A Small Victory, (Yet for me) A Momentous Occasion

Those who read my blog know I am not one to post short blurbs, but tonight I thought I would make an exception.  The theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg's thought, since highschool (though I hardly understood him then) has been the leading voice shaping my thought.  I have thus, for the last ten years, read his works, and secondary works about him, voraciously.  And though I have now grown to disagree with him on some issues he remains to me the apex of theological scholarship. His learning is enormous and something I could only dream to match.  He wrote more than most people read in a lifetime (his cirriculum vitae currently lists over 650 published works, including books and essays); he read more than it is sometimes imaginable for a human to read.  At one point in a single chapter of the third volume of his Systematic Theology he reaches nearly 1100 footnotes.  The inter-discplinary scope of his learning is enormous: one feels he left no stone unturned.  Aristotle, Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Tennyson, Barth, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Augustine, Aquinas, Wittgenstein, Barrow and Tipler, Penrose, Hawking, Mircea Eliade, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Freud.  All of these names and so many, many more appear in his writing.  And he not only cites them as authorities he has read, but gives deep, meaningful critique and interaction with their works.  Francis Schussler Fiorenza calls him "the most learned living theologian," and I can hardly doubt it.  He is an inspiration to me not only in acquiring and utilizing knowledge, but also in generosity and temperance.

But enough of the accolades, which could be endless.  This week I finished reading his Anthropology in Theological Perspective, a 600 page tour-de-force which, if now a bit outdated, will forever stand the test of time as a piece of scholarship.  Reading a 600 page book, however painstaking in itself, is not the victory  I wish to speak of, however.  In finishing this book I have, at least for me, completed a small milestone: I have read every book by Pannenberg yet translated into English.  From Revelation as History to the three-volume Basic Questions in Theology to Jesus: God and Man to Toward a Theology of Nature, and most recently the three-volumed Systematic Theology and the collection of essays entitled The Historicity of Nature. Many say knowledge puffs up.  Makes arrogant.  I can say that perhaps this is true but I have experienced the opposite: I am absolutely humbled before this man.  I am humbled and grateful to have access to his knowledge.  But above all I think I am humbled that a man who has a learning which infinitely exceeds anything I could ever muster is unanimously recorded by all who know him to be a man of generosity, a man whose Christian character is always displayed in his own humility.  I can say honestly I am honored to, however obliquely, keep a man such as this in my company always through the books he has published.  And I look forward to the years to come when I revisit him, and feel the wonder all over again as I re-read his works.

To Wolfhart Pannenberg: we never knew each other, but across the seas you spoke to me.  I hope I listened well.

My (Very Short and Utterly Objective) Review of Love Wins, by Rob Bell

‘Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free …, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might prove to be empty!’

               --Karl Barth "The Proclamation of God's Free Grace," in God Here and Now (Routledge Classics, 2003), p. 42

Being late as I am to most parties, I just recently came around to reading Rob Bell's now infamous release, Love Wins.  I should somewhat ruefully admit by "read" I mean "listen to," as I couldnt quite bring myself to delay other reading just for its sake.  (Bell is the narrator of his own book, for those interested in an audio version, and I can say he gives a slick and emotive reading.)  By now Im sure the many not following John Piper's eminently Christian gesture of rejecting a book not yet released (through a flawlessly logical dismissal contained somehow within the 140 character limit of twitter, no less) have either read the book for themselves, or heard rumors of Bell's "Christian universalism" (that is, for those who don't know, the idea that Christ saves everyone).  To my mind the label fits.  But Bell is more than the label.  This is a heartfelt plea to those who have been hurt by Christianity or disgusted by a two-faced God who is kind one minute and gleefully casting others who didn't pray quite right into an eternal lake He decided to fill with fire the next.  Rob Bell is quite rightly bemused and saddened at those who peddle a Dr. Evil-esque God, one who conjures all sorts of ludicrously exorbitant tortures for his victims ala sharks with (fricken) laser beams on their (fricken) heads.  After all, Bell is certainly right when he notes many of the images that are often invoked by the mere mention of Hell sound more of Dante than they do of Paul.


On a charitable reading, the book is thus a proclamation of the gospel of the hope of Christ, seen through the question: will Hell ultimately be empty?  Bell's answer is, of course, that God desires all to be saved and so ultimately gets what he wants.  So yes, eventually even those in hell will be softened, and turn to God.  Those wanting to question Bell's orthodoxy should be given at least a moments pause to note that Bell's position is very similar (at least superficially) to the Eastern Orthodox who believe that in Christ's death and descent into Hell, thereby by being resurrected and ascending to heaven Hade's chains were broken (usually based on a reading of Ephesians 4:7-10, which is a quote of Ps. 68:18)  In many (largely implicit) ways, Bell seems indebted to this Orthodox tradition.    


Yet, this is where the similarity ends.  Rob Bell embodies both many of the best and many of the worst qualities of a Christian author.  He is interesting, often generous, a good story teller.  Unfortunately even those many who might be sympathetic with Bell and his claims, may want to distance themselves from this, their most recent defense as it embodies an almost complete lack of coherent argument.  As a matter of temporal coincidence, last year I read another vaguely similar book by the leading Russian Orthodox theologian, Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, entitled Christ the Conqueror of Hell, which is a lengthy overview of the history of the concept in Eastern Orthodox theology.  I say vaguely similar because Archbishop Alfeyev is a scholar of the first rate, and it is unfair that I should compare Bell to him.  Nonetheless given the hoopla that surrounded Bell's book, I am sorry to say it was a rumble generated more from his celebrity than from his argumentation.  Neither heat nor light, merely sound.  And not even a voice in the wilderness.


