In order for us to view this as a gateway to liberation we are asked to tell both the biblical story as having present tense import and our own story as being a form of theopoetic and spiritual insight and resistance to the powers that be.
But to do this we must avoid the pit falls of reading the world as being on a road map to hell/destruction as displayed in the apocalypse. Our apocalyptic vision draws us toward deeper and greater insights into our own way of being in the world. This sort of reading provides for, in Stringfellows words ‘a faulty exegesis’ as well as locks us into a literal mythic structure that does not allow any room for reading the world as its own text that we can explore through biblical imagery.
If we cannot read our own story as an event that takes place in conjunction and in response to the biblical narrative then the biblical event comes to predominate our world. The hungers and voices of the poor are full of their own stories and desires by which they explore the implications of the biblical event. We tell these stories together, in the apocalyptic and the utopic, as a means of becoming church in the world.
To do this, to work for liberation, means that our imaginations must be freed for, from and in our traditions and aligned with the hungers of the world. This freedom allows us to speak a new voice to the churches that calls them towards being church in the world.
from my Theopoets Journal
I am not a Systematician nor am i a Constructive. I am a THEOPOET! The Theopoet works in fragments, ideas, stories, myths. We work in image and language, with the hungers and desires of our age.
Where the scholar pretends that they have no emotion, that the body can be removed from knowing and knowledge - that the reader and what the reader feels - is not important - the Theopoet knows better!
Inspired by Jan Zwicky and her idea of Lyric Philosophy, Witeensteins fragments and Rubem Alves Theopoetry I present the notes, fragments, corners of ideas and undeveloped Theopoetry from my Scholars Journal.
FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT:
To speak about the Kingdom of God is to speak about a non-kingdom. This is seen most clearly in our notions of the historic Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. In this person, in whom we say we encounter the passion and incarnation of God, we have named a reality we call 'prince of peace', 'king of kings' and 'Lord'. All these phrases offer up a reversal of expectation - princes, kings and lords are not born in mangers, nor do they die on crosses as politically scandalous/political subversives.
For Jesus to be prince is to be non-prince, to be King is to be non-king, to be Lord is to be non-lord. The non-kingdom of God as revolutionary ideal is a revolution that never fully arrives in our time, nor is it only a future event which can never be grasped.
The Revolution of God, a more fitting title than Kingdom, is a revolution of community and Incarnation. To say Jesus is Lord is to name the powers-that-be that are present in Ceaser as Lord have failed to incarnate the radical inclusiveness of Gods Revolution.
Cesar, or the Powers and Principalities present in every era of every age of every culture, will always be beholden to the pursuit and maintainance of his/her own power. Governments, even the best of them, will fall into that sin of selfishness - this could be war-making, human rights violating, environmental disaster or economic death. To name the non-kingdom present in Christ is to say that those communities that gather in the name of the Incarnate Passion of God (or Spirit, or Universe) are called to live out a radical communal life that challenges the powers-that-be.
For example - where cultures can not be inclusive, diverse, welcoming and peace making the communities of spirit (churches, community groups, social justice groups) have then a responsibility to live out a way of being that is 'the kingdom come' or 'the revolution present'.
The great sin of the churches is that where our culture has failed to include female, queer, minority and other voices the church should have been embodying these ways of being as a witness and testimony to the world which, by its idolatry to power and wealth, can never be Gods revolution.
To what end, then, does the non-kingdom of God function in the world? Are we to retreat from the world and set-up tiny, counter-cultural outposts on the margins of society?
Yes!
Are we to embody in widening circles the realities we live in our revolutionary lives? Do we embody another way of being and then enter into the public world as a call to conversion.
Yes!
Here we cut to the heart of what it may mean to be saved. For the conservative xtian it means a personal relationship with God which leads us to seek the salvation of another - to get their butts into heaven/out of hell.
For Liberals it means a communal salvation from poverty, injustice and war.
I am here suggesting a Integral Salvation. This is a conversion to Gods revolution that includes our MIND, BODY and SOUL. A spiritual conversion leads to mental conversion of my thoughts, focusing me on the incarnate other and their needs and the physical realities they live in.
To convert culture from a spirit of death, oppression and injustice is to convert the Spirit, but if we do not convert our mental systems then the realities we expierence bodily will never change. Salvation can beging with any one of these. But must also include the other.
If salvation is to be purley spiritual, or only of the soul, then we have no responsibility for our physical realities, how we treat our body or the wisdom of our bodies. This form of salvation only ever leads to post-world thinking.
To rely on a social gospel for salvation alone only ever suggests that salvation from physical realities is necessary but does not recognize the spirit of the age that allows for such a form of sin - societal oppression - to exist in the first place.
Integral Salvation insists that their can be no salvation that does not take all three into consideration. A mind/body/soul (integral) salvation seeks to engage with the whole human reality as it is revealed from these 3 positions. This then is a kosmocenteric salvation - respecting the interdependence of all systems on all levels of being.
To seek salvation of the world - kosmocentrically - is to work across the 3 positions in order to model ways of health for the whole of Creation. Salvation in this manner seeks the conversion of the war-mongering president as well as the health of our rivers and the lives - human and non-human - that rely on them.
When we speak of the Community of Spirit being the revolution that the world cannot be we are recognizing that we are doing this as part of the system and participants on multiple levels of the Kosmos and that our actions have ramifications even for those systems we cannot expierence directly.
