An Ikonoclast - For Those Desiring Eden

 

http://peterrollins.net/?p=3888

by Peter Rollins

August 30, 2012

 

I remember a good friend calling me many years ago, having just read How (Not) to Speak of God. As the conversation went on he said, “Pete, those gatherings you write about in the second part of the book were so inspiring. I loved them! They were so much better than when I was at them!”

 

This can help us understand Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the harsh realities of the French Revolution (with its terror and violence) and the inspiration birthed by the French Revolution (inspiring far-reaching political and social upheaval). In short, his insight that a problematic material reality can provide the ground for the birth of an ideal that instigates wide-ranging transformation.

 

With the creation of ikon (along with The Last Supper, The Evangelism Project, The Omega Course and Atheism for Lent) a group of people in Belfast embarked on a grand and ridiculous project of rethinking the event of Christianity. In the course of setting up and running it, a new and inspiring vision of faith appeared to grow. Yet the on the ground reality was often difficult (lack of resources, equipment that failed, bad ideas, conflicts, misunderstandings etc. etc.) The dirt out of which the idea grew was, well… dirty.

 

Knowing all of this another friend recently asked me if I would be willing to put myself through it all again. Whether I would want to get my hands dirty with a new project that would no doubt be full of difficulties and conflicts. The answer was a simple one: absolutely!

 

I’m no gardener, but I guess that one of the best bits is the work of digging into the manure and planting seeds that might grow into something beautiful. The only thing holding me back has been the time it takes to find people to work with and the effort needed to really understand the landscape that will be worked on. But the time of preparing is over.

 

A small, but growing, band of people have come together. A group who are, in fear and trembling, embarking on a new one-year project with me starting on the 9^th September in Brooklyn. I have no illusions that this will be a difficult journey as we strive to present a radically different vision of faith, one that overturns what is taken for granted by so much of the actually existing church. It will no doubt involve conflicts, boredom, confusion and annoyance at different times among different people. Some things will hopefully work beautifully and others will no doubt fall flat on their face. We will risk and we will fail… not once, but time and again.

 

So do I think that something wonderful will arise out of the dirt? I honestly don’t know, but we’ve got to try.

 

In truth, if you pack a few things and come along with us on this dissident journey there will be times when you’ll regret it and be disappointed. Because of that, if you want to be involved I would dissuade you from coming, there are other more brightly lit paths to walk. But if you need to come, if you feel that you must throw yourself in to this cauldron and see what happens, then do what you need to in order to be there.

 

Also sign up to the Pyrotheology facebook page to be kept up to date with future events.

 

 

Dystopia | Deity Nightclub | Brooklyn | 7pm | 9th September

 

 

 

 

"How Deep the Father's Love"

How Deep the Father's Love for Us (w/ on-screen lyrics)

 

 

 

LYRICS 

 

How deep the Father's love for us,
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
And make a wretch His treasure.

How great the pain of searing loss,
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the Chosen One,
Bring many sons to glory.

Behold the Man upon the cross,
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice,
Call out among the scoffers.

It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished.

I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection.

Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom.

The Story Behind the Song “How Deep the Father’s Love For Us”

http://doxaworship.org/?p=339

 

 

 

To begin our time of response this week in Doxa, we will be singing the modern hymn, “How Deep the Father’s Love For Us”, a song which speaks of the great loss of God the Father (the sacrifice of His Son) so that we could be redeemed. Check out what the author, Stuart Townend, reveals as he tells us the story behind this great song:

 

Writing this song was an unusual experience for me. I’d already written quite a few songs for worship, but all in a more contemporary worship style, drawing from my own musical background. But I distinctly remember getting this feeling one day that I was going to write a hymn! Now, like most people, I am familiar with hymns – they form part of my church background, and I love the truth contained in many of them. But I don’t go home at the end of a busy day and put on a hymns album! So I don’t think of hymns as where I’m at musically at all!