Without getting too much into details, Bell's work, while not without merit, is mostly a confused morass of hasty generalization hiding behind an army of conscripted Bible texts strain and crack under the tortion of making Bell's point.  Bell reads his Bible like I'm sure many stare at Magic Eye pictures: if you relax your eyes and tilt your head just so, the difficult melange of many colors and images disappear, and a nice, clean picture emerges.  In the same way Bell has stared long enough and hard enough that many of the details have quite conveniently melted away and find no voice here.  His word studies are lengthy examples of how not to do them.  His personal stories are touching but often appear to carry the weight of the argument, rather than the text.  At some points Bell reads images like Hell and sees them as just a mixture of metaphors that describe real experiences and consequences of rejecting God (mostly in this present life).  But at other times as it suits him, Bell is hyper-literal.  Gehenna, since it refers to a literal place outside of Jerusalem, couldn't possibly have a metaphorical or spiritual significance, argues Bell.  At another point Bell argues that since "aeon" can simply mean "age" Hell is not "eternal," merely a "period of time."  Yet he no where deals with the very real problem (putting aside for a moment that the actual word used is aeonion, which is not quite the same) that if this is true, why should we understand "eternal life," as forever?  Bell pictures heaven and hell side by side, with people eventually repenting and coming into heaven.  One wonders though, with Bell's reasoning, if people cant wander the other way.


At other times Bell's work is fractured from underneath by a certain tension.  He wants to present what he is doing as new enough so those recently burned by Christianity can accept it, but ancient enough that it appears orthodox.  And certainly there are good arguments out there, Alfeyev's book is proof that there is a strong stream of tradition.  Unfortunately very little of it shows up in Bell's book. Nor does he cite more recent offerings like von Balthasar or Barth.  He fires off a list of a few names like Origen (not the best example) and Gregory of Nyssa (better).  But then fails to give a single argument of theirs.  Its like Bell is dodgeball team captain and he's simply yelling "my team!" as fast as he can as he points to a few figures.  At other times he represents those who disagree with his view as confused simpletons who actually don't know what they are saying (in the audio book version he gets pretty sarcastic sounding as he goes).  He gives, for example, a catalogue of sixteen passages where Jesus lists different ideas on what it takes to please God (and these without context, in the audio book version Bell literally becomes breathless at the pace he lists them).  When Bell adds another five requirements from Paul (again without context, or attempt at synthesis) the impression he gives is that the Bible itself is a somewhat eclectic, incoherent mess.  So too is it implied that the more traditional view of Hell is just one (mistaken) view of many, not to be taken seriously.  In the end Bell appeals to the fact that the story he tells "is a better story," than the classic one.  Which to many may be true.  But why everyone should be beholden to Bell's final word on what makes a good story is itself unclear.  If what Bell means is that his story is tailor made for many contemporary sensibilities, sure.  It just seems to me that the fire and brimstone bit played to packed houses in the Middle Ages.  And Dante didn't get famous for writing a poem just about purgatory.


Bell's lack of engagement with anything but fleeting caricatures is disheartening.  At one point even the sympathetic will cringe as Bell, apparently unable to pick his battles, cites a passage in Hebrews by the sly: "the woman who wrote Hebrews notes..."  Even if you are open to the idea (that has zero evidence, however tantalizing it might be) that Priscilla or Aquila wrote Hebrews (first proposed, I believe, by von Harnack) you have to admit that by referencing it like that its hard not to get the impression that nice guy Rob Bell is at this point just giving the middle finger to the establishment.  And even if you are a Christian universalist you will have to admit Bell's stubborn refusal to deal with actual issues in favor of the opposition is like the kid who takes his ball and just goes home to play by his rules.  At one point he even asserts (without arguing) that Hell is absurd because judgment gives God no glory.  Or that there is only one way to read "God desires all men to be saved."  I am sympathetic to the claims.  Yet  I can only feel sorry for Bell at that point, as Im sure Calvinists from here to Geneva lined up at his door to beat him to death with a copy of the Institutes.  Of course, you could hardly blame them.  They were predestined to do it.


I put the Karl Barth quote up at the top because I think it illustrates a good point.  Often I think people were quick to criticize Bell not because they disagreed with this or that piece of exegesis, or because they felt the truth of the matter was different.  It often felt like there was a certain anxiety that God's grace might indeed turn out to be too free.  This, I think, is a silly fear.  All Christians should be hopeful universalists even if they don't believe it.  The vitriol Bell received was a testament to Barth's words.  I for one certainly do not agree with Bell; and while there were enjoyable moments there were also frustratingly bad ones.  I think we have to keep in mind Paul who wrote in Philippians 1:18:  "But what does it matter?  The important thing is that, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.  And because of this I rejoice, and continue to rejoice."  If anyone has come to Christ because they felt liberated by Bell's presentation of the Gospel, I too rejoice.  In their haste to cut Bell down I think many like Piper have forgotten that Bell was attempting (however poorly) to reach those who are hurting and needed to hear the real and genuine hope contained in the gospel message.  Yet I grieve too, because to be frank Bell completely botched his opportunity.  After all, the very same Paul quoted above again and again repeats the importance of doctrine, a point in general that Bell seems to shrug off.  God works in mysterious ways, and I hope he works through Bell's book.  And I hope he works in those genuinely hurt by the church to bring them back, to feel His love and hope.  But I couldn't help but put Bell's book down (or, I guess, turn the audio off) and be left with the impression of a really nice guy who believed passionately in something, but who didn't quite get beyond wikipedia.

Chapter Six: My Dreams and the Sea (Part One)

Once upon a time I sat in my car for hours.  I say once upon a time because I do not know when, or how long.  I was a world.  My own metric, endless, extensionless, a mathematical point that went nowhere forever.

