David Congdon - No, The American Church is Not in Exile

No, The American Church is Not in Exile

https://sojo.net/articles/no-american-church-isn-t-exile

By David Congdon

April 19, 2017

In the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing same-sex marriage, conservative Christian leaders sounded a dire word: Christians are no longer at home in the United States.

Rod Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative, wrote an article for TIME following the decision with the headline, “Orthodox Christians Must Now Learn To Live as Exiles in Our Own Country.” In his long-anticipated book, The Benedict Option, Dreher tells Christians to “embrace exile.” He alludes to the oft-used Jeremiah 29:7 in his conclusion when he says that “though in exile, we work for the peace of the city.” In a response to Jacob Lupfer, who penned an essay saying Dreher suffers from a “delusional persecution complex,” Dreher claims that Christians are “called by God to be faithfully present here in Babylon ... like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”

In a similar vein, Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, published a response to the Supreme Court decision in the Washington Post that concluded by calling Christians to “joyfully march to Zion” as “strangers and exiles in American culture.”

Moore is drawing here on the language of Hebrews 11, which describes believers as “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Heb 11:13, ESV). The idea of the follower of God as an exile has deep roots in the faith, originating in Israel’s history of exile in Assyria and Babylon.

But instead of “exiles on the earth,” Moore writes “exiles in American culture.” And Dreher speaks of being “exiles in our own country.” Everything hangs on this change.

Christians today who adopt an exilic identity have

abandoned this dimension of Christianity.

Why Exile?

The idea of the church in exile is once again popular in American Christian circles. Missiologist Michael Frost wrote Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture in 2006. In 2008, before his own exile from the evangelical community, Rob Bell coauthored Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile. New Testament professor James Thompson wrote The Church in Exile: God’s Counterculture in a Non-Christian World in 2011. And in 2015, Lee Beach of McMaster Divinity College published The Church in Exile: Living in Hope After Christendom.

Why the attraction to exile? For many of those in the missional church movement, exile language offers an alternative to the “culture war” rhetoric of the religious right. Instead of a church at war with surrounding culture, a church in exile presents a vision of God’s people living peacefully within foreign territory.

Seeking the welfare of a foreign city (Jeremiah 29:7) is certainly an improvement over waging constant battle against it. But what does the idea of exile imply about the church? And is it consistent with Christian faith?

Exile means that one is barred from one’s native land. The people of Israel, for instance, were prevented from living in the land promised to them by God. Followers of Jesus, however, have no native land. The Great Commission at the end of Matthew finds Jesus telling his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19). In the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus tells them “you will be my witnesses ... to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

READ: Where Do You Find Church?

If the message of Christian faith is for all peoples and nations, then how can the New Testament writers speak of believers as exiles? The answer is that, for Christianity, the whole earth is a foreign land.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus prays: “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world” (John 17:14). If the world is a foreign land, then the church is by definition in exile. But so the adage: If everything is exile, nothing is exile. Because the whole world is alien territory, no culture has a privileged position in relationship to God. Every culture is equally close and equally distant from the new creation. For those who follow Jesus, every person is a neighbor and every place is a home.

Talking about the church in exile is redundant, unless there is a change in the definition.

Exile and Christendom

Notice the book titles mentioned above. They describe the church in exile within “a post-Christian culture,” “a non-Christian world,” and a society “after Christendom.”

To be sure, many of these authors would view the experience of exile as a good thing. They do not necessarily think “Christendom” was a golden age to which we ought to return — and yet the decision to define the church as exilic allows Christendom to set the terms for the conversation.

Speaking of the church in exile within American culture suggests there is some ideal culture — according to Dreher, “the Judeo-Christian culture of the West” — in which the church would not be in exile. Once we make that move, we have abandoned the early church’s insight that the church is exiled from every culture.

We end up pining for the Christendom of earlier history, when in fact the only true Christian world exists beyond the end of history.

But the problem goes deeper. Thinking of the church as exiled from a particular culture further implies the church has its own. Dreher compares the evangelical church to the monastic communities of St. Benedict, while Moore views the church as a new Israel marching to Zion. This idea of church as a specific culture has implications for mission. Moore makes this explicit when he calls American culture “our mission field."

Imperialism or Separatism — or Something Else?

There are only two options at this point: Either the church spreads its culture to others or it assimilates its own into distinct community. The former is the way of imperialism, while the latter is the way of separatism.

Israel’s mission is of the separatist variety, as defined especially by the book of Deuteronomy, whose message can be summarized as a warning to Israel to remain distinct from the other nations. The prophetic tradition interprets the Babylonian exile as God’s judgment on Israel’s failure to remain separate from other cultures.

Yet the overall message of the New Testament, especially the book of Acts, is that the church is not a separate community with its own culture. The power of Christianity is found in what scholars of mission call its capacity for contextualization, which means that the message of Christ can be translated into different languages, cultures, and contexts.

READ: Religious Freedom or Culture War? 

According to Lamin Sanneh, the Gambian missiologist and professor at Yale Divinity School, the Gospel comes “without a revealed language or a founding original culture,” and therefore “all cultural forms ... are in principle worthy of bearing the truth of Christianity.”

Christians today who adopt an exilic identity have abandoned this dimension of Christianity. They are giving up on the contextualization principle. For them, contemporary American culture is enemy territory, and the only recourse is to retreat into a separate cultural community.

