Body-Modification, the Market, and Identity

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

This post follows on from On Tattoos. It might be best to read that first.

Following my recent post on the subject of tattoos, John H suggested a connection between the practice of body-modification and Christian consumerism. Both are attempts to secure identity, one through marks upon the body, the other through commodities. Both involve a sort of tribalism. I questioned this account, arguing that this relationship between the two is rather less straightforward.

The fact that body-modification seeks to establish identity by means of permanent marks upon the body is significant. In these respects, body-modification provides a (frequently co-opted) counter-narrative to the market and its modes of identity.

The ‘Culture’ of Consumption

Alan Storkey suggests that the heart of postmodernism is consumption.

[M]uch of the erudite and even arcane discussion of postmodernism misses the most powerful theory of all. Postmodernism is consumption. The deconstruction and fragmentation which is often identified with changes in approaches to text and philosophy is actually buying, advertisements, TV culture, in-your-face entertainment, shopping, pressure, thing-filled living – in a word, consumption. This is where the fragmentation is located and initiated, and much of the culture merely reflects these pressures.

I think that there is something to this.

The culture of consumption is characterized by ephemerality and the constant distractedness of desire, which renders it incapable of desiring any one thing deeply. The culture of consumption is, as William Cavanaugh observes, not about always wanting ‘something more,’ so much as it is about always wanting something ‘something different’. ‘In consumer culture, dissatisfaction and satisfaction cease to be opposites, for pleasure is not so much in the possession of things as in their pursuit.’ The postmodern is the vagabond tourist, the consumer of places who no longer has a home of his own. The desire of such a person cannot finally settle on one thing, but is always kept on the move (lacking the capacity to fix on any item, and in the context of an increasingly undifferentiated society, it is ever more vulnerable to the whims of mimetic desire – when culture is uprooted and persons are free to follow their own desire, they tend to desire what everyone else desires). Within this context, ‘relationships’ with products are transitory and easily abandoned when something better comes along.

Consumption is also anti-cultural. Consumption erodes cultural identities by idolizing choice over all else. As I suggest in this post, culture can cease to exist when choice is absolutized and the taboo or cultural prohibition is denied. Culture ceases to exist where there is no ‘thou shalt not’. The marketplace commodifies culture in the form of marketable simulacra, while destroying the originals. It uproots and dilutes culture in order to render it marketable. In an age of globalization, the ‘authentic’ culture that it markets is almost invariably an entity that no longer exists. Perhaps the perfect example of this is a nation that goes crazy about ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ mugs and tea towels, buying an ‘authentic’ Britishness of whose passing they serve as definitive proof.

The globalized marketplace detaches us from all times, places, and cultures. In the context of the universal market, there is nothing truly other, everything is merely different. Things are rendered interchangeable, replaceable, and exhaustively commensurable.

In this context of detachment and disconnectedness, few things are more desired than ‘authenticity’. The marketplace offers us (a specious) ‘authenticity’ in the form of such things as highly specialized cultural and exotic commodities, organic produce, and through its facilitation of the cultural meme of being ‘true to oneself’, undermining any cultural norms that might stand in the way of the lifestyle consumer.

The marketplace also offers us ‘branding’, creating intimate relationships between people and things. Cavanaugh writes:

Associating in one’s mind with certain brands gives a sense of identity: one identifies one’s self with certain images and values that are associated with the brand. Branding offers opportunities to take on a new self, to perform an “extreme makeover” and become a new person.

Nevertheless, these relationships aren’t built to last. Ultimately, all comes down to the immediate desire of the consumer, fickle, and subject to continual destabilizing mimetic crosswinds. Cavanaugh claims that

the subject is radically decentered, cast adrift in a sea of disjointed and unrelated images. If identity is forged by unifying the past, present, and future into a coherent narrative sequence, the ephemerality and rapid change of images deconstructs this ability. The late capitalist subject becomes “schizophrenic”, in Lacan’s terms, and experiences only “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time”.

The Appeal of Body-Modification in the Postmodern Context

I believe that the appeal of tattooing and body-modification needs to be understood in such a context. In a society where all is subject to the immediacy of the desire of the moment, it is the tattoo or body-modification that represents a genuinely ‘cultural’ choice – a choice that marks you for the rest of your life, whatever your future choices might be. It is a way of recording your past in the one place where it can’t easily be dislodged by the movement of the marketplace and the dislodging of desire and forgetfulness that it induces in us.

It is in the pain and bodily record of the tattoo that memory and identity are secured, and the past and future united to the present. The tattoo provides a relationship that will last, something permanent in a world of ephemerality. If one can dispute the ‘authenticity’ of all else, one cannot dispute the authenticity of one’s own body. The tattoo is more real than anything offered by the rapidly changing products on store shelves. The tattoo is something that overcomes detachment, as one cannot easily detach oneself from one’s own body. Finally, the tattoo is an attempt to be truly different in a society of the merely different.

A Christian Alternative to Consumerism

I believe that the culture of body-modification, as an attempt to shore up identity against consumerism is a futile cul de sac, even though it arises from a genuine appreciation of the spiritual emptiness of the contemporary marketplace and the meaninglessness of the identities that it offers. More importantly, I believe that as an attempt to secure identity through the marking of the body, it is driven by an impulse that is inconsistent with the Christian message.

The Christian alternative to consumerism involves our cultural inscription into a new body, and the inscription of a new social identity into our bodies, as we are conformed to the person of Christ, and bear the mark of his character and his Church upon us. It involves the fixing of desire upon the inexhaustible and unchanging good that Christ represents. It involves a surpassing of the logic of the merely different through the uniqueness of a Christ beyond and without price. It finds authenticity in the one who is closer to us than we are to ourselves, the one in whose image we were formed, and to whose image we are being transformed. It finds memory and persistence of identity through time in the constant re-membering of Christ that the Church undertakes.

This Christian alternative, however, does not adopt the tribalist or individualist route to securing identity. Baptism creates universal and decentred subjects, unplugged from their particular cultural substance, who find their identity in something far more determinative – the love and body of Christ. Our own flesh is a weak place in which to secure our identities, but Christ has given his own flesh for the life of the world. It is in relationship to the genuine otherness of Christ that our distinct identities can most flourish without being rendered merely different, as God himself names us. The Church is also a place where desire is trained and strengthened. When our desire is strengthened it can fix itself on one thing and no longer be at the mercy of market trends.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.

Posted in Culture | 8 Comments

Tarrying with the Tragic

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Yesterday I made some brief remarks on the Christian economy of pain. The subject came to mind again earlier today. The following are a few further thoughts on the matter.

In yesterday’s post I commented on the manner in which pain naturally separates us, but that for Christians it can become something profoundly different, as at the very heart of our faith is the notion of a fellowship of shared sufferings. Consequently, Christians should be marked by their capacity to have non-alienated fellowship with those in pain.

A forgetfulness of this truth can manifest in the Church in many forms. One of the most significant things that will happen when this truth is forgotten is that the whole realm of the ‘tragic’ will acquire a different character within the Church’s life. In particular, there will be a vacation of the realm of the tragic, or a re-description of it that denies its tragic character. Thorns in the flesh will be sugar-coated or those that experience them will be marginalized.

As Christians, of course, we can’t escape the biblical concern with those suffering or undergoing tragedy. However, we are constantly tempted to replace a commitment to presence with such for an approach that is fixated upon cure. When we can’t ‘cure’ the situation of the person in tragedy, they can become an embarrassment to us, or maybe even a cause of resentment (perhaps in part because we always tend to resent the people that we hurt). We retreat from them, although perhaps not before condemning them to a greater isolation by questioning the reality of their faith. For no one experiencing a situation of unalleviated suffering could have true faith, right?

Our society is one with a low pain threshold for suffering and tragedy, both its own and that of others. As Christians we are more affected by this than we might like to believe. While it might seem to be a positive thing to have a low pain threshold for the suffering of others, often this can be the very reason that we seek to remove those who are suffering beyond cure from our sight. For our low pain threshold for the suffering of others is not ultimately about their pain, but about our distress at having to witness it.

This vacation of the place of tragedy can be witnessed in the attitudes of churches to a whole range of different issues. In our vacation of the place of tragedy, we either cover up, marginalize, deny, disguise, sugar-coat, or abandon the place of sin and failure, the place of evil and injustice, the place of difficult celibacy and loneliness, the place of bereavement and death, the place of illness and disability, the place of doubt and despair, the place of depression and mental illness, the place of poverty and lack, the place of hunger and thirst, the place of homelessness and destitution, and the place of persecution and ostracization.

We can employ pious statements to mask the reality of sin and death in much the same way as the undertaker dresses and applies cosmetics and perfume to cover the ugly reality of the corpse. ‘All things work together for good,’ ‘It was obviously God’s will,’ etc. We can present faithfulness as a tidy recipe by which people can escape their situations. ‘If you truly believe you will not be afflicted with poverty or ill-health.’ ‘If you really gave your situation over to God, he would provide you with a partner.’ ‘The fact that you are experiencing depression is obviously a sign of unbelief.’

This inability to tolerate the tragic is expressed in theologies across the ecclesiastical spectrum, in many and various ways. It is expressed in the hypocrisy that flourishes in situations where the fact that Christians sin is a taboo, rather than something to be addressed with forgiveness and restoration. It is expressed in the valorization of youth, novelty, fame, hipness, and power over all that is marked by age, failure, or weakness. It is expressed in the inability to accept the notion of costly self-denial as constitutive of Christian vocation, whether that self-denial bites at the level of career ambition, lifestyle and personal wealth, sexual expression and fulfilment, or personal autonomy. It is expressed in the marginalization of the works of mercy within the life and ministry of the Church. It is expressed in the empty pews where those of other classes, races, ethnicities, or generations are missing, or where the mentally or physically disabled, or the chronically ill and elderly no longer sit.