Ive always hated math.

I thought, as the mind thinks its random thoughts as it struggles away from a tragedy: if I have a soul that is not flesh and bone, not metal or material, where was my limit?  How was I here?  If who I was truly was immaterial then how was I myself?  What kept me between ribs and heart if I could truly not touch them?

And so I surged away.

_______________________________

When my family was wealthy, and still loved itself, we had a house upon the high rocks looking over the shore.  I loved it.  It was like a beautiful monument giving its vigil over the slim stalks of dune grass, which descended at least a hundred feet down to the beach.  The house rested upon a stretch of mostly deserted, curling hill, away from the small town that sprouted further south along the cold foaming lines of ocean towards the Haystack Rock, a giant mounting up from the sea like a titan and impressing itself on the horizon through fog and cloud.  Our own private corner of paradise.

One could make their way down to the beach by finding a path winding through the sea grass down through the many dune hills, making labyrinthine the way toward the waters.  And as one passed through the waves of amber stock rippling, themselves like waves of water in the wind, watching the occasional fighter kite ripping carelessly through the air, you would make your way to level ground and see it.  The great dead tree.  Splayed over and horizontal like the lumbering sky itself grew bulk and fell to the earth, dead.  I remember some of us would have conversations about how it got there; whether it fell into the cove from the cliffs above, or if it was carried here by the galloping waters from far away.  It might as well have been from another galaxy; its frame was gnarled and infinitely complex.  As if the secret of our far cove needed another boundary, another limen, a second isolation from the endless southern beaches.  It was a field of husked and forlorn bones, jagged gnarling bark.  Even on its side it stood taller than a man.  A pillar that formerly held the sky had fallen.

             I drove there, after it all happened.  I went there without thought, without hesitation. I barely even remember the drive.  I fled through ancient memories, drove under a forest of stars.  How many times I had passed these roadways with my family.  With my friends.  I remember I took a girlfriend there, and we sat on the dunes beneath the brittle canopy of endless lights, kindled a fire, and we watched as the heavens broke through and wandered before us amidst the blackness.  I remembered kissing her and holding her, remembered how we whispered we’d love each other for ever on.

But that was gone now.

I had no money for hotels.  And we had sold our beach house so long ago.  So I parked out in front of it.  Slept in my car.  I was there for five days.  Alone with just the sea and my dreams.

_____________________________

Where are we?  What the hell is going on?

            Don’t you remember, I said.  I am dreaming.  Don’t you recognize the moment when I could have saved us?

            This cant be happening.

            I cant help what I dream.

            Let me out.

            I can’t, you’re me.  You gave me that damn look.

            You aren’t you.  You are me; my subconscious.  If I wake up—you—you disappear.

            Great.  So whats this about?

            You see us there?  I pointed.  You looked towards a door.  Our house, forever ago.  Everything else was strangely out of focus, in the way that dreams often are.  We both tried to look away, but everything else was just like oily marks on walls, stains on the air.  As if some artist were called in to fill in the peripherals, the details that didn’t matter and weren’t remembered.  As if art enframed us.

            But there you and I were, standing on the porch outside.  It appeared like we were talking.

            One could vaguely make out the marks of dusk, only just beginning to fall.  Everything outside the breadth of the door glowed and warped like pastel brushings on a canvas; there but not real, imprinted with the marks of some fabrication.  The sun sat nearly asleep on the shoulders of the distant mountains, threatening to tumble down.  Spiral clouds drifted like soaked cotton, barely aloft and threatening to drag sky to earth.  The deep firmament imperceptibly gave way, up, up, into a hemisphere of ink.  The navy blue horizon just the first gush of the uttermost and infinite dark.

            Theres no need to cry, my other I said.  His hand, my hand, on your cheek, my thumb, his thumb, gently brushing away a tear.

            I don’t want to watch this, I said.

            This is your dream.

            I tried to look away, I said.  Everything else is so…blurry.

            I know, you said.

            I watched and I remembered.  The scene repeated suddenly, like the tape had rewound as I tried to look elsewhere into the blurry night.  I had come for a few more of my things.  It was December and winter ran around us.  I had climbed the long stairs and found you with three of your girl friends, primped and ready for a night in the city.  Their movements lithe and full of intoxicating perfume.  Short skirts and lipstick and recently manicured hair. Cute coats.  A flurry of gossip and giggling, staccato and poorly stifled as I knocked.  Their heads all snapped to me as I feebly knocked, and as recognition rolled on their faces, all eyes furrowed through the half window of the door.  I could only imagine what they said about me.

            Other-You held a drink and a smile.  Walked toward me like a model walks the runway.

            I guess you weren’t drowning in tears, then.

            Oh hush, you know people deal with things differently.  You said.

            The other you, the dream you, shooed off the now scowling friends and scolded them to be quiet as you answered, opening the door.  Like wolves reluctant to be chased off a kill, they moved to the kitchen.  I saw martinis.  An empty bottle of vodka.  Nutrient, no doubt, for the night ahead.  Between olive touched draughts a head of one or two would snap towards us, free of coy restraint, as a glower and vicious stare leapt from their circle.  Hushed murmurs.  And a laugh would break out.

            Before my other-I could speak you stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind you.  A welcome wall between the wolves and I.   Your eyes were earnest.  Voice whispering.

            I remember you smelled like heaven as you came close.

            Thank you, you said.

            I need to talk to you your other-you said to my other-I.

            Theres no need to cry, other-I said.

            Your other-hand caressed the distance of my cheek.  A hand went to my waste and threaded two fingers through a belt-loop of my jeans and, ever so gently, seductively, pulled me in close.  Hips to hips.  Eye to eye.