Talking about the church in exile is redundant,

unless there is a change in the definition.

This does not mean, of course, that a church contextualized within the United States would uncritically affirm the culture. But it does mean we need to consider more thoughtfully what exactly constitutes the truth of Christianity and how this truth might relate to its given context.

Returning Home After Exile

The Barna Group’s “Faith That Lasts” project, conducted over five years between 2007 and 2011, revealed that nearly a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds (23 percent) said that “Christians demonize everything outside of the church” was a statement that “completely” or “mostly” described their experience.

Christians have largely left behind the days when their faith was defined by prohibitions against drinking, dancing, and movies. But the exile mentality remains: Today, Christian culture may be more ideological than moral, the us-versus-them logic more pervasive and more subtle.

The church communicates an exilic message when it speaks about the need to evangelize “the West” as if this need is greater now than in the past, when it associates “the world” specifically with American culture, or when it waxes longingly about how much better things were “back then” or are “over there.”

READ: Christ, Not America, First

The church needs to abandon talk of exile, and reclaim the possibility of being at home. Home is the cultural context within which the church already exists. Reclaiming home does not mean uncritically adopting whatever seems fashionable at the time. It means approaching cultural changes and developments with an attitude of openness and hospitality, with a readiness to embrace rather than exclude. Reclaiming home means obeying the biblical injunction to live wholly without fear or anxiety.

Many Christians have already put down their weapons to fight the culture. It is time now to put down the walls of defense that keep them separated from the culture. Perhaps a future generation will yet say that “Christians love everything outside of the church.”

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David Congdon

David Congdon has a PhD in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of three books, including most recently The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch.

Biblical Hermeneutics in a Post-Truth Culture

When developing a postmodern contemporary theology one of the first problems that drew my attention was the problem of how Christians interpret the bible. Because of the church's many deeply held sacrosanct traditions and beliefs it quickly became the one area that must be examined and talked about if progress was to be made in hearing God's Word again rather than our own uncharitable belief systems. Consequently, over the past decade or so many "practical or pragmatic" discussions have been occurring in the theological community across any number of levels of bible topics for the very reason that the theology of biblical interpretation is in transition. And it must be if the church has any hope of getting through the hard-bent realities of post-truth cultures doubling-down on secularizing (or segregating) cultural/societal beliefs resistant to the Spirit of God working across our tightly integrating global cultures. Resistance by the church to God's will and work creates a climate of spiritual darkness that chains everything-and-everybody to policies of inequity, injustice, and untruth. The church then becomes a body politik for these injustices rather than a mediating force for the love and goodness of God. Theologians and church people are beginning to understand this dilemma as seen in the quote below by David Congdon.

R.E. Slater

January 25, 2017

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From David Congdan, IVP Academics -

"...This is true, but I think the problem goes far deeper. Evangelicals are in the habit of viewing certain sources of knowledge—specifically, the Bible, but also their own traditions, beliefs, and practices—as being beyond scrutiny and critique. Their divine sanction renders them immune to historical and scientific testing. Assessing the truth-claims of Christianity represents a lack of faith. Having grown up in this tradition I know all too well how one learns from an early age that anyone who challenges one's beliefs must be an enemy of God, and thus an enemy of truth.

"The cultivation of this way of thinking over many years produces the conditions in which a "post-truth" culture and politics can easily thrive. If one is inculcated in the belief that one's theological ideas are unfalsifiable, then it becomes very easy to believe that one's political ideas are also unfalsifiable. Scientists say the world is billions of years old? It's a lie because the Bible tells me so. Historians say the conquest didn't take place as narrated? It's a lie because the Bible can't be wrong. Scientists say that humans are responsible for climate change? That must also be a lie because my faith community tells me so.

"It has long been acknowledged that evangelicals have a very difficult time with hermeneutics. The word hermeneutics refers to the science of interpretation. Hermeneutics arose because the old traditions could no longer be taken for granted; texts and theologies came under scrutiny in modernity as people became conscious of the way history and culture condition how people see the world and themselves. To acknowledge the challenge of hermeneutics is to acknowledge that all of our thinking and speaking is conditioned by our time and place. But this means opening ourselves to critique and testing as we become aware of the diversity of perspectives.

"All of which is to say, the evangelical resistance to hermeneutics is a key contributor to the creation of a "post-truth" society. If evangelicals want to address our political crisis, embracing the problem of hermeneutics is an important first step."

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Resources

Wikipedia - Biblical Hermeneutics

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Hermeneutics

Additional resources I would consider apropos would be in the postmodern sciences, social sciences, including the philosophical areas of the orthomorphology of linguistics, existential narrative, Continental Philosophy / Radical Theology using the Hegel stream of tradition (Peter Rollins et al), Relational Process Theology (Thomas Oord et al), Stanley Hauerwas' insights into the pragmatics of prophetic interpretation, Peter Enns and Greg Boyd's "Incarnational" writings (Jesus-centric), and so forth as have been reviewed here over the years. What is not needed is a continued dependance upon a biblical literalism but a grown-up, full scale, postmodern acquisition of how we see-and-understand things than translate them into our world to act upon or ignore. - R.E. Slater

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Defining Biblical Hermeneutics

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/defining-biblical-hermeneutics/

How Biblical interpretations, or hermeneutics of the Bible,

affect the way we read the scriptures

Ellen White  •  09/03/2016

This Bible History Daily article was originally published in 2011.