 

Nevertheless, I’d been meditating on the cross, and in particular what it cost the Father to give up his beloved Son to a torturous death on a cross. And what was my part in it? Not only was it my sin that put him there, but if I’d lived at that time, it would probably have been me in that crowd, shouting with everyone else ‘crucify him’. It just makes his sacrifice all the more personal, all the more amazing, and all the more humbling.

 

As I was thinking through this, I just began to sing the melody, and it flowed in the sort of way that makes you think you’ve pinched it from somewhere! So the melody was pretty instant, but the words took quite a bit of time, reworking things, trying to make every line as strong as I could.

 

After it was finished, I remember playing it to Dave Fellingham a few minutes before a time of worship. I was worried it was perhaps too twee, too predictable. Dave, in his typical demonstrative and over-enthusiastic way, shrugged his shoulders and said, “yeah, it’s good”, and that was that. It was only when I began to use it in worship, and all sorts of people of different ages and backgrounds responded to it so positively, that I thought that it might be a useful resource to the church at large.

 

Now I’m finding it gets used all over the world, by all sorts of churches; it seems to be as accessible to a traditional church as it is to a house church, and I’m excited by that. But it has perhaps branded me as an old man before my time. It was fed back to me that at a conference a couple who loved the song were surprised to hear I was still alive…

 

Stuart

 

 

 

Stuart Townend
October 2008
Background information
Born	1963
Origin	West Yorkshire, England
Genres	Contemporary Christian music, hymns, contemporary worship music
Occupations	Songwriter, worship leader, music publishing executive
Instruments	Vocals, piano, guitar, banjo
Labels	Kingsway Music
Website	www.stuarttownend.co.uk

 

 

Stuart Townend is an English Christian worship leader and writer of hymns and contemporary worship music. His songs include "In Christ Alone", (2002, co-written with Keith Getty, Townend's first collaboration with any other songwriter),^[1][2] "How Deep The Father's Love For Us", "Beautiful Saviour" and "The King of Love".^[3] As of 2008, Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) lists "In Christ Alone" in its Top 25 CCLI Songs list.

 

 

From Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Townend

(Not to be confused with Stuart Townsend.)

 

 

 

 

 

Stuart Townend - How Deep The Father's Love For Us (Story Behind the Song)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Love, Loss and the Uncoupling of Our World

 

http://peterrollins.net/?p=3900

by Peter Rollins
September 2, 2012

I am currently reading Slavjo Zizek’s latest book Less Than Nothing. It is a profound and systematic work (though I must warn that if you don’t have a background in continental philosophy it is difficult). Anyway, the following reflections are directly inspired by his writing on Malebranche, Occasionalism and the Big Other found there.

 

Descartes famously theorised that the human being was made up of two different substances: a body and spirit/soul/mind. In order to understand how these interacted he postulated the existence of what he called the Pineal Gland. This was, for Descartes, the physical location where the two substances united.

 

The problem however was that these two substances were so different that the idea of a gland uniting the two made no sense. It simply acted as a type of black box solution. Somehow, something happened in the gland that meant our thoughts could impact our body and visa versa.

 

As a result of the problems raised by the idea of the Pineal Gland the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche argued that, for the mediation to occur between mind and body, a third (true) substance was required to intervene. For him this was God. The argument was that, at every moment, God was at work ensuring that whenever we went to pick up a glass, scratch our nose or smile the intention would correspond with the act. Without God intervening at every moment in this way our intentions would be revealed as ultimately impotent. Like experiencing anastasia awareness we would find ourselves locked inside an inert body, unable to do anything at all.

 

This philosophical idea was called “Occasionalism” and worked with the idea that what we take as immediate (the interaction between our intentions and acts) is really mediated by God, who listens tirelessly to what we want and manipulates our body seamlessly so that it would appear the two (intention and act) are one.

 

Bizarre and outdated as this philosophical idea might seem it can actually help us to make sense of a very human experience. Take the example of things that we might enjoy such as travelling, fine dinning, time with friends or certain sports. The enjoyment of these things is experienced as direct. Biting into a chocolate, for instance, and experiencing the pleasure of the taste is analogous to the connection we feel between intending toward a glass of water and the act of lifting it up. They are not felt to be two separate things, they are experienced as one.