Conversion then is not to only come into right relationship w/God but to come into right relationship w/humanity, the earth, our bodies and our famallies and our culture. It is to begin a process of mind, body, spirit that seeks to have a healthy way of being in the world. It is also to recognize that such a process is a never ending journey.
The non-kingdom of God is a kingdom of Kosmocenteric responsibility. It is to pray for - by contemplation, action, community - the breadth of relationships in the Kosmos and our place in them from atoms, molecules, to cells, to beings, to consciousnesses. Likewise it is to seek salvation that is true across all levels of relationship - the balance of natural and living systems.
TO BE CONTINUED
Where the scholar pretends that they have no emotion, that the body can be removed from knowing and knowledge - that the reader and what the reader feels - is not important - the Theopoet knows better!
Inspired by Jan Zwicky and her idea of Lyric Philosophy, Witeensteins fragments and Rubem Alves Theopoetry I present the notes, fragments, corners of ideas and undeveloped Theopoetry from my Scholars Journal.
FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT:
To speak about the Kingdom of God is to speak about a non-kingdom. This is seen most clearly in our notions of the historic Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. In this person, in whom we say we encounter the passion and incarnation of God, we have named a reality we call 'prince of peace', 'king of kings' and 'Lord'. All these phrases offer up a reversal of expectation - princes, kings and lords are not born in mangers, nor do they die on crosses as politically scandalous/political subversives.
For Jesus to be prince is to be non-prince, to be King is to be non-king, to be Lord is to be non-lord. The non-kingdom of God as revolutionary ideal is a revolution that never fully arrives in our time, nor is it only a future event which can never be grasped.
The Revolution of God, a more fitting title than Kingdom, is a revolution of community and Incarnation. To say Jesus is Lord is to name the powers-that-be that are present in Ceaser as Lord have failed to incarnate the radical inclusiveness of Gods Revolution.
Cesar, or the Powers and Principalities present in every era of every age of every culture, will always be beholden to the pursuit and maintainance of his/her own power. Governments, even the best of them, will fall into that sin of selfishness - this could be war-making, human rights violating, environmental disaster or economic death. To name the non-kingdom present in Christ is to say that those communities that gather in the name of the Incarnate Passion of God (or Spirit, or Universe) are called to live out a radical communal life that challenges the powers-that-be.
For example - where cultures can not be inclusive, diverse, welcoming and peace making the communities of spirit (churches, community groups, social justice groups) have then a responsibility to live out a way of being that is 'the kingdom come' or 'the revolution present'.
The great sin of the churches is that where our culture has failed to include female, queer, minority and other voices the church should have been embodying these ways of being as a witness and testimony to the world which, by its idolatry to power and wealth, can never be Gods revolution.
To what end, then, does the non-kingdom of God function in the world? Are we to retreat from the world and set-up tiny, counter-cultural outposts on the margins of society?
Yes!
Are we to embody in widening circles the realities we live in our revolutionary lives? Do we embody another way of being and then enter into the public world as a call to conversion.
Yes!
Here we cut to the heart of what it may mean to be saved. For the conservative xtian it means a personal relationship with God which leads us to seek the salvation of another - to get their butts into heaven/out of hell.
For Liberals it means a communal salvation from poverty, injustice and war.
I am here suggesting a Integral Salvation. This is a conversion to Gods revolution that includes our MIND, BODY and SOUL. A spiritual conversion leads to mental conversion of my thoughts, focusing me on the incarnate other and their needs and the physical realities they live in.
To convert culture from a spirit of death, oppression and injustice is to convert the Spirit, but if we do not convert our mental systems then the realities we expierence bodily will never change. Salvation can beging with any one of these. But must also include the other.
If salvation is to be purley spiritual, or only of the soul, then we have no responsibility for our physical realities, how we treat our body or the wisdom of our bodies. This form of salvation only ever leads to post-world thinking.
To rely on a social gospel for salvation alone only ever suggests that salvation from physical realities is necessary but does not recognize the spirit of the age that allows for such a form of sin - societal oppression - to exist in the first place.
Integral Salvation insists that their can be no salvation that does not take all three into consideration. A mind/body/soul (integral) salvation seeks to engage with the whole human reality as it is revealed from these 3 positions. This then is a kosmocenteric salvation - respecting the interdependence of all systems on all levels of being.
To seek salvation of the world - kosmocentrically - is to work across the 3 positions in order to model ways of health for the whole of Creation. Salvation in this manner seeks the conversion of the war-mongering president as well as the health of our rivers and the lives - human and non-human - that rely on them.
When we speak of the Community of Spirit being the revolution that the world cannot be we are recognizing that we are doing this as part of the system and participants on multiple levels of the Kosmos and that our actions have ramifications even for those systems we cannot expierence directly.
Conversion then is not to only come into right relationship w/God but to come into right relationship w/humanity, the earth, our bodies and our famallies and our culture. It is to begin a process of mind, body, spirit that seeks to have a healthy way of being in the world. It is also to recognize that such a process is a never ending journey.
The non-kingdom of God is a kingdom of Kosmocenteric responsibility. It is to pray for - by contemplation, action, community - the breadth of relationships in the Kosmos and our place in them from atoms, molecules, to cells, to beings, to consciousnesses. Likewise it is to seek salvation that is true across all levels of relationship - the balance of natural and living systems.
TO BE CONTINUED
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