The loss of the possibility of the tragic shapes the framing of alternatives. For instance, one group of Christians tells the single person to be sexually abstinent prior to marriage so that married sex will be more satisfying, and that God will bless such faithfulness with the reward of a faithful spouse. Another group of Christians tells the single person that sexual abstinence is an unreasonable expectation (and even more so when future wedded bliss is not a realistic hope or prospect), and that God obviously can’t expect this of people. Still other groups of Christians take the activist approach and set up endless singles’ groups and engage in vigorous match-making, to try to ‘cure’ the singleness, viewing the lost causes with pity or embarrassment, or as spiritual failures (if they are fortunate enough not to be carefully ignored). What all of these approaches treat as the impossible option or at least as the studiously unspoken possibility is that God might call some people to undergo the struggle of a singleness without any earthly ‘happy ending’ to look forward to, and that he might call people to deny themselves when they could find sexual satisfaction if they were not held to such a clear sexual ethic.

However we fall on the theological issues, I believe that this inability to acknowledge the possibility of the tragic powerfully shapes debates on such subjects as homosexuality in the Church. All sides of the debate seem to blanch at the reality of the tragic represented by the celibate homosexual. Some can’t admit the possibility of a homosexual orientation, and insist that it must be a choice. Some insist that homosexuality can be ‘cured’, failing to say what happens when – as is so often the case – it can’t, and viewing with guilt and embarrassment the many scarred ‘lost causes’ of this approach. Anyone who lives with homoerotic desires throughout their life must be a spiritual failure. For others, the tragedy must be resolved by the celebration of guilt-free homosexual partnerships. It is precisely the impossibility of the tragic that is pressed against the traditional Christian position on the matter. What hardly anyone can acknowledge is that God might call persons to a lifelong tarrying with brokenness and tragedy.

Even for those who do acknowledge this possibility, the person called to tarry with brokenness and tragic is all too often regarded as the exception. What, however, if rather the vacation of the realm of the tragic, as Christians we have a vocation to the realm of the tragic? What if the role of the Church was to reveal the realm of the tragic in its full reality, by following its Master into its very depths? What if our Christian calling was not merely to people whose lives are marked by the tragic, but to be people whose lives are revealed to be marked by the tragic? What if the Church were the only agency on earth that could truly accomplish this? What if the tragic were a constitutive element, not merely of every Christian’s experience, but also of our mission? What if it is in the capacity of the Church to live in and with brokenness and the tragic, with failure, weakness, illness, death, suffering, and disability that the truth of Christ is known? What if it is only in the face of prisoners, the thirsty, the naked, the hungry, and the strangers that we can see the face of our Saviour (and to the extent that we see people as free, satiated, clothed, rich, and insiders, we are unable to see Christ in them)? What if the calling of the Church is to be the open wound on the face of humanity? What if this is the only way that the Church can be rendered Church, and the world rendered world? What if we can only encounter the Man of Sorrows as we walk in his steps?

When God first named Israel, he gave him a disability. From the day of his encounter with God at Peniel, Jacob walked with a limp. Disability and brokenness are sine quibus non of the Church’s existence and testimony, not accidental and embarrassing features. As the place of the purification of faith like gold, the Church must be the place where imperfections rise to the surface. As the place of testimony to a creation in birth pangs, the Church should be the place where that agony is most present, and must always be present where pain is most strongly revealed. As the people who bear witness to a new creation in which all wrongs are righted, all tears dried, all wounds healed, the Church must also be the place where these very aspects of the present order are most manifest.

Is it not in the Church that bears faithful witness to the tragic that the most powerful testimony to the coming return of Christ can be found? Is it not in fellowship with the broken, and in tarrying with the tragic beyond our cure that we most yearn for his coming? Conversely, is it not in the absence of a sense of the tragic in our midst that the Final Coming of Christ slips from our collective horizon? Most troubling, is it not in the absence of this sense that we most easily become the unwitting accomplices of evil, palliating people to its presence, and accommodating people to the tragic dimensions of existence?

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Posted in Theological | 12 Comments

The Christian Economy of Pain

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

From William Cavanaugh’s superb Torture and Eucharist: 

The Christian economy of pain, therefore, overcomes the strict incommunicability of pain on which torture relies. Torture is so useful for isolating individuals in a society from one another in large part because of the inability of people to share pain. Pain is incommunicable beyond the limits of the body, and the sufferer must suffer alone. Christians, nevertheless, make the bizarre claim that pain can be shared, precisely because people can be knitted together into one body.

I am reminded of Stanley Hauerwas’ remarks on the subject of pain and medical ethics. Hauerwas observes the profoundly alienating character of pain, recognizing that, even when we successfully develop a narrative within which our pain is accommodated, this narrative will tend to separate us from others, as it can’t easily be shared. He challenges any approach to medicine that regards it as primarily being about cures, claiming that medicine is primarily about the commitment to be present with those in pain.

Without these habits of presence with those in pain ‘the world of the ill cannot help but become a separate world both for the ill and for those who care for them.’ Hauerwas argues that medicine as the practice of presence is only possible for a particular type of community, and that it is in the life of the Church, a community formed by God’s presence with us in our sin and pain, that such a practice can be formed. ‘Only a people trained in remembering, and remembering as a communal act, their sins and pains can offer a paradigm for sustaining across time a painful memory that it acts to heal rather than to divide.’ Illness and pain come as strangers in our midst. Only a community that has learnt how not to fear the stranger (and we can become strangers to ourselves through illness), through God’s presence with us, can truly practice this presence with others.

Our ability to be present to the sick, to encounter Christ in the one alienated from us by pain, may thus be a test of the degree to which we truly belong to this ‘Christian economy of pain’. It is here that the gospel of health and wealth can most radically jar with the message of Christ. If all of the above is correct, should not our visitation of the sick be seen as a deeply theological practice, a practice that is more than an expression of mere generic charity, but something that should be marked out as distinctively Christian in its character. Can a Church that is not present to the sick be truly Christian? To the extent that my life is insulated from the pain of others, can I call myself a Christian?

Posted in Christian Experience, The Church, Theological | 6 Comments

‘Symbol and Sacrament’ Chapter 5: The Structure of Christian Identity

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Symbol and Sacrament Posts: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2:I, Chapter 2:II, Chapter 3, Chapter 4:I, Chapter 4:II, Chapter 6, Chapter 7

Chauvet has now established the philosophical foundation for his larger project. Now he will turn more directly to the sacraments themselves. The guiding questions will be: ‘What does it mean for the faith that it is woven together out of sacraments? What does it mean, then, to believe in Jesus Christ if such a belief is structured sacramentally?’ (159). In addressing such questions we are led to develop a ‘fundamental theology of the sacramental’.

Sacramental theology is not just a particular district in the larger town of theology: rather, it is ‘a dimension that recurs throughout the whole of Christian theology, a distinctive way of looking at it.’ In rethinking the sacraments, we will find ourselves, to some degree or other, rethinking the entire realm of theology.

One should not, however, fall prey to the idea that the sacraments can be isolated from the world and system of the faith, or think as if God somehow resided within them. For this reason, the next section of Chauvet’s work is largely concerned with situating the sacraments within the totality that is ‘the structure of Christian identity’ (160).

The Structuring of Faith According to the Emmaus Story

Chauvet seeks to provide one particular model of the structure of Christian identity, and takes Luke 24, and the story of the appearance on the road to Emmaus as his starting point. This particular account is flanked by the narratives of the women at the empty tomb (24:1-12) and the appearance to the Eleven (24:36-53). In each of these stories we find people in a state of non-faith, perplexed, with eyes closed, terrified and disbelieving. The cause of their state is in each case ‘linked to the desire to find, to touch, or to see the body of Jesus’ (161). The vision and touch in each case is focused on the ‘dead body of Jesus’ (162). In each case, the resolution offered is through memory (vv.6, 25, 44) and the opened Scriptures (vv.7, 26-27, 44-45).

‘The passage of faith thus requires that one let go of the desire to see-touch-find, to accept in its place the hearing of a word, whether it comes from angels or from the Risen One himself, a word recognized as the word of God.’ The desires to know, find, touch, and prove fail to recognize the Risen Lord, and only lead us back to his dead body.

The form of the Emmaus narrative is also that of the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch and Saul’s conversion, and each story describes the journey whereby one becomes a Christian. Each tells of a journey that leads away from Jerusalem (to Emmaus, Gaza, and Damascus), away from the site of Christ’s death, resurrection, and appearances. In the time of the Church, Jesus is ascended and is the Absent One, who is nonetheless present in the Church. The Church is the body that Jesus takes and in which he is encountered. This is a key that enables us to unlock each of the stories mentioned here. Although the Church is not explicitly mentioned within them, ‘it is everywhere present in a veiled fashion’ (163).

In each of the stories we see that access to faith and vision occurs by means of the sacraments of the Church: ‘the breaking of the bread at Emmaus, the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, the imposition of hands to call down the Holy Spirit on Saul, all characterize the passage from non-faith to faith.’ The ritual actions of the breaking of bread, and the laying on of hands are not mere decorative features in these narratives, but provide the moments when the eyes of the disciples and Saul are opened. In fact, the very way that Jesus’ breaking of the bread is described is a ‘revealing anachronism; it is a phrase taken from the Christian liturgy’ (164). Jesus disappears the moment that he is recognized in the ritual action: it is in that continued ritual action that he is to be recognized. ‘[T]he ritual actions made by the Church in his memory are in fact his own gestures.’

Chauvet observes that such stories follow a threefold pattern. First, an ‘initiative of the Risen One that imposes itself on the witnesses.’ Second, the recognition of the Risen One as the same as the crucified one by the witnesses, by means of a faith whose eyes have been opened. Third, sending out in mission. Without this faithful response one cannot truly receive the good news of the resurrection: it is not ‘a purely extrinsic consequence of faith, but constitutes an intrinsic moment in the very process of structuring faith’ (165).

A crucial part of this missionary witness is the ‘concrete sign’ of the fellowship and communion of the messianic community.

Luke in effect asks his audience, “So you wish to know if Jesus is really living, he who is no longer visible before your eyes? Then give up the desire to see him, to touch him, to find his physical body, for now he allows himself to be encountered only through the body of his word, in the constant reappropriation that the Church makes of his message, his deeds, and his own way of living. Live in the Church! It is there that you will discover and recognize him.”’ (166)

Consenting to the sacramental mediation of the Church requires a complete turn-around. This turn-around is seen in the Emmaus story. The disciples had given up on the mission, and were going their separate ways. The turn-around was a transformation from non-recognition to recognition, from closed to open eyes, from abandoning to taking up mission.