 

However, if we lose the people we love, we discover the truth that the relationship between the act and its meaning were really coupled via a mediator: the presence of the beloved. Without them we experience a strange uncoupling of what previously seemed whole.

 

This can be a deeply traumatic event because of the way that we experience our hobbies as pleasurable in an immediate way. However, after the loss of someone who bestows our life with meaning things change. We might still go to a fine restaurant and eat some delicious food like before. But now the act is devoid of the seemingly innate pleasure it once possessed.

 

No matter how special the food, it has now been reduced to inert matter with no function other than a basic biological one. To experience the uncoupling of our acts from the seemingly implicit meaning they have is not unlike the experience of sleep paralysis, in which a person wakes up to find that their body no longer acts in conformity to their intentionality. The psychological impact of experiencing the uncoupling of such a whole is traumatic.

 

Is this not what we witness in films such as Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers? Here we are presented with Don Johnston (Bill Murray) a man who undergoes this radial uncoupling in his own life after his girlfriend ends their relationship unexpectedly.

 

It is for this reason that many end up in psychoanalysis. Not because of some desire to change, but because the individual no longer really desires anything at all. They have entered into a surreal, Daliesque world in which things have become disconnected from themselves. It is as if we have just discovered that we inhabit a virtual reality world that, all of a sudden, is indifferent to our movements.

 

In Broken Flowers Johnston’s neighbour embodies the role of the analyst by helping Johnston try to find meaning once again (through the attempt to track down a son who he never knew he had).

 

It is in the loss of our mediators that we learn that what is worse tha[n] losing something that we desire is losing those who enabled us to desire.

 

 

 

 

Index - Poetry of R.E. Slater

Index - 

Poetry of R.E. Slater

Arranged in chronological order

OneRepublic - Come Home (prodigal son)

"Wherever home is,

Whatever home is,

Return,

Begin again,

Become anew."

- R.E. Slater

August 12, 2012

Shifting Sands

The Lure of Becoming

And Death Becomes Them

Cycles of the Fallen

Questions I Ask Myself When Nobody is Listening

A Country Idyll (prose)

Everyday Attitudes

We, the Vainglorious, Thy Holy Sentinels

To the Unknown God of Radically Lived Theology

To the Unknown God of Radical Love

Creation

Middle Earth Prose (Tolkien Untangled)

Seeing God in the Color of Blue


A Radical Democracy

 And Death Shall Go Before

T-Shirts I Have Worn in Life

In the Processual Beginning

Being and Begetting

With Malice Towards None

The Wheel of Time

The Power of God's Love

In the (Processual) Beginning

The Birth & Death of God


Ruptured Soils


Butterfly Wings of Promise


7X7 Anger

Being and Becoming

The Eighth Day of Creation

Meditations

God, the Poet

The Son of Protagoras

Annihilation

Ancient Rhythms

The Becoming of God

Love

Kintsukuroi - "Repaired with Gold"

Kindred Fellowships


Certainty Against Despair

Rebirth

The Glory of the Lord (psalm)

Three Coins in a Fountain

Rebirth: Towards An Open Bible and Emerging Faith

Expressing Love


Star Light, Star Bright


 A Prayer

The Power of Our Words (poem)


Jars of Clay (poem)

Parable of the Prodigal Son

Luke 15:11-32 (ESV)

11 And he said, “There was a man who had two sons. 12 And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he dividedhis property between them. 13 Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. 14 And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to[a] one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. 16 And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.

17 “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! 18 I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’20 And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’[b] 22 But the father said to his servants,[c] ‘Bring quicklythe best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.23 And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. 24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.

25 “Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. 27 And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ 28 But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, 29 but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.30 But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ 31 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. 32 It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’”

Footnotes

Luke 15:15 Greek joined himself to

Luke 15:21 Some manuscripts add treat me as one of your hired servants

Luke 15:22 Greek bondservants