            There was that silent moment, the moment between lovers that hold so close as to feel the warmth of breath, holding right on the edge of the pull of the others lips, leaving no room for the cold of the night.

            I—I think I made a mistake. Other-you whispered, as we watched. 

Oh, this moment, you said.

            What moment?  I asked, curious if you actually remembered it, too.

            When we kissed.

            For the last, time.  I said.  For a moment.

            Yes. 

            I—I—want you back.  Your other you said.

            I saw the hesitation in my face, the great grinding cosmos passing beneath my eyes through brain and wire and heart and screaming soul. 

            Time stopped for a moment.

            I remember asking myself: self.  What should I do?

            You could take her back.  A voice said.  You looked at me as if you heard.  Why didn’t you listen?  You asked.  Other-you and Other-I were frozen in embrace.

            I—

            But she betrayed you, another voice said.

            Shes asking forgiveness.

            Ha!  Forgiveness, after every other option ran dry.

            No, you looked at me, it was genuine.  That was a phrase I feared.  But could not believe.

            What does that even mean?  I asked you.  Genuine?  Do I think that you genuinely missed me in that moment?  Yes.  I believe that.  But what does it matter?  Genuine emotion can come from opportune moments.  You were alone, abandoned. 

            I missed you.

            I was an easy target to miss.  At the end of all other options.  Everyone thinks genuine means truly.  I don’t know.  You genuinely missed me, but it was not truly.  You were reduced, in that moment you were clouded.  And the actually you felt was you when you were small and not yourself.  So the self that was not you genuinely felt my absence.

            You were always too philosophical.  Why couldn’t you just be romantic?

            And take you back then?

            Yes!  Embraced me in a moment of sorrow.  My heart was yours to take back.  You were too blind to see.

            I would have had it for but a moment. 

            You tilted your head.

            You know its true, I said.  We would have been in love again.  Yes I believe it.  But what happens after a week?  A month? A year?  Nothing changed.  We would have been intoxicated in some deep sleep.  And we would wake again from that coma.  Romance would have just led to us to a second death.

            You don’t know that.

            No.  I guess I don’t.  Not for sure.

            Do you regret it?

            I regret—I regret that there will be a moment that I have to stand before God and explain this to Him.

            Me too.

            And the tape started playing again, in this pastel dream.

            I want you back, other-you said to other-I.

            Because Im the last resort.  How other-I hurt you, how I struck you down.

            No.  You said and pulled me a little closer.  Your perfume blurred the lines between us.  I breathed in deeply like I could draw you into my soul.  That terrible halcyon love threatening to spark there between us again, artificially new in the twilight of its death.  It refused to settle down.

            I remember catching a last waft of the candles you loved to light in our house.  Slipping between your perfume and beautiful breath.

            Cinnamon and apple pie.

            And then that beautiful horrible moment came.

            Before I could answer again you drew me in for a kiss.  The world wobbled; the lustral dark swooned.  You held my belt loop beneath the pastel moon and the pastel stars, and with the other hand the back of my head as your fingers ran through my hair.  You looked into my eyes, and I looked at yours as they darted down longingly to my lips and you with the gentlest of pressure drew me in.  The kiss was tentative and tender, like a first try, like our first so long ago beneath the waterfall and the Autumn of Oregon’s gorges; we were movements of infinitesimal advance until the tender bridge of mouths connected.  And at their impress I felt silence expand like a deep breath, as the wolves waited and watched.  Lips, so light and delicate, reveled as they found each other and held in that smallest pressure and heat. 

            We spoke in a language where no words passed between us.

It was a kiss you feel in your whole body, as if one and another were unity.

            But our bodies were a sorrow.  And we could not escape it. 

Could not escape what made us tragic.

            I pulled away.

Not because I didn’t love the kiss, but because I did.

            No.  Other-I said.

            No?  Other-you replied.

            You looked at me.  I looked at you. 

            In the dream it was like the event happened twice at once as our duplicates and  ourselves made the same motions, apologies.  We watched ourselves dying, died ourselves as we watched again.  Said the same goodbyes.

            I cant do this, both of me said.

            Both of you looked grieved.

            The whole dream moved and we all became one motion.

            Pastel stars swirled and bled.  The whole sky, fibers of dark and light.

            I said to you: Im sorry.  I just cant.

            Why, you both asked with your giant, beautiful eyes.

            I don’t want this.  I cant trust you.   Not anymore.

            You think Im a bad person?

            No.  I never said that.  God, I never said that, you know I love you.  I just cant trust you—not with me.

            Then you did something I could never do.  You accepted what I said. 

And with a grace you nodded with an empty look and stepped away.  A step back.  Taking your perfume with you.  Your face a pastel shadow sinking into the dream.

            The world heaved with a dull roar.

            Whats that sound?  Your shadow said as the blurry world went even more dim.

            I think it sounds like waves.

            Waves?

            Waves.  I am dreaming.  I think I remember, I am asleep next to the ocean.

            You mean in a hotel?

            I don’t think so.  Im—its very cold.

            God—you’re not sleeping outside are you?

            No.  I think Im in my car.

            There was a sadness in the pastel dark of your shadowed eyes.

            I never wanted that for you, you said.  Your were always in my heart.

            I know.  I said.

            You, other-you, was silent and looked to the side.

And still we pulled away.  Great lengths of shadow stretched between us.

I heard your wolves howling about me as you walked into our former home with red eyes.

And I walked away.

Toward the new life sorrow built.  So cold.

I awoke.

Stumbling, I spilled out of my tiny car.  Into the misty cold of the morning.  Grey mist kissed my skin as I pushed through the sand toward the roar of water giving its endless conversation to the land.  The sea is a woman, I thought.  And the land a man.  The water is always talking, and the earth always silent as it listens to the sea. 