It has been updated and expanded.—Ed.

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This vellum copy of the Gutenberg Bible is owned by the Library of Congress. The Gutenberg Bible, the Vulgate (Latin) translation, is the first book printed using moveable type. Printed in the 1450s in Mainz Germany, this is one of only 48 copies that still survive (11 in the United States), and is considered to be one of the most valuable books in existence. Photo: Raul654’s image is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

For as long as there have been Biblical texts, there have been Biblical hermeneutics, or Biblical interpretations. One definition of hermeneutics (given by Bernhard W. Anderson in a piece he wrote for Bible Review) is that Biblical hermeneutics are “modes of [Bible] interpretation[s].” In another Bible Review article, James A. Sanders offered a Biblical hermeneutics definition as “interpretive lens[es]” through which one reads the Bible. Going a step further, the Merriam-Webster dictionary extends its hermeneutics definition to include not only the methods or principles of the interpretations but also the study of those very Biblical interpretations. In short, the hermeneutics of the Bible are the many ways people read the Bible.

Biblical hermeneutics even take place within the Biblical text itself. In the Hebrew Bible, the authors of the Psalms and the prophets often referred back to the Torah and incorporated their own interpretations and understanding of the text from their social locations.

In the years leading up to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., several different Jewish groups had risen to prominence, including the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. Although they were all Jewish, each group had very different Biblical hermeneutics. Definition of what happened to the soul after death, proper temple sacrifice and the importance of studying the law differed among these groups because of their varying approaches. Christianity also began as a Jewish sect, but as Jesus’ followers developed their own hermeneutics in relation to the law and the role of the messiah, it became a distinct religion.

Today there are many hermeneutics applied to the Bible. These methodologies range from historical-critical, to post-colonial, to rhetorical, to cultural-critical, to ecological to canonical-critical. These are all types of Biblical hermeneutics. Part of the reason that so many hermeneutics exist is that interpreters have different goals. For example, if you want to understand how Moses’s life in the wilderness differed from daily life in the ancient Levant, you would use an archaeological/anthropological hermeneutic. However, if you want to understand the gender politics between Miriam and Moses in the wilderness, you would use a feminist or womanist approach to the text. Different hermeneutics lead to different types of interpretations. Cheryl Exum famously wrote two articles on Exodus 1-2:10 focusing on the women in the narrative. Her conclusions in these articles appear contradictory, but that is because she used two different hermeneutics (rhetorical and feminist) and each method focused on different elements of the text, which led to different interpretations of the text.

Even archaeology, which is the focus of BAR, is a Biblical hermeneutic. By studying the remains of ancient people and how they lived, and comparing their finds to the texts, archaeologists are able to offer exciting new interpretations. For example, the sacrifice of Isaac is one of the most interpreted stories throughout history. The disturbing narrative about a God who orders his follower to sacrifice his son, but ultimately withdraws this command at the final moment, has caused great discomfort in readers for several reasons. Many of these reasons revolve around the modern revulsion regarding child sacrifice. The world of archaeology provides insight into the practice (or non-practice) of sacrifice in the ancient world, as well as the hilltop altars, which appear in the story. For more on this topic see “Infants Sacrificed? The Tale Teeth Tell” by Patricia Smith in the July/August 2014 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

There are many ways in which you can approach the text, and your method will determine your interpretation. It is important then to be transparent about what is essential to you as a reader and recognize how that impacts the interpretations that you develop. Your interpretive goal will ultimately determine your Biblical hermeneutic.

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This Bible History Daily article was originally published in July 2011.

It was updated and expanded by Dr. Ellen White on October 13, 2014.

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Ellen White, Ph.D. (Hebrew Bible, University of St. Michael’s College), was the senior editor at the Biblical Archaeology Society. She has taught at five universities across the U.S. and Canada and spent research leaves in Germany and Romania. She has also been actively involved in digs at various sites in Israel.

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Read how noted scholars arrive at a definition of Biblical hermeneutics:

• Bernhard W. Anderson, “The Bible: Word of God in Human Words,” Bible Review, June 1997.
• James A. Sanders, “’Spinning’ the Bible,” Bible Review, June 1998.

Book Review: Philip Goodrich - A Theology of Money

Philip Goodchild, What is Wrong with the Global Financial System?

Published on Aug 18, 2014

Philip Goodrich discusses the power of money to subordinate all political aims and more. Since money is both a means of payment and a unit of account, the best way to achieve one's goals is to obtain money first. Thus, money posits itself as the universal, supreme value and the means of access to all other values.

"[Philip Goodchild] analyzes this myth in terms of four kinds of instabilities:physical,

conceptual, economic, and market. The physical instability is due to a conflict between

economy and ecology that will inevitably lead to catastrophe: 'We are consuming our

own collective body.'"

- David Congdon, review

Click here for Amazon Link to book

Read Introduction, part of Chapter 1, and Conclusion - 

http://www.amazon.com/Theology-Money-New-Slant-Religion/dp/0822344505

Book Review

Theology of Money, Philip Goodchild, Duke University Press, 2009(ISBN 978-0-8223-4450-6), xvi

+296 pp., pb $23.95

Philip Goodchild’s Theology of Money was prescient in its timing. It was first released in England in 2007 (SCM Press), followed by a US editionin 2009. The latter edition comes with a preface dated ‘February 2008’.What this means is that, while the book appeared in the midst of the recent financial crisis, it was written before that crisis was ever publicly known. This makes the book doubly remarkable – not only because of its many keen insights about the market and modern society, but also because of its particular relevance to the present situation.