The turn-around is effected as Jesus breaks open their closed conversation. Faith ‘requires an act of dispossession, a reversal of initiative; Instead of holding forth with self-assured pronouncements on God, one must begin by listening to a word as the word of God’ (168). For the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the relationship between Jesus and the Scriptures was ‘the same as his relation to the tomb: a relation of death’ (169).

The circular connection between the three places of the body of Jesus, the tomb, and the Scriptures was complete and closed: over the dead body rose the “memorial tomb” (mnemeion) crowned by the verdict of “put to death according to the Law” (or “according to the Scriptures”), which guaranteed the verdict’s religious legitimacy.

The disciples are stuck in their own death, their own tomb. The eyes of the disciples begin to ‘open’, as Jesus begins to ‘open’ the Scriptures. ‘[T]hey begin to see the Risen One while hearing him “raise himself up” from the Scriptures: he lives there where his word is heard, there where people witness to him “according to the Scriptures.”’

It is in the breaking of bread that Jesus reveals himself, and immediately vanishes from the disciples’ sight. Their eyes ‘open on an emptiness – “he vanished from their sight” – but an emptiness full of a presence’ (170). The same thing happens in the Church’s celebration of the Eucharist. Our eyes open ‘on the emptiness of the invisibility of the Lord’, yet on an emptiness charged with symbolic presence.

The recognition of the resurrected Christ produces the disciples’ own ‘surrection’, transforming them. Having passed through death, they are reborn. Indeed, the whole community of disciples, having passed through death, is reborn as the Church.

The sacraments are in many respects an adaptation to ‘the in-between time’, a balancing of the ‘already’ and ‘not yet’ of the gospel (171). In portraying the sacramental mediation of the Church as he does, Luke is seeking to answer the question of why, if Jesus truly is alive, we cannot see him. Within the three stories that Chauvet examines, especially that of Emmaus, the importance of consenting to the Church as the site of Christ’s presence between the times is presented.

Diagramming Christian identity

Chauvet diagrams one model for Christian identity, a diagram that I have reproduced above. Elements are connected together by arrows, showing that the value of each element must be understood in its place within the whole, and relation to each other element. The ‘whole’ is ‘the symbolic order proper to the Church’ (172). The diagram is an attempt to represent the sacramental mediation of the Church, a mediation that ‘requires a renunciation of a direct line, one could say a gnostic line, to Jesus Christ.’

[A]ccess to faith requires an acceptance of the angels’ message given to the women at the tomb: “He … has risen.” The tomb is empty of the dead body of Jesus, as a “real object” to be observed; it is filled with a “sign to be believed”… (173)

This rejection of all attempts to ‘find’ Christ, and our consent to his presence in the Church instead, entails resistance of three temptations. The first is that of ‘a closed system of religious knowledge’ (174). In many respects this is a particularly Protestant temptation, as Protestants have occasionally sought Christ in the Scriptures to the neglect of all else. Such a system undermines the otherness and unmanageability of God. The second is belief in a sort of sacramental ‘magic’, a peculiarly Roman Catholic temptation. Finally, there is the sort of moralism by which we might seek to gain a claim over God. This temptation can be found in all sorts of churches, most especially those that focus the gospel on social action, or in churches where the presence of Christ in the community is taught in a manner that detracts from Christ’s otherness.

These are three different methods, most often subtle, for killing the presence of the absence of the Risen One, for erasing his radical otherness. Three different ways, expressed another way, to convert him, the “Living” One, into a dead body or an available object.

Referring back to the diagram, Chauvet observes that each of these temptations arises from the isolation of one of the constituent elements of the Christian faith from the others. As in the case of neurosis the abstracted element becomes a ‘point of fixation for the psyche’ (175). Christian faith must always hold these elements together, and cannot rest merely on one or two. Nevertheless, we should not think of this in a static manner: the maintaining of balance must be a dynamic process in which we recognize the timeliness of the accentuation of one particular element rather than others.

Abstracted from the others, each element loses its value. ‘Would not the Scriptures be a dead letter if they were not attested as the Word of God for us today, pre-eminently in the Church’s liturgical proclamation, and if they did not urge the subjects who receive them to a certain kind of ethical practice?’ (177). Likewise, the sacraments are valueless if they are not the ‘living memory’ of the crucified God, and if they do not lead to the worshippers becoming in their practice what they have received in the sacrament. Ethics must also be lived out in response to the Scripture’s revelation of God’s love, and in relation to the gift of the sacraments.

There is a further danger that we must be aware of at this point. Although we must accept the loss of Christ’s departure, and receive his symbolic presence through consenting to the Church as its form, we must not live too comfortably in the Church. The Church is not Christ and, if the Church is recognized as the place of Christ’s presence, it must also be recognized as the place of his absence. ‘[T]o consent to the sacramental mediation of the Church is to consent to … the presence of the absence of God’ (178). At the heart of the Church is a vacancy that will not be filled, and this vacancy is held in place by the mediation of the sacraments.

[I]t is precisely in the act of respecting his radical absence or otherness that the Risen One can be recognized symbolically. For this is the faith; this is Christian identity according to the faith. Those who kill this sense of the absence of Christ make Christ a corpse again.

In this sense, it is appropriate to speak of a ‘homology of attitude’ between Heidegger’s form of philosophy and Christian theology. Becoming a believing subject is never a task that we can finish.

The categories that Chauvet employs in his diagram should be understood in a more expansive sense. For instance, under ‘Scripture’ we should include everything pertaining to the knowledge of revelation, including catechetical and theological understanding. This dimension must always be combined with the dimension of recognition, ‘living symbolically what one is attempting to understand theologically.’ Under the term ‘sacrament’ comes ‘everything that has to do with the celebration of the Triune God in the liturgy’ (179). Ethics includes all interpersonal moral praxis and collective social praxis.

These elements, corresponding to the fundamental anthropological structure of ‘cognition-recognition-praxis’ must be held together. ‘The discursive logic of the sign, the identifying challenge of the symbol, the world-transforming power of the praxis (to the benefit of everyone): these three elements coalesce and form a structure’ (180).

The Place of the Church

Chauvet’s diagram is one of identity rather than salvation. It teaches that there is ‘no recognized salvation’ outside of the Church, not that no salvation exists there at all. This is why there is a broken line surrounding the Church. The circle of the Church is ‘open to the reign which always exceeds the Church; open to the World, in the middle of which it is charged with being the “sacrament” of this reign.’ Nevertheless, while open, the Church still has ‘borders’ that distinguish her from other religions.

The identity of the Church is paradoxical. At the same time as one enters into a ‘well-defined group’ one is also freeing oneself ‘from every parochialism in order to open oneself to the universal’ (181). This leads to two temptations.

The first is for Christians to recoil into their particularity, where the Church is represented as coinciding with the reign and thereby becomes again a closed circle – the “club” of those who may possibly be saved. At the end, opposite this Church without a reign is the reign without a Church, that is, the Church so bursts open toward the universality of the reign that, giving up all its distinguishing marks, it also loses it function as the sacrament of the reign.

The Church is the mediator of every access to Christian identity. This is related to the fact that every form of identification is institutional in character, involving social institutions (such as the family, the school, the nation, etc.) and the norms that they pass on. The modern tendency is to adopt a selective attitude to such identifications. We can’t, however, escape them. The emergence of Christian identity will always be tied to the confession of Christ as testified to in the Scriptures, through the ritual form of this confession, as we are baptized into his name, and feed on his body and blood in communion with his people, and through our living in a transformed manner.

A further thing that the diagram shows is that ‘the recognition of Jesus as Christ and Lord cannot take place … through a personal contact with him, but on the contrary requires acquiescence in the mediation of his symbolic body, the Church’ (183). ‘It is not Christians who, in coming together, constitute the Church; it is the Church that makes Christians’ (184). For the apostolic church,

the coming together in the name of the Lord Jesus was perceived as the chief mark of Christians, the fundamental sacrament of the risen Christ. Christians are people who get together. (185)

In recognizing the institutional Church as the sacrament of God’s reign, we must distinguish the ‘institution’ from the particular organization that the institution adopts in different contexts, something ‘completely relative to the ambient culture’, and which always remains in need of reform. We must also learn to regard the Church as only a sacrament, never forgetting the distance that exists between it and Christ. This is important both for those who are too comfortable within the Church and for those whose criticisms of the institution lead them to miss its sacramental character. Both positions miss the presence-in-absence that the Church as sacrament entails.

[I]s not the resentment which one feels toward a Church tolerated only as a necessary evil, a Church endured and dragged as a ball-and-chain, a symptom of this “gnostic” desire for … immediate contact with Jesus Church … and of an ultra-metaphysical way of thinking that contrary to what we called consent to the corporality of our condition, is constantly reinforced by the preference granted a priori to interiority and transparency? (186)

In contrast to these two approaches, the Church must always be perceived as a ‘transitional space’ in its relation with Christ.

Pastoral Implications

The Christian assembly is the primary sacramental representation of Christ’s presence. However, it is also a stumbling block, ‘for such a representation is also the radical mark of his absence’ (187). ‘The true scandal is ultimately this, the path to our relation with God passes through our relation with human beings and most especially through our relation with those whom the judgment of the mighty has reduced to “less than nothing.”’ The truth of our bond with Christ entails that we make our way to him through our bonds with others. This presents a challenge to the individualism of many forms of piety. For instance, in our approach to Sunday worship, our approach should not primarily be one of turning inward and focusing on ourselves and God. Theologically this must ‘be subordinated to a reverse attitude of “de-centration”: that is, of a deliberate taking cognisance of others in their diversity, and in recognizing them as brothers and sisters’ (188).

To sum up, rather than seeking for a direct, immediate, and ‘full’ presence of Christ, we are to consent to mediation.