I ducked into my car and searched for a sweatshirt.  I threw it over my head and quickly buried my hands into the small front pocket.  The clock hummed six-fifteen.

I found my way to a carapace of rocks throwing itself into the oblivion of early tides.

I closed my eyes.  Breathed in the mist.

         I stood on the verge of the trembling sea.

It was just we, me and the sea.  But I saw it wrong. Grammar told me it was actually the sea and I that were paired.  But this doesnt rhyme.  Let me start over.  It was just the sky and I.  As I was by the sea. 

Much better.  Lets begin.

There was no narrative now, in the spaces between our lives.  No constellation or map.  Just moments.  Beautiful horrible spaces.  Gasping amongst sea-foam for each other, but alone.  They no longer talk.  They no longer unite. It was like a movie reel caught on fire.  The amber waves of cascading light making small circlets, burning, expanding as they invaded and ate the frame of the reel.  Leaving only spots and atoms of pictures, remnants unrelated.  And I wandered useless between them.  A star knocked from orbit; searching now within the voids and deserts between lights.

A picture held me captive.  Of you and I wandering.  Apart. Away.

And I tried to escape.  But you painted yourself on everything I saw.  All my language repeated you.  Was inside you.  And every small story I spoke, in winter or summer, in happiness or depression, repeated you to me inexorably.

Imprinted itself upon my world.

I am an abbreviation, I thought as I breathed out into the open sky.  I am caught here, on cliffs and all of Oregon’s little misty edges and tidal draughts, holding one end of a love.  All my movements are an etc… of some story, and every breath of mine is just another ellipses.  I was like a stripped live wire, loosing its clouds of sparks like blood seeping, bleeding my last little fires out into an unreceptive empty space.  But were these little fires, like all ellipses, merely hints and symbols of something more?  My visible movements, were they just little hills with beautiful crests, carved from an infinite sky more profound than them all?  Was there meaning here?  Or was I nothing more than one of the stones listening to the sea?

The whole world stood before me, I felt, in its horizon and panorama as a great mystery.  I felt so saturated with meaning that I could burst; but what I would burst with I did not know.  It was like one of those dreams—like all dreams starting in the middle, within an action already started—and you are chasing a glimmer of movement.  You go as swiftly as you can through the room, sometimes the dream makes you move like you are fettered in chains, sometimes you are swift as an imprint of lightning on the air—but the outcome is the same.  All the doors that open in the dream reveal only further stretches of carpet and another door.  Oh God—this was not a curse but a question shouted at the waters—was that our love?  Were we merely types of sadness searching for that movement, and did we mistake each other for it?  And that disappointment that sometimes fell between us my love, was it the sorrow that murmured as we strained to look beyond each other, trying to sneak a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner, always a pace or two ahead of us?

Had we been curious temples for each other, for God himself?

Oh God.  We thought we were to be God for each other.  But that shadow always escaped us.  We were not God.

Our divorce was the dissolution of a recognized idolatry.  Of a failed love.

I could only hope it was so grandiose.  So holy.

But it raised the question.

Where was God?

Where was God as the nights closed in around me; where was God when you desperately gave yourself out to find compassion? 

But what was even more important:  Was God a thing that had a place and was not where He was expected?  Or was God a thing that we discovered had nowhere to be?  The difference was great.  A thing not where it was expected to be is still somewhere.  But what if the thing you wanted was nowhere?  The highest tragedy, the one that spoke loudest to my soul in every book I ever read or movie watched, was the desperate search for that which did not exist.  El Dorodo.  The fountain of youth.  Atlantis.  How many desperate souls had committed themselves with all the passion and fury of man to a phantom and a rumor?  And how close were they when they in their heart of hearts felt so close?  Only ever infinitely far.  The last verge of hill, or great swath of jungle, held no secrets but only another silence.

I looked up at the shore, at the horizon, at the rumors of sun over the sleepy horizon.  And an anger pulled itself from my cage and bones, like my soul was snared by the question and hurled itself upon the sea and its tumbling waters.

I stepped from the crags onto the dunes blonde with sea-grass.  One could hear all the gears and clockwork of my sadness grinding, could hear the unwinding hours of grief pouring from my soul. I ran at the beach spotted with pools of water and the great mist of an early Oregon morning, suddenly in sprint like a madman, all frenzy and terror.  My lungs stung with the onrush of frozen breath.  I got my wish from so long ago, when I wanted to scream and break things until my voice cracked my skin and unfurled my soul from artery and bone, until I just burned out like cinder and became absolutely nothing but the thin air.  The mist and the sea and my screams were a symphony playing to the morning horizon.

Where are you?  I roared.  At God.

You were supposed to meet me here!

A few seagulls flew away.  Far along through the mist two shipping boats floated serenely about, shimmering outlines on the far end of the sea.  Down along the shoreline at a distance an old man was hunched over looking for shells in the early morning.  My voice did not even carry to him.  Or if it did he did not let it bother his pursuit.  Did my voice then, carry to God?  Or was I so small that it was lost upon even the first waves?  Was God hunched over looking for me, as the old man was for his little shells?  My anger redoubled.

Where are you, coward?  I exploded.  You said you would take care of me!

In the heat of my rage I had pulled off my shirt, even in the utter cool of the morning.  The mist hugged my skin with frost.  Both my arms were held out, flexing and with fists flailing to my side.

I’m right here!  Answer me! 

God was silent, but the sea-song was beautiful.

Christianity and the Logic of Capitalism (Part Four): Some Problems

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America is Disneyland…Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.