First, however, a word of clarification regarding the title. Some will no doubt pick up this book expecting to find a ‘theological’ (as in [a] Christian systematic theology) reflection on the nature of money. One who does not know Goodchild’s work might expect the book to be an exercise in theological ethics or political theology, comparable with, say,M. Douglas Meek’s God the Economist

or Kathryn Tanner’s Economy of Grace. That person would likely be disappointed. Goodchild’s book is  not a Christian theological account of money; it is not faith’s treatment of money in light of christology or the doctrine of the trinity. One will not find any of the usual doctrinal loci in this book. Instead, Goodchild is attempting to offer the theology that accounts for the modern ‘religion of money’. If money is our god, then Goodchild seeks to articulate the theology that ‘explain[s] the distinctive nature of this spectral power in the modern world’ (p. 14). So while the book is a kind of ‘political theology of money’ (p. 25), words like ‘theology’ and ‘metaphysics’ refer to the being of money rather than the being of God in relation to money. There is no distinction here between theology and philosophy.

Even though students of Christian theology might be disappointed (due to the non-standard use of the word ‘theology’), that does not mean in the least that they should be disappointed. On the contrary, there is much in Theology of Money that demands a wide audience. In order to understand the book’s significance, it is necessary to first gain clarity about its purpose. From the ‘US Edition’ preface: ‘The aim is to show what devotions, sacrifices, and convictions lie at the basis of contemporary existence, and to call for a new effort of devotion, sacrifice, and conviction that may evoke another social order’ (p. xvi). Money is part of the essential fabric of modern existence, according to Goodchild. It is impossible to isolate a purely ‘economic’ realm without touching on matters of political agency, ecology, anthropology, and moral theology. The future of money is, in an important sense, the future of society itself.

After an opening chapter on power – in which he argues that ‘money is the political body par excellence’ (p. 39) – Goodchild launches into an assault on the myths of modernity in his second chapter. ‘Modernity has always been a utopian myth’, he begins (p.43). He analyzes this myth in terms of four kinds of instabilities: physical, conceptual, economic, and market. The physical instabilityis due to a conflict between economy and ecology that will inevitably lead to catastrophe: ‘We are consuming our own collective body’(p. 47). Goodchild makes the point that any economic analysis that only focuses on human labor without accounting for the physical resources upon which such labor depends is ‘deficient’ (p. 49). Conceptually, modernity is built upon abstract concepts, such as‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, which are intrinsically aporetic and self-contradictory, and thus open to propagandistic manipulation. In the case of democracy, the only way to resolve its internal conflicts is to‘appeal to passions and immediate interests’, which explains why modern democracy has become a corporate oligarchy, because ‘the creation of wealth alone has universal appeal to immediate interests’(p. 51). Because of these and other instabilities, the myth of modernity is sustained by a ‘utopian faith’; it depends on ‘nothing less than a secular theology’ (pp. 53–4). But this faith cannot last. Goodchild concludes this chapter with some dire statements about the coming economic collapse and modernity’s imminent end. His claim is that a new social order will not come from taking a principled stand in absolute opposition to contemporary credit capitalism, as that merely reinstates the same modern myths of individual autonomy and sovereign power. Progress will come ‘only from passing through the internal logic of the political body of money, appropriating its soul and distinctive power while subordinating it to newly created ends’ (p. 69). This is precisely what he sets out to do in the rest of the book.

Part Two of Theology of Money (‘A Treatise on Money’) is the heart of the book and is composed of three chapters on the ecology, politics, and theology of money. By ‘ecology’, Goodchild means the whole process of economic production, the network of relations involved in the ‘accu-mulation, invention, and assembly’ of capital (p. 73). This ecology refersalso to the earth’s ecological systems, in that ‘economy and ecology are mathematically incompatible’ (p. 81). Primarily, although, this chapterdetails the complex web of relations established by the global capitalisteconomy, driven as it is by promise and desire. He concludes by notingthe paradox that the freedom established by capitalism ‘offers very littleeffective freedom’ (p. 120). The following chapter on the politics of money extends this critical analysis of money to the institution of themarket. This includes problems of distribution, wealth accumulation,and class differences. Goodchild levels some of his most trenchantcriticisms against capitalism in this section. He calls the market ‘adespotic social institution founded on violence’, one that ‘proclaims atotal and universal war’ (p. 128). Money has a spiritual power, one thatappeals to those who benefit from it. For this reason, the only way totransform the injustices of the market is by ‘a stronger spiritual power’(p. 129).

The third chapter within the ‘Treatise on Money’ turns towards Goodchild’s constructive argument for how to reform the modern capitalist economy. While this chapter claims to be a ‘theology of money’, what he addresses under this title is the question of money’s value; theology refers to the evaluation of money, and thus to the complete ‘revaluation of value’ itself. Goodchild develops this argument through an assessment of the ‘morals’ of accounting. In contrast to the ‘culture of individualism, of threat, and of righteous revenge’ that is a constitutive feature of modern economic practices (p. 180), he argues for a change to the practices of accounting that would give rise to a new culture. Accounting is a means of directing one’s attention. A new ethics of accounting would direct attention to what truly matters; it would involve recognizing that value is external to the ecology of money and market forces. A ‘new kind of value’ would be able to assess the production of capital in new ways (p. 185).