In directing us toward this alliance with others as the privileged place where the body of Christ comes into being, the liturgical assembly constitutes the fundamental “sacramental” representation of the presence of the absence of God. To consent to this absence and thus, simultaneously, to be willing to give back to God this body of humanity that he expects from those who claim to belong to Jesus Christ, constitutes, as we have stressed, the major trial of becoming-Christian. (188-189)

Posted in Christian Experience, My Reading, Reviews, The Church, The Sacraments, Theological | 11 Comments

Header Photos

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Several people have asked me about the photos in the header of my blog. They are all my photos, and are all taken within thirty minutes’ walk of my house in Durham. I count myself exceedingly fortunate to live in such a beautiful city. I added two more photos yesterday to bring the total number up to eighteen. The header photo is chosen randomly every time that you load or reload the page.

Posted in Photos | 2 Comments

On Tattoos

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Most of today has been occupied with reading and other activities, so I haven’t had the time to complete my latest Chauvet post. However, rather than break a run of thirteen days of daily blogging, I thought that I ought to post something. For this reason, I am deciding, not without some reservations, to post the following thoughts that I just wrote on the controversial topic of tattooing.

At the outset, I want to lay my cards on the table: while I can recognize the importance that they have for many, I neither have a tattoo, nor find them culturally or (in the overwhelming majority of cases) aesthetically appealing. My position is an extremely partisan one, and I am not unaware of the degree to which it is a product of my personal background and of aesthetic values that I have no right to impose upon anyone else. I am also conscious of a degree to which my opinion on this matter may be affected by an impression of tattoos as déclassé, involving a quasi-moral judgment that discriminates against a behaviour traditionally associated with a class other (and in this regard perceived as ‘lower’) than my own. At the very least, such a judgment should not be allowed to pass with close and probing interrogation. In presenting moral qualms relating to the practice of tattooing, it is crucial that I be attentive to the possibility of ugly classist prejudice or cultural chauvinism masquerading under the position that I outline (or, worse, that I am employing Scripture to underwrite my personal values, rather than submitting my values to Scripture). Given the significant possibility of moral blindspots developing in such an area where underlying prejudices might be operative, I would appreciate that, as my reader, you be no less attentive in this regard, alerting me to areas where I might be driven by something other than attentiveness to Scripture. I would also request that you be no less attentive to the ways in which your own background, affiliations, or prejudices might shape your opinion on this matter in a manner that dulls you to God’s truth.

In this post, it is not my aim to present a blanket argument against tattoos. I am not convinced that such an argument can be made. This is an area where relevant principles must be carefully identified, principles that might be operative in certain situations, cases, and contexts, while not being operative in others.

I believe that there are some very relevant biblical principles that we ought to apply in our thinking about tattoos. The Old Testament commandment against tattoos and cutting for the dead (Leviticus 19:28) occurs within the context of a tribal society. Without suggesting that this commandment is directly applicable to the current situation, we can benefit from reflecting upon its significance within its particular cultural context.

Within a tribal society, tattoos and cuttings for the dead are primary modes of self-identification. They are a way of denoting the fact that one belongs in a particular tribe. They are marks of family and group association, binding you to kin and to ancestors. In forbidding such tattoos and markings, God was forbidding a primary means of tribal identification.

Israel, of course, had its own identifying mark in the flesh in the rite of circumcision. In contrast to tattoos and cuttings for the dead, this did not augment or add to the flesh, but removed something from it. It was a sign of weakness and impotence. The commandment of Leviticus 19 was a commandment against a reversion to a tribalism that sought its identity in such marks, rather than or in addition to the covenant of circumcision. Tribalism is all about the flesh as the site of identity; God sought to teach Israel to find their site of identity in the covenant. The free Israelite body was free of all markings, save for the covenant mark that God placed upon them.

There were certain bodies that had further markings upon them. In Exodus 21:5-6 we see that the body of the lifelong servant was marked by the piercing of the ear by an awl (I wonder whether there is something to the fact that Jesus heals the severed ear of the High Priest’s servant in this connection – Luke 22:49-51). The marked or pierced body was the sign of ownership or belonging. The body marked solely by circumcision was a body that spoke of the weakness of the flesh and of God’s sole ownership by the covenant of circumcision.

In the New Testament, Paul speaks of a ‘stripping of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ,’ relating this to Baptism (Colossians 2:11-12). In Baptism the body is washed, and the old fleshly identities are displaced. We are no longer defined by our old family ties – we belong to a new family. We are no longer defined by our old national ties – we belong to a new nation. We are no longer defined by our old tribal identities – we belong to a new people. We are no longer defined by our old physical bodies – we are the heirs of resurrection bodies. We are no longer defined by our old dead ancestors – in Christ we become part of a new history, being the sons and daughters of Abraham.

Baptism has been spoken of as a ‘branding’. It is a branding that erases all other brandings. As I have been exploring in my Chauvet posts, the body is the place where we are written into the world and the culture that surrounds us. Baptism is the washing away of all of the old identities and definitions that once claimed us through our bodies. For us, there is now only one true branding: Christ’s claiming of our bodies as his living sacrifices in Baptism.

The body is the place where the distinction between subject and object is overcome, where self meets world. As such, actions performed upon the human body – not least as we are the images of God – carry immense significance (one reason why sexual sin is presented as a matter of such seriousness in Scripture – it is a sin against your own body, and the temple of the Holy Spirit). In permanently marking our bodies, we are seeking to express and realize our personhood and identity in a profound way. In many cases this is far more than a matter of aesthetics: it is a lifelong marking that declares ‘this is who I am’.

In the present popularity of tattoos, I believe that we are witnessing, as James Jordan, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and others have observed, a return to a more tribal way of regarding identity. Large social identities are breaking down – few of us find our primary identity in the old national or imperial identities – and people seek identity through affiliation with ‘counter-cultural’ or ‘tribal’ groups, or through marking their own private narrative upon their flesh. The dangers of tribalism that the Scriptures address in Old and New Testaments can here be seen to return in a transformed manner. Most people get tattoos nowadays for much the same reasons as they ever did. They are means of identifying with the ‘tribe’, or means of marking their own private identities on their flesh. Either they seek to identify their flesh with a certain tribe of people, or they seek to differentiate it from all others.

In Christ, our flesh is stripped, and our identities reconfigured. Our bodies are washed and claimed, and we become members of a body that is far more determinative for our identities than any other – the body of Christ. For this reason, I believe that any Christian who wishes to mark his or her body with a tattoo needs to think seriously about these questions of body and identity in Christ when making their decision, whatever conclusion they arrive at. Baptism involves a ‘putting off’ of the flesh, which crucially involves a turning away from the flesh as the means of identity that it once served as, whether through blood and kinship, race, national or tribal identity, or through body modification and tattooing as means of establishing our core identities.

The tattoo is also associated with pain, and through pain with both memory and initiation. In its own way, the cross displaces the tattoo in these respects too. Baptism is our initiation into the Initiation – the death of Christ. Baptism is the initiation that washes clean all our tribalisms, and surpasses all other initiations. It isn’t just another mark on our bodies among others, but the washing of our bodies for living sacrifice of the whole. It is God’s claim upon our bodies as his temple. Through Baptism we are ‘unplugged’ from our old identities, and become new persons. Paul is perhaps one of the greatest examples of this. The most tribal man of all – the Hebrew of Hebrews – becomes a universal man – all things to all men – through Jesus Christ and his cross.

The death of Christ is the event that is branded into our bodies. In Galatians 6:17, Paul can speak of bearing in his body the marks (the stigmata, literally the scars or brandings) of the Lord Jesus. Had you asked Paul what he meant by this, I suspect that he would have shown you a back furrowed by scars of beatings that he had endured for the gospel. It is the pain of the ‘stigma’ of the cross – not just physical suffering like Paul’s, but the social ostracization and ill-treatment – that should be the great source of memory for the Christian. It is in fellowship with the suffering of Christ that our Christian identities and memories are forged.

Paul presses the ‘stigma’, the mark, of the cross against any other tribal mark that would rival it. In the Galatian church Paul was facing a situation where circumcision had been perverted into a tribal mark, a mark that divided the church into two classes. Although Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians may have identified each other as Christians, circumcision was being treated as a mark of identity that was determinative even in the realm of the Church, as a remnant of the old tribalism and fleshly identity that escaped the stripping of the flesh in Christ’s cross. In such a context, becoming circumcised could be a rejection of a central truth of the gospel.

I believe that this same concern should be raised in relation to Christians who get tattoos as the same issues of the body, tribalism, and identity are present. While I don’t believe that we can categorically condemn tattooing on the basis of Scripture, I believe that we are given grounds for considerable caution.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

‘Symbol and Sacrament’ Chapter 4:II: Language and the Body

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Symbol and Sacrament Posts: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2:I, Chapter 2:II, Chapter 3, Chapter 4:I, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7

The Act of Symbolization

To illustrate the act of symbolization, Chauvet gives the example of two secret agents who are given two irregular halves of a five-dollar bill. A few elements go into this act. The symbol only exists in the act of joining. It is a matter of action, not of ideas. The pieces of paper are ‘necessarily distinct’ (something that is significant for understanding the sacraments’ symbolizing of Christ and the Church). The value of each half is only in relation to the other. The utilitarian value of the symbolic object is of no importance. The act of symbolization is ‘simultaneously a revealer and an agent’ (130). Through it the agents are revealed to each other as partners. As an agent, it binds the agents together in a common ‘we’. ‘The symbol is an agent of alliance through being a revealer of identity.’

The efficacy of the symbol here ‘touches reality itself’. However, it is crucial that we recognize that this ‘reality’ is not some ‘ontological “substance”’, but a cultural processed, spoken, reality. This is, in fact, the most ‘real’ reality of all. The act of symbolization thus ‘carries out the essential vocation of language: to bring about an alliance where subjects may come into being and recognize themselves as such within their world.’

The Performance Dimension of the Act of Symbolization

Every language act (to employ J.L. Austin’s terminology) ‘is a process’ which ‘sets the system … to work.’ One can distinguish between the historical narrative, which occurs in the past tense and is governed by the third person and the discourse, which occurs in the present tense and is ‘governed by the first person in relation to the second person.’ The discourse, in contrast to the narrative, is unique every time, and is concerned less with the ‘text of the enunciation’ as with the act of the enunciation.

Declaration and performance ‘activate two different functions of language’ (131). Neither exists in a pure state. For instance, in saying ‘I order you to close the door’, something is being declared (the existence of an open door that I desire to be closed), yet the accent is on the performance – I am ordering you and placing you in a position of subordination to me.