                                                                              Jean Baudrillard[1]

Money has not only the ‘appearance of value,’ like other commodities; it is the ‘form of the appearance of the value of commodities.’  It participates in a Platonic metaphysics in which its abstraction is consummated by its disappearance [the Real is no-thing finite, but the pure ideal and unrepresentable Form of Desire itself].  The power of capitalism lies in the omnipresence of an absence that circulates in and through desire…it is an environment, an atmosphere.  It…possesses and promotes a cosmology…however much it deals with material goods…its ethos and ethics are utopian and transcendental…In a world where content disappears and brand names such as Pepsi, Armani, H&M…Reebok, and so on float free and ethereally on electronic waves of advertising, we enter a parody of Plato’s world of pure forms…corporate mythology [means]….raw objects…are merely ‘collective hallucinations.’

                                                                                    Graham Ward[2]

For our purposes we must here ask with William Cavanaugh, then, “when is a market free?”[3]  Friedman defines a free market as one in which the transactions that occur are “informed,” and “voluntary.”[4]  He writes:

So long as effective freedom of exchange is maintained, the central feature of the market organization of economic activity is that it prevents one person from interfering with another with respect to most of his activities.  The consumer is protected from coercion by the seller because of the presence of other sellers with whom he can deal; the seller is protected from coercion by the consumer because of other consumers to whom she can sell; the employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work, and so on.  And the market does this impersonally and without centralized authority.[5]

 Friedman is confident, in Cavanaugh’s terms, “that the price system in a free-market economy transmits all the information needed to make exchanges informed.”  Yet this definition, though powerful, is hardly neutral or natural, but in Taylor’s terms an alternative imaginative construction of human fullness.  Thus the prophetic movement of Christian witness can, for example, unearth that the very demands of the market are a faith: our continued belief that our freedom (and indeed, salvation) so-defined lies in the market itself.  And so the etymology of credit itself stems from credo: I believe!  Thus in the recent bail-outs “let us…not forget that the sublimely enormous sums of money were spent not on some clear ‘real’ or concrete problem, but essentially in order to restore confidence in the markets, that is, simply to change people’s beliefs!”[6]  Augustine defined true freedom as the ability to act for the end of the Highest Good, namely God. Shorn of any higher good, however, Friedman’s definition of freedom from restriction (and nothing more) is little different than nihilism.  “To be entirely modern,” writes David Bentley Hart, “is to believe in nothing.”[7]  For “if the will determines itself principally in and through the choices it makes, then it…at some very deep level, must also be nothing: simply a pure movement of spontaneity, motive without motive, absolute potentiality, giving birth to itself.”  Some might object that this is special pleading by a critic, yet though unrelated Hart’s analysis is remarkably consonant with one of capitalism’s own proponents,  Michael Novak, who comments that

The ‘wasteland’ at the heart of democratic capitalism is like a field of battle, on which individuals wander alone, in some confusion, amidst many casualties.  Nonetheless, like the dark night of the soul in the inner journey of the mystics this desert has an indispensable purpose.  It is maintained…[and] it is swept clean out of reverence for the sphere of the transcendent, to which the individual has access through the self, beyond the mediations of social institutions.[8]

     

This sounds remarkably like the nominalist God who does as He pleases as a spontaneous act of power and will, as outlined in the last section, here merely transferred to the sphere of humankind.  It thus fits almost without remainder to Hart’s definition of nihilism.  Moreover we can ask whether or not it even delivers what it offers.  In one sense of course it absolutely does—and in abundance.  Yet with no guiding purpose the market of “free” individuals merely becomes a site of pure competitive power jostling in the same plane for expansion and shedding imposed limits obviously this is the ideality of free-market capitalism.  Yet is it something that as Christians we can simply accept?  It appears to be a sort of Pelagianism of the market: we are free insofar as we are merely un-coerced.  Yet a more “Augustinian” definition of freedom would say any true account of human freedom be embedded in an examination of the true ends of human life.  Moreover the Pelagian notion of freedom is a feint, for we are under the sway of the market’s evolutionary dictum: expand or be cast out.  Alex de Tocqueville once wrote that in art and poetry he was not so much worried about lapses into safe realism so much as into flights of unanchored fantasy, which would in turn render the real world intolerably boring, and thus more prone to cycles of increasing escape.[9]  This is illustrated by Zizek in his usual humorous manner: “On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: ‘Dear Guest!: To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally-smoke free.  For any infringement…you will be charged $200.’  The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay.”[10] 

Cavanaugh, following Zizek, is surely right then when he notes wryly, “rather than celebrating the growth of enormously powerful corporations as the manifestation of consumer freedom, it is more realistic to examine the ability of sheer concentrated economic power to control patterns of consumption.”[11]  With the saturation and power of marketing forces “freedom,” (defined as freedom to choose) becomes more an ironic simulation than the actual exercise of choice.  “In a world of consumption without ends, it is assumed that the consumer will want to maximize his or her own power at the expense of the laborer, and the manager does not feel free to resist this logic, lest his or her corporation fall victim to competition…”[12]  The ascent of the brand image coupled with the quest for the ephemeral “cool” is by its very nature an imprecise and anxiety ridden enterprise, “except now the harrowing doubts of adolescence are the billion-dollar questions of our age.”[13]  Faith in the freedom of the market can be parodied by the analogy that success is like picking the top ten photos of pretty girls out of one hundred: only you are not picking your favorites.  The choices now revolve around your thoughts about what the other’s opinions will be and vice versa: everyone else is choosing based upon their guesses of what everyone else will choose.  Is this freedom?