The final section of the book (‘Of Theology’) develops the constructive proposal. He begins with a dense reflection on metaphysics and ontology, arguing that the current financial system is marked by a‘metaphysical failure’ and that economic reform can only arise through a new political theology with an alternative metaphysics (p. 214). His basic point is that money and God both compete for the same meta-physical territory today: both claim to be the ‘source of the value of values’ (p. 218), and thus both are ‘competing sources of credit’(p. 211). This leads to his ‘modest proposal’ for economic reform. In the present system, evaluation is subordinate to the desire for profit, because profit alone is able to command a general consensus. Goodchild proposes developing ‘a secondary tier of the economy concerned solely with the production and distribution of effective evaluations’ (p.243). In this way, investment and the production of credit would be subordinate to evaluation. Credit would flow to what is valuable, rather than value being attributed to what is profitable. He identifies several problems that have to be addressed. For example, how will these ‘banks of evaluative credit’ be funded?

Despite the obstacles, Goodchild is to be commended for writing a political theology that makes a robust, concrete, and theoretically viable proposal for how to implement actual economic reform. Unlike most political theologies, this work is neither utopian nor separatist: it is not limited to a future eschatological kingdom, nor is it limited to the community of faith. He provides a way of reforming the global capitalist economy from within capitalism. Put differently, he has sketched a way to bring the alternative evaluation of socialism into the present economic system. One can only hope that this work will gain a wide and interdisciplinary – not to mention also non-academic reading.

David W. Congdon

Princeton Theological Seminary

Book Review

CLAYTON CROCKETT

University of Central Arkansas

MONEY AND CREDIT, THEOLOGICALLY SPEAKING

http://www.jcrt.org/archives/09.3/crockett.pdf

Review of Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money.

SCM Press, 2007. 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-334- 04142-9

(American edition forthcoming from Duke University Press)

Philip Goodchild is the most constructive and original philosopher of religion in the UK, and his Theology of Money succeeds and builds upon the themes opened up by his important book Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (2002). In this extraordinary new work, Goodchild offers a sustained analysis and critique of how money functions as the value of value, and how it determines our metaphysics, our ethics, our politics, our economics and our theology. Money is directly theological insofar as “money replaces God as the metaphysical source of truth, value and power” in the modern world (221).

What Goodchild offers is both a critique of money and a theology of money, and part of what makes this book so fascinating is the significance of calling what he is doing here a theology of money as opposed to simply a critique of money. At the beginning of the book, in the Introduction, Goodchild elaborates Jesus’s attack on money, and states that “theology can have no neutrality here” (3). This framing may suggest that Goodchild is offering us a theological critique of money by opposing a bad contemporary theology of money that functions implicitly and insidiously, with a Christian theology that offers the only true alternative to the supreme value of money. And this reading would be wrong, because Goodchild exposes and critiques a political theology of money, in order to offer an alternative theology of credit that does not look to restore traditional theology or metaphysics.

This does not become entirely clear until the end of the book, but the crux of Goodchild’s argument is to distinguish and separate credit from money, in order to construct a more effective theology. He claims that “theology consists in the ordering of time, attention and devotion” in a broad sense rather than the determinate faith in Jesus Christ or any other particular religious tradition (261- 62). Goodchild argues that in order to oppose the pervasive injustice of money, “the divorce between the secular and the religious, between attending to treasure on earth and attending to treasure in heaven, must be overcome” (243). Theology concerns treasure and wealth, and this is an uncommonly rich book, because Goodchild strains to provide alternative measures of accounting and accreditation from the ones that overwhelm our deeds and our thought.

Goodchild opposes credit and capital to profit and exchange, and argues that we need strategies and institutions to help us evaluate credit and resist the compulsion to value time and attention solely in terms of money. In the Introduction, Goodchild claims that “money exercises a spectral power that exceeds all merely human power” because it creates and shapes desire (12).

In Part 1, “Of Politics,” he suggests that money is a kind of dispersed sovereignty which wields supreme political power in the modern world.

Part 2 is “A Treatise on Money,” which successively lays out an ecology of money, a politics of money, and finally a theology of money. In many respects, the ecology of money is the most illuminating and insightful, because Goodchild delineates the material basis of life and value in terms of energy and nutrition, time and capital.

Finally, Part 3, “Of Theology,” deals directly with credit, and proposes an alternative metaphysics and theology of credit to our current theology and metaphysics of money, and includes a striking reading of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

The last chapter sketches out a proposal for institutional reform, a bank of evaluative credit that would regulate “the production and distribution of effective evaluations” (246). This evaluative economy would constitute a secondary tier to the existing economy, and it would function distinctly in a separate but related realm to the broader monetary economy. I do not have the evaluative expertise to say whether or not such a proposal would work or would work well, but I do think that we urgently need to experiment with alternative ways to distribute and evaluate capital and credit.