Austin maintains that every language act have three dimensions, which vary in importance from act to act. The locutionary act is the act of saying something. The illocutionary act is the ‘act effected in saying something’ (132). For instance, in saying ‘I give you my word’, I am performing the illocutionary act of promising. The perlocutionary act is the consequence of the language act, ‘the act effected by saying something’. For instance, the perlecutionary dimension of my language act might be that of persuading the person with whom I am speaking.

There are a few things that we need to recognize when employing these distinctions. First, we should distinguish between the intra-linguistic illocutionary effect and the extra-linguistic perlocutionary effect. Second, the illocutionary is ‘not concerned with the true or the false, but with the happy and the unhappy, that is to say, in the last analysis with the legitimate or the illegimate’ (133). I may not, for instance, have the authority to perform a particular act (e.g. proclaiming a couple man and wife). Third, the illocutionary function depends upon convention, upon such things as the following of proper procedure. The perlocutionary act does not.

Fourth, the illocutionary-performative dimension of language is most visible in the language acts of ritual. The power of the illocutionary act does not derive from some magical character of language itself, but from a ‘relation between the properties of the discourse, the properties of the one who pronounces it, and the properties of the institution that authorizes one to pronounce it’ (134).

Fifth, there are different degrees of ritual. The precise ritual form of something like baptism is not present in the informal ‘I bet you’ uttered in a conversation between friends: ‘the reference to the absent Third (the social Other under whose jurisdiction alone a bet can be made) is now only implicit’. In this level of ritual and the illocutionary, the ‘duality between saying and doing’ is broken, and ‘a transformation in the relations between the subjects, under the authority of the social Third (the law)’ is symbolically effected.

The Symbolic Efficacy of Rites

Chauvet gives ethnographical examples of healing rituals which are designed to act ‘on the real by acting on the representations of the real’ (138). The healing rituals of shamans, ngangas, and other traditional healers provide a sort of ‘language’ whereby the sufferer can ‘assimilate an actual experience of pain, otherwise anarchic and inexpressible, into an ordered and intelligible form’ (136). By this means, physiological processes may even be released and healing may occur (and even if it doesn’t, the sufferer’s relationship to their condition or disease is altered).

In indigenous societies ‘sickness is seen as more than a simple biological event; it is a cultural disorder, the effect of a violence done by some malevolent spirit, an ancestor, or relative who is persecuting a member of the group’ (138). The traditional healer has learnt to see the violence that exists between people and master it, providing a script by which the ‘incongruent element’ of the disease can be restored to the symbolic order, and the sick person’s relationship with his world and community re-established.

This symbolic efficacy cannot be understood by means of cause and effect, or according to some sort of physical law (such as a sort of psychosomatic effect). Rather, the symbolic efficacy is a function ‘of the consensus created around the representations, on the one hand, and of the symbolic connection between the representations and what is at issue, on the other’ (139). It should also be recognize that this symbolic efficacy, even though it may occasionally have dramatic physical effects, may not always aim directly at the healing of the body.

Within the rituals of Christian faith we seek ‘effects other than the purely corporeal’, effects that we commonly speak of as ‘grace’. This grace should be understood according to the symbolic order of language. ‘It is precisely a new relation of places between subjects, a relationship of filial and brotherly and sisterly alliance, that the sacramental “expression” aims at instituting or restoring in faith’ (140).

It is not Chauvet’s intention, however – and this is a point of crucial importance – to reduce theology to a form of anthropology, by reducing divine grace to the ‘socio-linguistic process’.

We must say, then, that “sacramental grace” is an extra-linguistic reality, but with this distinction, in its Christian form it is comprehensible only on the (intra-linguistic) model of the filial and brotherly and sisterly alliance established, outside of us (extra nos), in Christ. Despite grammar, which should never be taken at face value, “grace” designates not an object we receive, but rather a symbolic work of receiving oneself: a work of “perlaboration” in the Spirit by which subjects receive themselves from God in Christ as sons and daughters, brothers and sisters.

The Symbol and the Body

In relating human beings to the realm of language we are constantly reminded of the primacy of the body within this realm. The body is of fundamental importance for a theology of the sacraments: ‘The sacraments … teach us that the truest things in our faith occur in no other way than through the concreteness of the “body”’ (141).

Language as ‘Writing’

Language creates ‘significant matter’ by creating significant phonetic material, by means of distinguishing between noises in order to form phonemes – ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘k’, ‘o’, etc. These distinctions precede us as persons, and provide a given or ‘law’ for us. Language is not merely one institution among others, but is that which forms the space out of which all other institutions arise – it is that which institutes.

Language resists our desire to escape mediation and gain full self-possession (recall the discussion of the formation of the subject in chapter 3). This mediating character of language is well-expressed in the recognition of all language as ‘writing’. Obviously, we are not referring to literal writing here. Rather, ‘writing’ refers to the fact that all language exists in our absence, much as writing endures in the absence of the writer. As instituted, language is a law that precedes us and exists in our absence.

The metaphysical tradition tended to favour the voice over the written word. While the written letter is material and mute, the voice is far closer to our own souls and our own presence. The written letter suggests the ‘exteriority of meaning’ (144). The written letter, associated with the body, is repressed and the voice, which possesses a more immediate and internal connection to our personal presence is valued over it.

The ‘letter’ is the (subtle) body of language. Language ‘must be approached “literally,” that is to say, in its significant materiality and density’ (145). Against traditional metaphysics, which sought to escape the bodily mediation entailed by the written-ness of language, we must assert that the ‘exteriority’ of the written word mediates the ‘interiority’ of the subject: there can be no opposition between the two. As a subject I come to be, not through some private internal language, but through the ‘writing’ of the symbolic law that pre-exists me and is ‘outside’ me.

To speak of language as ‘writing’ is just another way in which we stress the point that we must consent to mediation, rather than seeking immediate pure presence. It closes off one of the ways in which we seek to escape this mediation, while acknowledging the ‘concrete resistance’ entailed by the materiality of language (146). It enables us to grasp the truth of the statement that ‘the most “spiritual” happens through the most “corporeal.”’ It is through the mediation of the (written) symbolic order that persons are formed and transformed.

The Body and Language

We often think of language as a means of expressing something that exists anterior to it. However, language is ‘the subject’s taking up a position within the world of its meanings.’ These meanings are at our disposal, because they result from earlier acts of expression. ‘Like language, the body is matter, matter significant from the first, that is, culturally instituted as speech.’ Abstracted from culture and language, the body would be rendered a mere instrument. ‘Humans do not ex-sist except as corporality whose concrete place is always their own bodies.’

It is the body that speaks. My body is ‘made of the same flesh as the world’ and is ‘the primordial place of every symbolic joining of the “inside” and the “outside”’ (147). The body overcomes the dichotomy between subject and object by providing the middle space that binds my humanity and the world, self and other, internal and external, identity and difference, together under authority of the law of the symbolic order.

In order to arrive at selfhood, we must break with ‘sameness’. The schemes of the body – ‘the vertical scheme of above and below, the horizontal schemes of left and right (in space), of before and behind (in time as well as in space) – provide us with fundamental means of identification and differentiation. The primordial vertical symbolism of height and depth almost invariably attends religious experience, as God is spoken of as ‘exalted’, or some ‘depth’ of being or life is revealed. The left-right differentiation powerfully shapes ethical discriminations in some manner or other. The in front/behind, before/after scheme shapes all historical sense. The language of posture, feeding, cleanliness and dirtiness, warmth and coldness pervades our thought and understanding, even at its highest levels, but is firmly rooted in the ‘existential topography which is constitutive of the internal structure of the human being’ (149).

‘Body am I, entirely and completely, and nothing besides.’ This statement of Nietzsche captures the profundity of the connection. The body isn’t merely an attribute of the ‘I’: rather, the ‘body – in the third person – assumes the function of subject of a verb in the first person’ in a manner that undermines all attempts to establish some sort of intervening space between the two.

The Body: Speaking and Spoken

The ‘I-body’ is ‘my own body, irreducible to any other, and yet, in the midst of its difference, recognizing itself to be similar to every other I-body.’ My body is the site of ‘living words’, the place where my unique story, meaning, and personhood is articulated: it is the site of my speaking. However, my body is only the site of my speaking as it is itself ‘spoken’. My body is connected to other bodies, structured by its culture, identified, and granted models of identification by others. It is tightly bonded to a world and culture, being ‘structured by the system of values or symbolic network’ of the group to which I belong, and is engaged in an anthropomorphizing of the universe, through relating the universe to my being, and a ‘cosmorphizing’ of itself, as it relates itself to the universe (150).

The I-body exists only as woven, inhabited, spoken by this triple body of culture, tradition, and nature. This is what is implied by the concept of corporality: one’s own physical body certainly, but as the place where the triple body – social, ancestral, and cosmic – which makes up the subject is symbolically joined, in an original manner for each one of us according to the different forms of our desires.

‘The subject is not in the body as the stone is in the peach; it is body as the onion is in its layers’ (151).

The body is the ‘arch-symbol of the whole symbolic order.’ It is the body that connects me with –– or is my having always-already been written into – the entire world of culture, nature, society, and language. It is impossible to express some transparent and pure internal presence apart from the body’s mediation. Through the body every word is subjected to a ‘writing’ external to the subject. For this reason, in order ‘to find the Spirit, one must first grasp the Letter’ (152). If this perspective is correct, we are led to the conclusion that the sacramental is the ‘arch-symbolic space’ for the theological economy. It is in the sacraments that the body is written into the world of the faith, and can become a subject that speaks from this world.

The Sacramentality of the Faith

These observations provide the foundation for ‘a theological understanding of the sacraments as expressions of the “corporality” of the faith.’

In effect, in the sacramental celebrations, the faith is at work within a ritual staging in which each person’s body is the place of the symbolic convergence – through gestures, postures, words (spoken or sung), and silences – of the triple body which makes us into believers.

In the celebration of the sacraments we receive a body that has been written into the social body of the Church, into the traditional body of the Church, and into the cosmic body of the universe, as the sacraments employ symbolic material elements, which mediate God’s grace.

