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September 9 - December 31, 2019
most important reasons for failure are the “inter-locking relations of church and cultural section which spill into partisan politics marked by the mobilization of collective hate and cultivated bigotry”
Cultural identity insinuates itself with religious force;
Christian communities, which should be “the salt” of the culture, are too often as insipid as everything around them.
“If the salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?”
it, and invites a turnabout. What we should turn away from seems clear: it is captivity to our own culture, coupled so often with blind self-righteousness.
Abraham is a progenitor of a people which, as Franz Rosenzweig puts it, “even when it has a home . . . is not allowed full possession of that home. It is only ‘a stranger and a sojourner.’ God tells it: ‘The land is mine’” (Rosenzweig 1971, 300).
At the very core of Christian identity lies an all-encompassing change of loyalty, from a given culture with its gods to the God of all cultures. A
They have no fixed location, but roam from place to place, always departing and always arriving. “There is no starting point just as there is no goal to reach,”
Departure is here a temporary state, not an end in itself; a departure from a particular place, not from all sites
Though Deleuze has difficulty thinking of the concept of human agency, people do act as agents; they have goals, make things happen, and often enough these are evil things.
“blissfully” taking in whatever ride life has in store for them, always saying and accepting everything, including every misdeed that those who have goals choose to commit (Frank
Against his intention (Deleuze 1991, 195ff.), Deleuze would have to say “yes” without being able to say “no,” much like the Nietzschean “all-contented” ass who always says “yea”
An “anti-phallic” revolution must bring down the detached and violent self, situate it in the web of relationships, and help it recover its immanence.
is created “with and within the field of relations” (18).
Modernity seeks “emancipation with no binding to the other”
Rather, he is surrounded by a wandering community. Unlike
"he" is Abraham and the wandering community is analogous to our post-modern nihilistic culture
I will address this question as a Christian (rather than simply as a fellow sharer in the Abrahamic faith), I will turn from the towering figure Abraham, the common ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, to the Apostle Paul and his reflection on the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham in Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:16).
relation of the Christian children of Abraham to culture by examining the transformation of the original Abrahamic departure.
the particularity of “peoplehood” to the universality of multiculturality,6 from
Check footnote excellent
belief in one God entails a belief in the unity of the human race as recipient of the blessings of this God, yet in order to enjoy the full blessings of this God a person had to be a member of a particular “tribe” (Wright 1992, 170).
Believing in a god behind all concrete manifestations amounts therefore to not believing in one: each culture ends up worshiping its own tribal deities, which is to say that each ends up, as Paul puts it, “enslaved to beings that are by nature not gods” (Galatians 4:8).
Christ unites different “bodies” into one body, not simply in virtue of the singleness of his person (“one leader—one people”) or of his vision (“one principle or law—one community”), but above all through his suffering.
culture can retain its own cultural specificity;
the same time, no culture can retain its own tribal deities; religion must be de-ethnicized so that ethnicity can be de-sacralized.
Christian children of Abraham can “depart” from their culture without having to leave it (in
within the cultural space one inhabits.
it involves neither a typically modern attempt to build a new heaven out of the worldly hell nor a typically postmodern restless movement that fears to arrive home.
is always already rest and joy (pace Lyotard and Gruber 1995, 16). Is the result of this kind of departure
with one foot outside their own culture while with the other remaining firmly planted in it. They are distant, and yet they belong. Their difference is internal to the culture (Volf 1994, 18f.). Because of their internality—their immanence, their belonging—the particularities, inscribed in the body, are not erased; because of their difference—their transcendence, their distance—the universality can be affirmed.
Distance from a culture must never degenerate into flight from that culture but must be a way of living in a culture.
This, then, was Paul’s creative re-appropriation of the original Abrahamic revolution. In the name of the one God of Abraham Paul opened up a particular people to become the one universal multicultural family of peoples.
There is a reality that is more important than the culture to which we belong. It is God and the new world that God is creating, a world in which people from every nation and every tribe, with their cultural goods, will gather around the triune God, a world in which every tear will be wiped away and “pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:3).
like to call a “catholic personality,” a personal microcosm of the eschatological new creation (Volf 1992a). A catholic personality is a personality enriched by otherness, a personality which is what it is only because multiple others have been reflected in it in a particular way. The distance from my own culture that results from being born by the Spirit creates a fissure in me through which others can come in. The Spirit unlatches the doors of my heart saying: “You are not only you; others belong to you too.”
Edward Said points out, all cultures are “hybrid . . . and encumbered, or entangled and overlapping with what used to be regarded as extraneous elements”
The distance from our own culture which is born of the Spirit of the new creation should loosen the grip of our culture on us and enable us to live with its fluidity and affirm its hybridity. Other cultures are not a threat to the pristine purity of our cultural identity, but a potential source of its enrichment. Inhabited by people who are courageous enough not simply to belong, intersecting and overlapping cultures can mutually contribute to the dynamic vitality of each.
function of the distance forged by the Spirit of new creation is no less important: it entails a judgment...
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Distance created by the Spirit opens the eyes to self-deception, injustice, and the destructiveness of the self.
evangelical personality—a personality brought to repentance and shaped by the Gospel and engaged in the transformation of the world. The struggle against falsehood, injustice, and violence both in the self
tradition I become an indeterminate “self,” open to any arbitrary content. As a consequence, I simply float, unable to resist anything because I do not stand anywhere.11
indeterminate space, looking at the world from everywhere and anywhere. Rather with one foot planted in their own culture and the other in God’s future—internal difference—they have a vantage point from which to perceive and judge the self and the other not simply on their own terms but in the light of God’s new world—a world in which a great multitude “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” is gathered “before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation
evangelical personality needs ecumenical community.
chapter is also not only about exclusion from “ethnic” and other kinds of communities (say a community built around gender), but about exclusion from a situated
Exclusion is barbarity within civilization, evil among the good, crime against the other right within the walls of the self.
would reveal not simply a mean streak in an innocent face but also a certain aura of meanness that exudes from its very innocence. As Friedrich Nietzsche and neo-Nietzscheans (such as Michel Foucault) have pointed out, exclusion is often the evil perpetrated by “the good” and barbarity produced by civilization.
Foucault shares a distaste for boundaries with other postmodern thinkers, such as Jacques Derrida or Gilles Deleuze. Commenting on the nature of postmodernism Alan Wolfe rightly notes that the essence of the approach is to question the presumed boundaries between groups: of signifiers, people, species, or texts. What appears at first glance to be a difference is reinterpreted, discovered to be little more than a distinction rooted in power or a move in a rhetorical game. Differences, in other words, never have a fixed status in and of themselves;
Does not such radical indeterminacy undermine from within the idea of inclusion, however? I believe it does. Without boundaries we will be able to know only what we are fighting against but not what we are fighting for.
Second, “no boundaries” means not only “no intelligent agency” but in the end “no life” itself. Aiming
The absence of boundaries creates nonorder, and nonorder is not the end of exclusion but the end of life.
This is one of the major lessons of Foucault’s thought.
But first I need to make some important distinctions without which our outrage at exclusion would rest on nothing firmer than the arbitrariness and fickleness of our own displeasure.