Ultimately evaluative credits provide a different way to measure and evaluate capital. Capital, according to Goodchild, “is the means of production that has itself been produced” (77). Capital is negentropic, and it is the source of all wealth. The problem is that money has exchange value only measures rates of profit. Capitalism is “the social system in which capital is measured as an accumulative quantity in terms of exchange value,” and it is more profitable in the short term to consume the means of production of capital itself than to preserve them for the production of future capital (84). The primary value of capitalism is money, because everything can be expressed in terms of exchange value, as a commodity. Money as credit is created as a debt, but debt must be calculated and repaid at usurious rates of interest that ultimately comes at the cost of human life and liberty, flesh and blood (228-29). Capital and credit must be liberated from their capture in systems of exchange and debt, which is what redemption is all about, if it is possible. Redemption, as Goodchild claims at the conclusion of his book, depends upon the creation of new value.

Goodchild’s emphasis upon the overwhelming significance of money to create and sustain value seems both correct and over-stated. That is, given the prevalence and predominance of our theology of money and its sovereignty, it seems impossible to offer any alternative vision or value unless this value is limited in some respect. So Goodchild’s case appears to totalize the ubiquity of money and its effects. I would tentatively suggest a competing value, something like glory, which is not an oppositional value but one that often works in coordination with money. Glory appeals to the surplus of value above and beyond exchange value, the desire for fame and power that is not immediately or directly connected to money’s intermediary capacity. This is a difficult issue, because of course glory and money reinforce each other, but I would argue that there is a distinction, and that glory provides the most significant alternative value for contemporary human beings, although I agree with Goodchild that money is the over-arching force and value.

In some ways Goodchild’s reading of Merchant of Venice and his argument that money veils flesh and blood provides evidence for my counter-claim. The value that we ascribe to the flesh is economic as well as aneconomic. Flesh offers a sensuality, a romantic and political form of life that Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call bio-political, and I think that bio-politics is not divorced from a monetary economy and its sovereignty, but works in conjunction with it. I just think that flesh or life possesses an aspect of glory that cannot be reduced to or conflated with money’s role in establishing a universal value. One way to phrase this understanding, using Deleuze’s terms, would be to suggest that glory (as flesh or as life or as power) deterritorializes the world, opening it up to a reterritorialization of and by money. Or, we could say that glory is the halo of money, its shining which allows it to appear as other than money, which is closer to Goodchild’s own analysis. At the same time, glory offers a competing value and allows for an evaluation of money otherwise than simply on its own terms.

In terms of contemporary capitalism, money works because it is a form of capital as well as a means of exchange. Money as credit is lent to create money in the form of debt, and these loans allow for capital are tied to the ability of money to replace and represent things that then become commodities. What is easily missed is the fact, as Goodchild notes, that money and capital are grounded in physical, material and organic processes, including the excavation and exploitation of cheap energy via fossil fuels.

These two processes, the financial and energetic, allow for the incredible production of goods and material enrichment of human existence, at least in rich countries, over the last two centuries. Unfortunately, we are now experiencing the collapse of the largest financial bubble ever created, and the ongoing credit crunch is destroying money faster than it can be created in a process of global deflation of value. At the same time, world oil production is peaking (51), making energy more expensive and scarce, which increases commodity prices and prevents the creation of a new investment bubble, such as the investment in the development of alternative energies that is urgently needed. These two trends occur against the background of global warming, or the accelerating of global climate change and the straining of the earth’s resources caused by human over-population and over-production.

Goodchild offers an understanding of this situation that articulates what is most important about it, including its theological significance. He appreciates that it is not simply the critique and re-circulation of ideas but the production of value that is theological, because it allows for the re-ordering of time, attention and devotion. Furthermore, Goodchild understands that there is no real change possible without institutional reform, that evaluative credit can only work if there are institutions to support and foster the generation of evaluative credit.

Theology appears to offer only two alternatives to our current situation, in contrast to the accommodation to predominance of money which is liberal or neo-liberal. On the one hand, fundamentalism provides an apocalyptic resignation by affirming the catastrophic state of affairs but then offers itself up to an incredible fairy-tale god who will punish the wicked and save the righteous. On the other hand, genuine conservative and neo-orthodox theologies offer counter-values based upon Abrahamic, biblical and/or medieval (nonmodern) values to oppose modernity and its political theology of money. Goodchild’s Theology of Money, however, sketches a radical theological vision of credit that promises the potential for a future theology as well as a future humanity. He admits that he does not fully develop a metaphysics of credit in this book, but he provides vital resources of thought and capital for theological and practical human beings to put to work.

CLAYTON CROCKETT is Associate Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas, as well as an Editor of JCRT. He is a co-editor, along with Slavoj Zizek, Creston Davis and Jeffrey W. Robbins, of the book series "Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics and Culture," published by Columbia University Press. He is currently working on a book on radical political theology.

© Clayton Crockett. All rights reserved. Crockett, Clayton. “Money and Credit, Theologically Speaking,” in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 9 no. 3 (Fall 2008): 7-10.

Review Bruce McCormack - Studies on Karl Barth's Theology

Bruce McCormack: Barth in response to Open Theism

 http://fireandrose.blogspot.com/2008/07/bruce-mccormack-barth-in-response-to.html

by David W. Congdon

on July 3, 2008

Bruce McCormack recently edited a volume of essays by Protestant theologians on the doctrine of God, entitled, Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives. The volume is well worth reading, in part because of the range of perspectives represented in its pages—including everyone from D. A. Carson to John Webster. But the book is worth the price just for McCormack’s essay. His article, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” is a 57-page exploration of the claims made by open theism over against classical theism as well as the alternative which Barth provides to both of those metaphysical positions. As a way to whet your appetite for more, here is the opening of McCormack’s essay:

For nearly two decades now, the evangelical churches in America have been the scene of a polarizing debate between defenders of classical theism and the proponents of what is typically referred to as “open theism.” After reading through the growing literature generated by both sides, my own conclusion is that each has something important to say; each has “theological values” which would need to be preserved in any truly adequate doctrine of God. The trouble is that both sides are actually occupying a shared ground on which no resolution of the debate is thinkable. It is clearly time for some fresh thinking.