The materiality of the sacraments presents a huge and unavoidable stumbling block to our desire to have an unmediated, direct, and interior contact or relationship with God. The sacraments teach us that ‘faith has a body’ and that ‘to become a believer is to learn to consent, without resentment, to the corporality of the faith’ (153). While the materiality of the Word as ‘writings’ and the ‘letter’ can be difficult to accept sometimes, it is in the sacraments that the materiality, exteriority, bodily and institutional character of the faith hit us most powerfully.

The struggle to reconcile ourselves with the materiality of the sacraments can be seen in those descriptions of them as concessions to our fleshly need for something sensible. In an ideal world, supposedly, we would have no need for sacraments. The reason why we stumble on the materiality of the sacrament, body, institution, and letter is because we are wedded to the nostalgia for the immediate imaginary presence of the ‘mirror stage’, or to the metaphysics of the tradition.

Language (understood as ‘writing’ – the symbolic order that exists in our absence) is the place where the human subject comes into being. The sacraments are the greatest empirical expression of the ‘language’ of faith, of ‘the place where the believing subject comes into being’ (154).

This … is a transcendental condition for Christian existence. It indicates that there is no faith unless somewhere inscribed, inscribed in a body – a body from a specific culture, a body with a concrete history, a body of desire.

The sacraments render our bodies the site of God’s writing, as through baptism we are ‘plunged into the body of signifiers – material, institutional, cultural, and traditional – of the Church’ (155). ‘One becomes a Christian only by entering an institution and in letting this institution stamp its “trademark,” its “character,” on one’s body.’ It is thus impossible to think of the faith outside of the body, as our Christian existence is ‘always-already inscribed in the order of the sacramental.’

Taking seriously the sacramentality of the faith, therefore, we must consent to corporality. This consent must be so complete ‘that it tries to think about God according to corporality.’ The stumbling block of language, materiality, and the body is ultimately seen to be inseparable from the great Stumbling Block of the cross.

Posted in My Reading, Reviews, The Sacraments, Theological | 11 Comments

‘Symbol and Sacrament’ Chapter 4:I: The Symbol and the Sign

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Symbol and Sacrament Posts: Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2:I, Chapter 2:II, Chapter 3, Chapter 4:II, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7

Chauvet has now established the methodological foundation for an understanding of the sacraments as mediations, rather than instruments, ‘as expressive media in which the identification and thus the coming-to-be of subjects as believers take place’ (110). Within this chapter, Chauvet seeks to present a case for understanding the sacraments ‘as acts of symbolization putting into effect the illocutionary dimension of language acts, according to which they effect … a relation of places between the subjects and thus an identification of these subjects with regard to others within this particular “world” we call the Church’ (if the meaning of this sentence isn’t immediately apparent, I trust that it will become clear over the course of this post). It is within the context of such an understanding that Chauvet wants to articulate his understanding of symbolic efficacy. This study of the symbol leads us directly to the realm of the body, as the ‘primordial and arch-symbolic form of mediation, as well as the basis for all subjective identification’ (111).

The Symbol

Chauvet reminds us of his earlier distinction between the logic of the marketplace and value and the logic of symbolic exchange (discussed at the end of the previous post). These logics function on two different levels, yet are ‘subjected to the dialectical tension between two poles’. In the world, sign and symbol are ‘always mixed together’. Chauvet’s purpose is not to purify away all signifying elements, to leave us with the ‘essence’ of the symbol, but to maintain that the symbol should not be thought of as if it were just a more complex or intense version of the sign.

The ancient symbolon was ‘an object cut in two, one part of which is retained by each partner in a contract’ (112). The parts were valueless by themselves: their symbolic power arose from their connection with the other half. As such the symbol is the ‘expression of a social pact based on mutual recognition and, hence, is a mediator of identity.’ The meaning of the word ‘has been extended to every element (object, word, gesture, person…) that, exchanged within a group, somewhat like a pass-word, permits the group as a whole or individuals therein to recognize one another and identify themselves.’

The symbol is something that transports us into the world to which it belongs. In this key respect it differs from the sign. The sign refers to something of a different order to itself, implying ‘a difference between two orders of relations: the relations of sensible signifiers, and the relations of intelligible signified meanings’ (113). However, the symbol introduces us into a symbolic order, which is different from that of ‘immediately experienced reality’.

‘The symbol begins with the initial rupture of the immediately given.’ The most basic form of the symbol is the phoneme. The single phoneme does not ‘signify’ anything. However, its utterance ‘introduces us into the world of meaning’ of the human conversation that presupposes. Lost in the deep jungle, a single phoneme can be the means by which we are enabled ‘to recognize a human presence, to renew our alliance with humanity.’ That single phoneme reconnects us with a whole ‘world’ of human life and meaning (perhaps it might be helpful to recall the distinction made in earlier posts between ‘world’ and ‘universe’ here).

The symbol depends for its existence upon the differences and relations that it has with the other parts of the system (‘b’ is only a phoneme as it is distinguished from ‘p’, ‘g’, ‘k’, etc.). In isolation from all of these, it could mean anything. The value of the symbol arises from the place that it occupies in the whole. Chauvet compares this to a shard of porcelain that we find on the street, through which we can recognize a vase.

It seems then that an element becomes a symbol only to the extent that it represents the whole (the vase), from which it is inseparable. That is also why every symbolic element brings with itself the entire socio-cultural system to which it belongs. (115)

This holds for all sorts of symbols, religious, political, poetic, etc. It is only as it is correlative to other elements that something can function as a symbol and, in functioning as such, it evokes the ‘entire symbolic order to which it belongs’. The symbol is thus a means by which subjects recognize each other, and by which we identify with our world. In fact, so intimate and immediate is this bond that the symbol ‘ceases to function, here and now, as a symbol the moment one steps back and adopts a critical attitude towards it’ (116). The symbol is the ‘third term’ that mediates between subjects and subjects and subjects and their world and saves the subject from being lost in its imaginary double.

Chauvet illustrates his point with reference to Heidegger’s analysis of Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant woman’s shoes. The painting of the shoes does not have a utilitarian value, or ‘communicate knowledge’ in the form of information, nor is it even to be understood by reference to some aesthetic order. Rather the painting symbolically gathers together the whole world of the peasant woman in her shoes – the ‘fatigue of the steps of labor,’ the world of earth and soil, and the anxieties of her life. The work of art, like the symbol more generally, is a ‘making come-into-being’ or an ‘advent’ (117).

Value and Non-Value

A word is treated as a sign insofar as we are concerned with measuring and establishing the value of statements, of approaching language ‘under the aspect of information’ (118). The ideal form of signifying language, possessing much of the greater exactitude and precision towards which it aspires, is scientific language. By contrast, viewing language under the aspect of the symbol, ‘the first function of language is not to designate an object or to transmit information – which all language also does – but first to assign a place to the subject in its relation to others’ (119).

This is akin to the experience that one might have when, walking down the streets of distant foreign country as a tourist, you hear a familiar word from your own language and country. Your first thought is not of the signifying meaning of the word spoken, but with the recognition of the world that you share in common with the speaker (‘another Englishman!’). The single word can evoke the entire world that you share, much as the shard of porcelain can evoke the entire vase in your mind. This is the ‘symbolic’ function of all language, something which precedes its signifying function.

In all these cases the symbol maintains us in the order of recognition and not of cognition, of summons or challenge and not of simple information; it is the mediator of our identities as subjects within this cultural world it brings with itself, whose unconscious “precipitate” it is. (120)

Unlike the sign, the function of the symbol is not to refer to ‘something else’, but ‘to join the persons who produce or receive it with their cultural world (social, religious, economic…) and so to identify them as subjects in their relations with other subjects’ (121). The symbol is bound up with the ‘primordial function of language’, not one of given us information about the real in an instrumental fashion, but in transforming the real into a meaningful ‘world’, a place of coming-to-presence, by making the real speak (and enabling human beings to speak). The difference between sign and symbol should be regarded as homologous to that between the principle of market-value, and the principle of symbolic exchange.

Symbol and Reality

Against much of the Western tradition, Chauvet holds that symbol cannot be regarded as derivative of or as a more complex or intense form of the sign. Symbolization is not merely ornamental, nor is it a degeneration of language into subjectivism. Rather, symbol ‘unfolds the primary dimension of language’ (123). In contrast to the sign, which entails a transposition from the order of the real to the order of information and cognition, the symbol ‘touches the most real aspect of ourselves and our world.’ For instance, water is never more ‘real’ and ‘so close to its “truth”’ as when it becomes the means of baptism. In the symbol there is not a mere exterior connection between two realities (such as that established by the word ‘like’ in the simile), but the evoking of a deeper union. Symbol is not, therefore, opposed to reality as many might think.

The symbol is perhaps most potently illustrated at times of bereavement, when words prove powerless or seem insufficient or inappropriate. At such times it is the grace of the symbolic gesture that can convey the truth of mutual presence and restore the alliance of human beings in the face of radical loss and otherness (nothing separates us so much from each other as suffering).

The Two Poles of Language

As we have seen, language has two different levels to it: the recognition of the symbol, and the cognition of the sign. The typical example of the symbol is the myth, which is the foundational language that allows a group to recognize and identify itself and its members to recognize themselves and each other in the myth. The most typical example of the sign is scientific discourse.

Nevertheless, these things don’t exist in pure form. Even in scientific discourse the symbolic aspect of language is operative. Words must be ‘recognized as relevant to science,’ as belonging to that world. Scientific discourse is also concerned with the ‘symbolic capital’ of being recognized (as an ‘authority’, for instance) by a group or institution. Everyday language is also ‘constantly caught between sign and symbol’ (126). Perhaps the symbolic character of everyday language is most visible in the case of phatic speech (for instance, talking about the weather), where the conveying of information is not the point, but communication on a more basic level occurs, as people recognize the presence of other persons. Symbolic exchange can also be seen in such things as handshakes, or even in inanimate objects such as shoes, which can become symbols of suffering and toil. It is symbol that binds us to each other and other world.