Nor is this even an issue relegated to personal opinion: marketing has a serious interest in influencing the universal average by capturing it with powerful marketing images.  Klein parodies this by analyzing the phenomenon of marketing “street snitches,” who look like ordinary people who hang out with groups in order to secretly determine their preferences, so that they feed back into the marketing machine to begin influence on everyone else.  “The vision is both horrifying and hilarious: a world of glorified diary trespassers and professional eavesdroppers, part of a spy-vs-spy corporate fueled youth culture stalking itself.”[14]  Or this situation can be flipped on its head and explained another way.  It is a solipsism in reverse: instead of “I am the only thing that exists,”  it becomes “I am the only thing that does not  (but must!) exist.”  This means often the question of our desire itself is this enigma of the average opinion, not primarily “what do I want?” but “what do others want from me?”  “By no longer simply repressing the lack of a fixed identity, the hegemonic ideology [of capitalism] directly mobilizes that lack to sustain the endless process of consumer self re-creation.”[15]  In a very real sense then, “we are forced to live as if we were free.”[16]

This sense of the illusion of freedom (the “nowhere” of its utopianism), if real even for we who live in an affluent country, how much more is its “nowhere,” of false freedom for others in worse situations.  Part of the illusion of our freedom is that the market is set up to make us forget the actual sources of our goods and their means of production.  The ideal spirit of consumerism constantly tries to flee from its earthbound bones, so to speak.  But this flight is an ironic refusal to affirm to limitations inscribed into the market’s own notion of freedom.  “On the one hand we are told that we live in an era of unparalleled freedom of choice…on the other hand there is a profound sense of resignation to fate in attitudes towards the market.  The process of globalization seems to have advanced beyond anyone’s control.”[17]  The “hollow corporations,” described at the beginning of this essay had to jettison their bulk somewhere.  So began the creation of sweatshops as extensively outlined by Klein in her book No Logo.[18]  The utopian “nowhere,” ideal of brands that float free of products, and capital which floats free of goods, can hurriedly mobilize in a vast, global circulation of virtual currency carried electronically in binary, but labor, bound to the earth, cannot move so fast.  “It is the very fact that laborers south of the border can be paid a tenth of what laborers north of the border can that accounts for the phenomenon of factories in the United States shutting down and moving to Mexico [and elsewhere.]  It is the immobility of labor that accounts for the mobility of capital.”[19]  Thus “we shop; they drop.”[20]

The common retort is that these so-called sweatshops, even in their how-low-can-you-go limbo wages, are providing a better lifestyle for these people than they would have if the factories were not there.  This, however, is in many ways itself an illusion of the utopian idealism of the market.  Klein, Zizek, Cavanaugh, and Bell (and numerous others)[21] all tell horror stories of how factory life not only does not provide enough to live on but alternate sources of income and revenue have been destroyed by precisely the same market forces which have driven the factories to cheaper-labor territories.  Often countries are, for example, pressured into giving their land over to export crops from other countries, and as more of their domestic crops were for pure exportation, they had to rely increasingly (and ironically) on imported food, while farmers thrown off their lands were forced into slums and consequently had to turn to sweatshops as their only alternative.[22] 

In an especially bizarre case a recent study has correlated the rise of Tuberculosis epidemics in Eastern Europe with IMF loans; once the loans stopped, the TB epidemics declined.  “The explanation for this apparently weird correlation is simple, the condition for getting loans is that the recipient state has to introduce ‘financial discipline’ i.e. reduce public spending; and the first victim of measures designed to reestablish ‘financial health,’ is health itself.”[23] Gnosticism here intervenes: true health is the virtual and “pristine” spirituality of capital, while the debased materiality of the hylic world is but a small forfeiture.  It’s coughing sluggishness but residue, the detritus necessary to cast off for the frictionless ascent of the absolute dollar.

Ironically, then, poor health-care operations of these countries as a result gives others the impetus to offer humanitarian aid in the form of charity, which is recycled into the logic of the market.  Money from our Starbucks coffee for example goes to children in Africa (not at all a bad thing!).  Yet the deflating of our conscience-alarms has occurred through a mechanism which ironically created the poverty it is now, piecemeal, trying to alleviate.  The act of charity is not an abnegation of our desire to consume, but within that very act of egoistic fulfillment.  And within that gambit the corporate reach which has monopolized the harvesting of cacao and forced independent contractors to conform to this standard and streamline business by eliminating and so impoverishing most of its constituents, is also the major engine funding the possibility for the American affluent, and caffeine intoxicated to find a conduit for their pity to alleviate this destitution.  Here is Derrida’s pharmacon: the poison/cure.   Whereas before charity served often as the dialectical abrogation of our concentric fascination with consumption, here it appears merely as that very egoism’s consummation.  Which is to say the deterritorialization of capitalism has provided its own cure: namely in the course of its own limitless expansion, it “corrects” itself for the territory it displaces and subsumes by allowing proximate spending in its own heartland to partially sanction and mythologize this border-pushing in the name of “charity” and normativity.  And if buying into Starbucks’ “coffee ethic,” is not enough, “and you continue to worry about Third World misery,” fear not!  “There are additional products you can buy,” like Ethos water.[24] Charity is no longer an embodied act, but a frictionless virtual one that is identical to the gesture of self-fulfillment.  Indeed part of the same gesture of destruction which enabled charity to exist in this form.  Nietzsche remarked that charity always secretly revels in the existence of its opposite, vice.  For it is only in vice that virtue appears.  Nietzsche’s chilling take on reality appears real, all too real. What is most important here is that the economic strategies of capitalism, and companies within capitalism, which are now “funding,” this charity, are symbols of the very logic which partially drove these countries into needing aid in the first place.  This charity is thus a very real case of taking with the left hand what the right has given.  These people in their earthbound squalor are the heavy bones that our ghost-like freedom tries to leave behind. Thus the economic “benefit,” they are receiving from their new labor is itself doubly questionable, and our own freedom the negative echo of their near imprisonment.