As the subtitle of this essay makes clear, the goal here is to bring Karl Barth into conversation with the open theists. The decision to treat Barth in relation to open theism rather than classical theism is not based upon a belief that he stood closer to the former than the latter. Far from it. As I have already suggested, both sides to the current debate stand finally upon the same ground—a ground which would have to be abandoned if the values now contained in each model were to be brought into a single, unified conception. Barth occupies a very different ground, and as we shall see, it is because he does so that he is able to take up and preserve the values set forth in each of the other two models.

In any event, Barth does not stand closer to the open theists than he does to the classical theists. The decision to bring Barth into conversation with open theism is based simply upon the perception that open theism is attracting a great deal of attention—to the point of disturbing the peace of the churches—and the belief that it is not dealt with adequately where it is met by power plays (e.g., attempts to exclude its proponents from membership in the Evangelical Theological Society). The only adequate response is to provide an alternative which is demonstrably superior to it—something today’s defenders of classical theism have consistently failed to do.

- Bruce L. McCormack, “The Actuality of God: Karl Barth in Conversation with Open Theism,” Engaging the Doctrine of God: Contemporary Protestant Perspectives (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2008), 185-86.

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Bruce McCormack:

Orthodox and modern: studies in the theology of Karl Barth

http://www.faith-theology.com/2008/09/bruce-mccormack-orthodox-and-modern.html

Posted by Ben Myers

September 19, 2008

Bruce McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Baker Academic, 2008), 317 pp. (review copy courtesy of Baker)

Bruce McCormack’s 1995 work on Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology is one of the towering monuments of Barth studies. It casts its shadow over all subsequent interpretation of Barth, just as it has corrected or relativised much earlier work in the field.

Since 1995, McCormack has produced a steady stream of essays on Barth’s theology (a full list here) – essays which have continued to expand the horizons of Barth-interpretation in many directions. Broadly speaking, McCormack’s full corpus of essays can be divided into three categories:

1. historical studies, focusing especially on Barth’s relation to the 19th century; 
2. studies of Barth’s relation to contemporary theology (especially to contemporary evangelicalism – although unfortunately none of the essays on evangelicalism appear in this collection); and finally, 
3. constructive essays on the contemporary significance of Barth’s theological ontology.

To begin, let us review then each of the points above.

1 The essays selected for this volume (all of them previously published, but some appearing now in English for the first time) are organised under these three categories. In the first section, McCormack explores Barth’s relation to the 19th century, particularly the traditions of Schleiermacherian theology and Kantian philosophy. Against the common tendency to find in Barth a complete break with Schleiermacher and with Kantian foundationalism, McCormack situates Barth within the broad Schleiermacherian tradition of “mediating theologies.” He argues that Barth’s thought remains wedded to neo-Kantian categories (even if, admittedly, “Kant is no longer Kant by the time Barth is finished with him”), and he shows the extent to which Barth remained “a 19th-century theologian” who was deeply preoccupied with the questions and problems of the Schleiermacherian tradition.

If Barth’s project was born of an effort to overcome theological historicism and psychologism, this was in fact a struggle not against Schleiermacher but against Troeltsch – although Barth himself persistently confused Schleiermacher with Troeltsch, or at least imagined that a root-and-branch repudiation of the latter had to entail a rejection of the former. Throughout Barth’s career, however, he shared the fundamental concerns of Schleiermacher, and he agreed with Schleiermacher that post-Kantian dogmatics had to be shaped by the epistemological “turn to the subject” and by the problem of the limits of human knowing.

2 In this set of historical interventions, McCormack’s antipathy to “postmodern” readings of Barth is never far from the surface. For McCormack, postmodern and non-foundationalist appropriations of Barth’s thought are based on flawed understandings of Barth’s own questions and contexts – and also on a failure to grasp the real priorities for contemporary constructive theology. The essays in the book’s second section bring this critique explicitly to the foreground.

McCormack analyses and critiques the “postliberal Barth” of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, together with the “postmodern Barth” of Walter Lowe and Graham Ward. He finds more promise in the work of John Webster – although he observes that, at times, “Webster’s Barth can come across as a bit too ‘premodern’,” too closely wedded to the assumptions of classical metaphysics (p. 164). In any case, McCormack’s main point is that English-language research tends “to move much too quickly to ‘use’ of Barth’s theology before having acquired a proper understanding” (p. 165), so that Barth’s theology too easily becomes a mirror of our own contemporary assumptions and commitments. In short: “The followers of Frei and Torrance must look elsewhere for resources for their various projects” (p. 294).

3 While McCormack’s historical work on Barth is peerless for its depth, range and sophistication, his own recent constructive engagement with Barth’s thought represents a major event within contemporary theology. The essays collected in the third section of the book provide a sample of this recent theological engagement with Barth – beginning with the widely discussed Cambridge Companion essay on “Grace and Being,” where McCormack offers a critical correction of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity. The argument here is that Barth ought to have reversed his ordering of Trinity and election: properly understood, Barth’s own doctrine of election entails that God’s decision to be God-for-us is the ground of God’s triunity. Simply put: according to its own internal principles, Barth’s dogmatics ought to begin with the doctrine of election, not with the doctrine of the Trinity.