The ‘pure symbol’ doesn’t exist (save perhaps in the form of something like the phoneme). Indeed, for symbol to function it often requires a measure of knowledge and cognition, a degree of sign value. This applies to Van Gogh’s shoes, for instance. Knowing what shoes are, what they are used for, the character of peasant life, the biography of the artist, his historical context in the development of art, etc. all helps to enable the work to have its symbolic effects upon the viewer. Such knowledge can be crucial for the painting to become visible as art. Symbol is not, therefore, ‘sufficient unto itself’ (128). ‘A symbol about which one could say nothing would dissolve into pure imagination.’

Posted in My Reading, Reviews, The Sacraments, Theological | 10 Comments

Some Quick Thoughts on ‘Biblical Masculinity’ and the ‘Feminized Church’

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

The subject of ‘biblical masculinity’ has been receiving some discussion in various contexts recently, especially following Mark Driscoll’s recent remarks on the subject. I generally find him an extremely unhelpful voice on the subject of gender, even though I do not see eye to eye with most of his critics either. His recent comments merely reveal his continued obsession with (‘biblical’) masculinity, something that by turns bemuses and frustrates me. I have little interest in engaging directly with Driscoll here, but since the topic is a live one, I thought that I would weigh in with a few rough thoughts on ‘biblical masculinity’ and the so-called ‘feminization of the Church’.

The Nature of Biblical Masculinity

As I read the Bible, I really don’t see the notion of ‘biblical masculinity’, as a set of exclusively or peculiarly male traits that all Christian men are expected to exhibit. What I see is that men are called to reflect God’s character and to perform his will in certain relational contexts and ways (as sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, etc.). They are called to do this with love, self-control, humility, courage, and faithfulness. If we are to speak of such a thing, this is ‘biblical masculinity’. Women are called to reflect God’s character and to perform his will in different relational contexts and ways, and to do so with love, self-control, humility, courage, and faithfulness. Again, if we are to speak of such a thing, this is ‘biblical femininity’. Women can’t exercise biblical masculinity, not because they lack certain virtues or traits of character, but simply because they are not men and do not have the same callings (although we share our fundamental calling in common).

While there are general differences in areas of strength between the genders, there isn’t a particular set of traits that either men or women have a monopoly upon. The vocations of men may tend to focus on certain strengths over others, and may be vocations for which males are, as a general rule, more apt on account of their natural capabilities. The same thing can be said about the vocations of women relative to peculiarly female strengths. However, the fundamental virtues at work are shared, though these virtues may be inflected in different ways depending on the context and role in which one finds oneself.

Biblical Masculinity versus Machismo

As such, the measure of a man’s masculinity is not his machismo, but his faithfulness in living out his vocation in the contexts in which God has placed him. There are innumerable different forms that ‘biblical masculinity’ can take, conditioned by our natural traits of character, our contexts, and the peculiar vocations that we have (for instance, we should recognize that the fact that a man may lack the traits suiting him for a particular role does not necessarily make him less of a man). God doesn’t call us all to be alpha male warrior types, nor does he call all of us to be refined and cultured scholars and musicians. Both are valid ways, among many others, of living out ‘biblical masculinity’. We should stop getting so hung up about ‘biblical masculinity’ and appreciate the incredible variation within both of the sexes, and the rich potential that this gives for different forms of complementarity in the context of marriage, for instance.

This is why the bizarre tendency among many young evangelicals today to confuse biblical masculinity with acting ‘tough’ is so unhealthy. It also fails to notice how far removed from the macho model of biblical masculinity many central biblical characters fall. Take Jacob, for instance: a soft-skinned mummy’s boy, who cooked an awesome lentil stew, but didn’t leave home or marry until his seventies. Jacob became an incredible man, yet this process was less about becoming a manly badass as it was learning tenacious perseverance, self-control, and faithfulness through suffering and weakness in the positions where God had placed him. The great men of the Bible are renowned for their patient suffering, perseverance, humility, self-sacrifice, faith, and self-control, all in service of others, traits far removed from the sort of triumphalist and self-glorifying machismo that our society would have us look up to. The important thing to observe is just how many forms such virtues could take, and in how many contrasting ways they could be exemplified.

The tough men of the Bible are broken by God and made to fight the hardest battle of all, struggling to gain mastery over themselves. The resulting masculinity is a chastened and humble one, quite unlike the self-glorifying masculinity to which many would have us aspire (self-glorifying masculinity – the form of masculinity with which our culture is so often preoccupied – is one form of masculinity for which God has little time). In stark contrast to machismo, this is a masculinity most fully exemplified in sober and seasoned elder men rather than in young and cocky braggadocios. Refracted through their own roles and contexts, these are precisely the same virtues that mark out the great women of God.

All of this should lead to a less demonstrative approach to masculinity. Of course, masculinity will always need to be ‘proved’ to some extent, and people can fall short of biblical masculinity. However, what is being demonstrated is not a set of stereotyped traits through exaggerated posturing, but our capacity faithfully and humbly to exercise the callings that we have as men, however well-equipped or not we may feel for them.

The fact that many churches have bought into pathetic gender stereotypes, rather than seeking to form self-controlled men and women who persevere in and faithfully discharge their various callings can often be seen in the form of our men’s and women’s ministries, which frequently serve to bring out the peculiarly gendered vices that tend to emerge when the sexes cease to be challenged by each other. Far too many men’s ministries, for instance, cater for the very irresponsible man-children that they ought to be rendering extinct.

The ‘Feminized Church’?

One frequently hears claims that the Church has been ‘feminized’. I believe that there is something to these claims, but it is important that we make clear what exactly should and shouldn’t be meant by them. Most crucially, the ‘feminization’ of the Church shouldn’t be spoken of in a way that denigrates or belittles women. I don’t think that this is how it is intended to function in most contexts. In conclusion, I will briefly sketch what I think should be referred to by this expression.

  • In many quarters, the basic demographics of the Church are ones in which women increasingly predominate. The Church is ‘feminized’ as it becomes an institution that appeals primarily or almost solely to women. Obviously, it is a good thing that the Church appeals to women, but it should hold no less of an appeal to men.
  • The Church is ‘feminized’ as a particular sentimental form of piety and set of religious sensibilities, arising from the belief that women possess a greater natural affinity for the things of God, is treated as the norm and imposed upon all (I speak of a sentimental form of piety, as this is the shape that this phenomenon has historically tended to take). Quite apart from the degree to which it departs from scriptural patterns of worship, the sentimentalization of worship and theology alienates many men who rightly feel that a particular mode of spirituality that caters more to women than to men is being privileged at the expense of those forms of biblical spirituality which connect so strongly with them. The Church is ‘feminized’ as women are treated as the exemplars of spirituality to which men must conform. There is a common narrative of the woman ‘reforming’ the man who is spiritually wayward. However, the reformation of the man involves his ‘feminization’ – the transformation of the man involves him coming to see things just like the woman, and trying to become like her in spiritual matters. This narrative has its secular versions in romance literature in which the expectations of women provide the norm to which men must conform themselves. In reality, God calls each of the sexes to a painful adjustment to the other and doesn’t finally privilege the perspective of either.
  • The Church is ‘feminized’ as men are rendered spiritually passive, the reluctant congregants who sit uncomfortably at the back of churches, their wives glaring at them when they start fidgeting. Where this narrative prevails, men will feel emasculated and infantilized, and will find church an unappealing prospect. The Church is ‘feminized’ as churches cease to call men powerfully to live out their God-given vocations and produce men who are little more than useless deadweight.

From this, it should be clear that ‘feminization’ does not involve a stigmatization or denigration of women, but a resistance to the Church becoming a sort of ‘girls’ club’, in which women dominate in numbers, activity, or in the modes of spirituality. The solution to this is most definitely not that of adopting the ‘masculinized’ Church of Driscoll and others, but to produce a Church in which we all learn to reorient our gendered identities humbly to create space for the other sex to flourish.

Posted in The Church, Theological | 12 Comments

Towards a Kenotic Anthropology Part 2

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Alastair Roberts

Within this post I conclude the piece I posted yesterday. I wrote this over four years ago now, and probably wouldn’t express my position in quite the same way today. However, I think that there are some things worth exploring here.

The Foundation of the Subject

Something analogous to such a death can be seen at the foundation of humanity. The man Adam is placed in a deep sleep and part of his body is extracted. The rib taken from Adam is fashioned into woman. Awoken from sleep, Adam receives himself back in the other (Genesis 2:21-24). Adam loses an important measure of self-identity in the creation of Eve. Henceforth, Adam must ‘ex-sist’, as his being is rendered to him by the woman. Adam’s being itself is ‘othered’.

Adam dies to the state of being alone and rises again to the more glorious state of fellowship with his wife. It is through the kenosis of Adam that Eve is formed. A genuine separation of Adam from himself must take place if his relationship with his wife is to be more than an exalted form of narcissism. The splitting of Adam from himself represents a genuine loss and the death of the old self-identical Adam, but this death (which occurs through a death-like sleep) is followed by a more glorious ‘resurrection’ as God brings the woman to Adam and Adam lives as one flesh with her. This pattern may be fulfilled in the blood and water that flows from Christ’s side at his crucifixion (John 19:34), the blood and water through which the Church is formed.

In both of the cases mentioned above, the gift of the self reconstitutes the giver and constitutes an Other, whose being is received as a gift. The unity and self-identity of the giver is broken. The giver relinquishes his grasp on his own being and receives himself back as he is rendered to himself by the Other.

In Ephesians 5:28 husbands are instructed to ‘love their own wives as their own bodies’ as ‘he who loves his wife loves himself.’ Accustomed as we are to the opposition between self-love and love of the other, such injunctions — as with the call to love one’s neighbour as oneself — can perplex us. Once we recognize the true nature of the self such commandments become more understandable. The self is so constituted by relationship that any individualistic form of ‘self-love’ that would exclude the other strikes out at the self. The theoretical opposition between self-love and love of others already presupposes the ontological alienation of the self from the other that founds individualism. The only true self-love is love of the neighbour; it is in loving the neighbour that we truly love ourselves, for our being is not something that we possess as individuals, but is rather that which is rendered to us by others.

Conversely, purely disinterested love for the other should not be set forth as the ideal. In his article ‘The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice’, John Milbank critiques the notion that the idea of unilateral gift or self-sacrifice without return grounds the ethical. Making dying for the other the ultimate good subordinates the person to ‘an abstract moral principle’. The gift of self-sacrifice must rather be performed in hope of resurrection and the reconciliation that resurrection promises. We lay down our lives for each other because we desire communion with each other. Only such an approach takes seriously the uniqueness of the person (including ourselves as persons). As Hart observes:

In simple human terms, a love that is inseparable from an interest in the other is always more commendable, more truly selfless, than the airless purity of disinterested expenditure, because it recognizes the otherness and delights in the splendour of the other.

Other approaches, such as that of Levinas, risk reducing the person to an ‘anonymous opacity’.

The idea of a split at the foundation of the subject is one explored in the work of the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. The subject is formed as the self cuts itself off from engagement with its world. The self expels the world out from itself and it is the void that remains that constitutes the subject. The subject is ‘the gap between nature and the beings immersed in it.’

Žižek relates this to the being of God. For God to attain freedom with respect to the ground of his being, he must first establish a distance from it. This distance is achieved as God expels the ground of his being from himself in an act of ‘madness’. Through this heterodox account of divine subjectivity Žižek illustrates his approach to subjectivity in general. The subject, for Žižek, is formed ‘by the removal of itself from itself’; formed through this externalizing of itself the subject is seen to be ‘the object outside of itself’. The distance that establishes God’s subjectivity is that of the generation of the Son. The Word — which in Lacanian terms corresponds to the Symbolic — is the ‘othering’ of the Real. This ‘cut’ in the Real of the divine being enables God to relate freely to the ground of his own being.

The void of the subject is later filled by the Self, which weaves a particular identity out of the material of the Symbolic order, an order founded upon the loss of the immediacy of the Real. The subject is irreducible to the Self, as the subject is the lack that the Self tries to fill.

Similar points are made by Karl Rahner in his ‘Theology of the Symbol’. He observes:

[A being] gives itself away from itself into the “other,” and there finds itself in knowledge and love, because it is by constituting the inward “other” that it comes to (or: from) its self-fulfillment, which is the presupposition of the act of being present to itself in knowledge and love.

We must render ourselves ‘other’ to truly own and know ourselves. Thus, the Father knows and possesses himself in the Son that is eternally begotten of him.

It is in terms of this definition of the subject that Žižek articulates what he refers to as ‘the act’. The act represents a return to the founding gesture of the subject. It is ‘a form of Symbolic suicide’ in which the subject rejects its Symbolic substance and returns to the state of being a void. Through such an act the subject can be reborn. It is by striking at, or cutting oneself loose from, the thing that is most precious that the subject can gain ‘the space of free action’.

Žižek argues that this is exactly what the Father does at the cross. The Father surrenders his Son — the one most precious to him. Through this act a new subject can be formed, a subject freed from the bondage of the old Symbolic order (the Holy Spirit). Žižek’s reading of the crucifixion, presupposing as it does a tragic impotence on God’s part, is not one that we find satisfactory. Nevertheless, there is much that we can gain from engagement with him.

In willingly and obediently going to the cross, Christ undertakes an act of ‘madness’. He ‘shoots at himself’, and thus renders the existing Symbolic order powerless over him. As Frederiek Depoortere argues, the self-emptying of Christ is his willingness to be ‘stripped of all his particular characteristics’ and become the ‘man as such’, to be thoroughly ‘disgorged’ from the Symbolic order, to become as a piece of excrement. This becomes the founding act of a new order, beyond the existing Symbolic. Christ’s kenotic reduction to the excess of the socio-symbolic order establishes him as the location where the socio-symbolic order can be transcended by others.

To summarize, kenosis is the way in which the subject can be first formed through the creation of a distance from itself, by rendering itself as other. As Balthasar has argued, the kenosis of death as a sacrificial self-rendering and ‘self-destitution’ can be grounded in the eternal processions of the Trinity. The Father eternally begets the Son and thus eternally gives up his own self to receive it back from an Other. In rendering himself to the Father the Son is eternally and completely sacrificed in his fullness. These Trinitarian ‘kenoses’ ad intra provide the foundation for all of God’s self-giving actions ad extra, whether in creation, redemption or perfection.

On account of these kenoses, God can always be the ‘God of the gaps’: the Trinity itself provides the basis for the ‘gap’ that constitute the difference between the creation and the Creator, and the ‘gaps’ that constitute the multiplicity of creatures. As Jenson maintains, the otherness of creation from God is ‘enabled only by and within the otherness of the Son from the Father.’

Kenosis is also the way in which the subject can be freed from the constraints of its present social and Symbolic substance and re-establish itself on a new and free footing. This further dimension of kenosis is particularly significant for understanding the death of Christ. It is through such a kenosis that Christ overcomes the realm of Death and Flesh, rendering it to God.

Kenosis and the New Society

In Colossians 3:10-11, Paul describes the ‘new man’ as ‘renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.’ The significance of such a description does not merely lie in the essentially social nature of the new man, but in the negation of particular characteristics that renders such a new society possible.

Alain Badiou contrasts the law and that which exceeds the law in terms of ‘two types of multiplicity’. The law circumscribes the ‘particularizing multiplicity’, giving everything its place and its due. In contrast, ‘universalism’ is enabled by the multiplicity that, by virtue of ‘being in excess of itself precludes its being represented as a totality.’ In such a multiplicity the multiple is considered ‘not as a part, but as in excess of itself, as that which is out of place, as a nomadism of gratuitousness.’ The self that identifies itself with the excess of grace is no longer circumscribable by the laws of the realm of the Flesh. Within this excess of grace the differences established by the law and the Flesh can be overcome. The person retains their properties, but is no longer defined and partitioned off by them, but is what it is by virtue of what is becomes through the excess of grace.

As Badiou observes, the message of universality in grace is always addressed to particular persons with particular characteristics and differences. These differences are not abandoned, but are traversed and transcended in various ways. In fact, our differences become the means by which we are able to carry that which is universal. However, these differences can never be permitted to qualify the universal itself.

Similar points are made in the work of Žižek, who speaks of it in terms of ‘uncoupling’. This is the process whereby we are ‘unplugged’ from our social substance. Each person is evacuated of that which regulates and defines their social and symbolic identity and is ‘reduced to the singular point of subjectivity.’ This is similar to the point that Zizioulas makes when he claims that

…the Christian ethos of otherness does not allow for the acceptance or the rejection of the Other on the basis of his or her qualities, natural or moral. Everyone’s otherness and uniqueness is to be respected on the simple basis of each person’s ontological particularity and integrity.

Love does not merely involve the emptying of oneself to receive the other, it also empties the other of his self in order to love him truly. It is for this reason that ‘hatred’ of the other and of ourselves (defined in terms of our places in the socio-symbolic order) provides the precondition for genuine agape. It is only through the ‘violent’ act of emptying the Other of his or her qualities that we are enabled to truly establish a genuine relationship of love, on the basis of the uniqueness of their person.

It should perhaps be noted that such a form of kenosis already finds precedent prior to the Fall, in the institution of marriage. The man must be uncoupled from the social substance that he shares with his father and mother in order to be joined to his wife. The fact that the ‘good’ social substance of the family is something that should be left behind suggests that kenosis is a movement of maturation, moving from the good towards that which is perfect, each mini-death being followed by a mini-resurrection into a more glorious social substance.

For Žižek it is important that we appreciate what this ‘uncoupling’ is not: it is not the mere adoption of a position of detachment, but is the work of love through which a new community is formed.

In light of this, the particular characteristics of Christ are not to be focused on. Žižek remarks on just how indifferent Paul seems to be to the particular acts, teachings and qualities of Christ as an historical figure, ‘ruthlessly reducing [Christ] to the fundamentals’. Paul’s focus is almost exclusively on Christ’s death and resurrection as the event which provides the foundation for the new society. Žižek argues that Paul was particularly suited for this task because he was never a member of the inner circle. Consequently, he was not tempted — as the other apostles might have been — to let his knowledge of Christ ‘according to the flesh’ obstruct the true knowledge of Christ according to the Spirit (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:16).

This process of ‘uncoupling’ ought to be understood in terms of kenosis. It is just such a kenosis that we see in Philippians 3: Paul, though remaining a Jew, willingly suspends this identity, in order that he might exceed himself, that by grace he might be permitted to ex-sist in Christ. As Paul exceeds his Jewish identity he is enabled to minister to people from all backgrounds (1 Corinthians 9:19-22). Paul becomes the universal man.

The kenotic act that forms the new subject of grace is baptism, which is always baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ (Romans 6:4; Colossians 2:11-12). In baptism the baptizand is ‘unplugged’ from old solidarities in order to ex-sist within a new society where old divisions of the flesh are transcended (Galatians 3:27-28). The baptizand must leave father and mother, wife and children and even his own self behind in the waters of baptism (cf. Luke 14:26). As Oliver O’Donovan writes, ‘the church is entered only by leaving other, existing societies.’

The kenosis that founded the alternative community of the Church is participated in by all of its members. This kenosis is not a merely formal concept of kenosis, but the particular event of the kenosis of Christ. Our self-emptying is a self-emptying in and with Christ.

Within the Church kenosis — which is involved in some sense in the formation of every true self and symbolic order — is not merely the ‘vanishing mediator’ (in Žižekian terminology the ‘vanishing mediator’ is something that mediates the transition from one form to another form and then disappears — in this case, the ‘vanishing mediator’ being referred to is the void of the subject) that it is within the socio-symbolic order of the world. Kenosis is rather a central feature of the Church’s ongoing life. Žižek writes

As every true Christian knows, love is the work of love — the hard and arduous work of repeated ‘uncoupling’ in which, again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into.

In order for the Church to be constituted as universal it must be constituted by kenotic love. The reborn subject must be continually kenotic, characterized by a repeated sacrificing of its particular substance for the sake of the ex-sisting gracious excess that now constitutes it in Christ.

Through this kenosis the subject is re-incorporated into an economy of gift, ultimately grounded in the life of the Triune God. The ecstasy of man’s being is re-established. The loaf of the self is broken and cast onto the waters of Others, being received back in the many surprising returns of abounding grace. Through this entire process the image of God is restored in man, as man begins to reflect the cruciformity of the Triune God.

Posted in Theological | 4 Comments