In chapter 8, a magisterial essay on “Karl Barth’s Historicized Christology” (previously published in German), McCormack continues to pursue this revisionist reading of Barth, by exploring Barth’s own revision of Chalcedonian christology. Before developing his doctrine of election, Barth’s thought contained significant traces of “the abstract metaphysical ontology which underwrote the Christology of the Chalcedonian Council” (p. 207). It was only with the development of his doctrine of election that he was able to excise this metaphysics from his thought; the turning-point here was his insight that Jesus Christ is the subject of election, so that election is “a free act in which God assigned to himself the being God would have for all eternity” (p. 216). God’s decision to be God-for-us is an event in which God differentiates himself into the three modes of being – Father, Son and Spirit. The gap between Jesus Christ and the eternal Son is thus eliminated.

The second mode of being in God simply is Jesus Christ. Indeed, this insight can lead McCormack to support Bertold Klappert’s challenging remark that “Barth does not think incarnationally.” For Barth, there is no absolute metaphysical subject which unites itself to a human “nature.” Rather, there is a divine decision in which humanity is taken up into the event of God’s own being, so that “the human history of Jesus Christ is constitutive of the being and existence of [the second Person of the Trinity]” (p. 223).

In these highly creative readings (and constructive revisions) of Barth, McCormack is pressing towards the articulation of a striking new theological ontology. I once remarked that, where theological ontology is concerned, John Milbank’s project is the only game in town – and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that McCormack’s work represents the only thoroughgoing counter-proposal to Milbank’s ontological vision which is available in contemporary theology.

• While Milbank’s ontology is structured by hierarchical and participatory categories, McCormack articulates an ontology structured by actualistic categories and by a radically historicised doctrine of God.
 
• While Milbank’s thought presupposes an ontological state of primal harmony, peace and fecundity, McCormack issues a direct challenge to “the Trinity of peace and perfection” (p. 276), and he envisions instead a Trinity of act and decision, centered on the insight that “the death of Jesus Christ in God-abandonment … [is] an event in God’s own life” (p. 189).

Although McCormack has never directly engaged Milbank’s work, his essay on “Participation in God” (chapter 9) shows how much is at stake in the question of creaturely deification, and in the ontological categories through which “participation in God” is understood.

In all this, McCormack’s writing is shaped by Karl Barth and by the distinctive problems of modern German theology; but his proposals have a much wider theological significance, and they deserve close attention and deep reflection. Within the narrower field of Barth studies, of course, McCormack’s work is not only a towering presence – it is also highly contentious and divisive. As McCormack himself observes, his recent work on ontological actualism “has incited a controversy that threatens to divide Barth scholars in the English-speaking world into two rival camps” (p. 295).

I can only speak for myself here, but I think this division is a productive and important one – and I hope it is sharpened all the more by the appearance of this book. As I suggested in an earlier post (against Paul Molnar), I believe the future of theology lies not in any incarnational realism, nor in the recovery of a metaphysical Chalcedonian objectivism, but rather in a far-reaching appropriation of Barth’s christological actualism. And for this task, there is no better guide than the work of Bruce McCormack.

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Karl Barth: Of

Calvinism and Armeninianism

I had a conversation with Dr. Roger Olson about Karl Barth on another matter

but in that conversation we talked about Barth's position on Calvinism and

Armenianism. He was the jist of that discussion....

- skinhead

Russ says:

August 22, 2011 at 1:05 pm

If you have not done so already I would be interested in what Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Dietrick Boenhoffer taught as vs. evangelical and emergent Christian thot today. For me Barth is complex and simplifying him may not be possible. Still Barth seems to offer some 3rd-way alternatives to the discussions of Calvinism v. Arminianism, as well as to Open Theism (or so I’ve read). Thank you. (Roger's reply did not include references to Open Theism)

rogereolson says:

August 23, 2011 at 11:57 am

• Great question. My study has led me to believe the following about these theologians and the whole Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate. Barth was basically a monergistic universalist (salvation without the interaction of the human will). Someday I’m going to defend that thesis here. I have friends who know Barth just as well as I do who disagree, but my study of Barth’s doctrine of election has led me to that conclusion. Of course, that would put him at odds with Arminianism as well as with traditional Calvinists. Barth called his own view “purified supralapsarianism (a double predestination position that God consigns the non-elect to hell with foreknowledge).” That alone should prove my thesis–especially in light of his adamant insistence that Jesus Christ was the only reprobate man. 
• Brunner reveled in paradox, but I see his soteriology as very close to Arminianism. Some of my students over the years have written papers on Brunner and Arminianism and I’m convinced their conclusions are right. They all concluded that there is real affinity between them. Brunner despised double predestination while affirming single predestination but without the monergistic, individualistic flavor one finds in much traditional Calvinism. He affirmed divine self-limitation throughout his Dogmatics. 
• Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran. That should settle it. Lutherans generally reject both Calvinism and Arminianism as too rationalistic and simply embrace paradox (if not contradiction). But I’m not aware of whether he ever addressed the Luther versus Melanchthon issue over monergism versus synergism.