A Small Case Study 

In her brilliant sequel to No Logo, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is an immense and horrifying 700 page narrative of what she terms “disaster capitalism,” in which there are “orchestrated raids [of economic policy] on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting marketing opportunities.”[25]  The idea being that, analogously to “shock therapy,” which attempts, through a series of traumatic electrical shocks, to revert the brain into a pristine pre-lapsarian “blank slate” to be reprogrammed, Klein’s basic thesis is that disaster capitalism (backed upon the theory of Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economics) uses high-level disasters as opportunities to implement their economic policies on a “softened” or “primed” system.[26]

Thus in direct contrast to Webb’s statement that we “have no ideology to impose on others,” Klein argues the opposite: 

Seen through the lens of [the shock doctrine of Milton Friedman], the past thirty five years look very different.  Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact committed with the deliberate attempt of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical ‘free market’ reforms…the bottom line is that while Friedman’s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy, authoritarian condition are required for the implementation of its true vision.[27]

            Klein’s is of course a complex and controversial thesis, the most famous example of which is probably the brutal Pinochet regime in Chile—recorded not only by Klein[28] but is also the focus of William Cavanaugh’s heart-wrenching book Torture and Eucharist.[29]  It can hardly be elaborated upon here.  For our purposes it helps us understand the absurdity of purely equating the spread of American “freedom,” with the gospel message.  If Klein’s narrative is even partially true (and I am inclined to believe it is much more than that) then the spread of American freedom (understood in some sense as the expansion of the free market) has been marked by untold monstrosity, despite whatever advantage and ignorance we who benefit from it back home have had.

            Countless fascinating examples are given, among them however Klein's discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will perhaps have the most immediate resonance with Christians, especially my fellow evangelicals who are (much as I often have been) prone to be "Pro-Israel," without so much as a second thought or nuance.  This is then absorbed into the larger story of "American-style" freedom's we have seen, and which we showed Webb to advocate earlier.  Two examples will hopefully complexify and problematize the pure compatibility of Christianity with that story of American (and free-market) freedom.  The first is that of Russia and the fall of the Soviet Union.  “The democratic revolution was already well under way—in order to push through a Chicago School economic program, that peaceful and hopeful process Gorbachev began had to be violently interrupted.”[30]  And that

by unfortunate historical coincidence the start of the Oslo period [of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks] coincided precisely with the most painful phase of the Chicago-School experiment in Russia.  The handshake on the White House lawn was on September 13, 1993; exactly three weeks later, Yeltsin sent in the tanks to set fire to the parliament building, paving the way for his most brutal form of economic shock.  Over the course of the 1990’s, roughly 1 million Jews left the former Soviet Union and moved to Israel.  Immigrants who came from the former Soviet Union now make up more than 18 percent of Israel’s total Jewish population.  Its hard to overstate the impact of such a large and rapid population transfer to a country as small as Israel.  Proportionally, it would be the equivalent of every person in Angola, Cambodia, and Peru packing their bags and moving to the United States all at once.  In Europe, it would be equivalent to all of Greece moving to France.[31]

            Even more than this, as the Oslo accords came into effect,  because of the new influx of Jews, economically Israel no longer had any sort of need for reliance upon Palestinian labor.  This tilted the balance as such labor always challenged Zionist projects by making demands for restitution and equal citizenship.  The influx of Russian Jews provided a new cheap labor base that had no anti-Zionist pretensions (even if they did not have particularly pro-Zionist affiliation).[32]  There is an interesting coincidence with the ultimate unfruitfulness of the Oslo accords and this influx.  Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres had told the press that, yes, Oslo sought peace, and that this peace was inevitable.  But it was a particular kind of peace.  “We are not seeking a peace of flags,” he said, “we are interested in a peace of markets.”[33]  Peace with the Palestinians had been primarily motivated for economic purposes, and the fear that Israel’s economic future was in peril.[34]  Not only had this influx of Jews because of Friedman’s shock doctrine alleviated this in the immediate form of cheap Zionist-neutral labor, but “amongst the hundreds of thousands of Soviets who came to Israel in the nineties were more highly trained scientists than Israel’s top tech institutes had graduated in the 80 years of their existence.”[35]

            Israeli technical markets boomed.  “When Israel’s niche in the global economy turned out to be information technologies, it meant that the key to growth was sending software and computer chips to Los Angeles and London…success in the tech sector did not require Israel to have friendly relations with its Arab neighbors or to end its occupation of the territories.”[36]  When the dot-com crash came, the tech-heavy Israel was the hardest hit of all countries.  However they were eventually saved from free fall when the market for their services in communication technologies was channeled into security and surveillance.

A slew of new start-ups were launched, specializing in everything from ‘search and nail’ data mining to surveillance cameras, to terrorist profiling.  When the market for these services and devices exploded in the years after September 11, the Israeli state openly embraced a new national economic vision: the growth provided by the dot-com bubble would be replaced with a homeland security boom.  It was the perfect marriage of the Likud Party’s hawkishness and its radical embrace of Chicago School economics, as embodied by Sharon’s finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israel’s new central bank chief, Stanley Fischer, chief architect of the IMF’s shock therapy adventures in Russia and Asia…overnight Israel became, in the words of Forbes magazine, “the go-to country for anti-terrorism technologies.”[37]

            Klein notes with a very level headed tone “economics is by no means the primary motivator for the escalation in the region since 2001.  There is no shortage of fuel for violence on all sides.”  Yet “within this context that is so weighted against peace, economics has, at certain points, been a countervailing force.”  Indeed ironically our homeland security push (also in a chapter by Klein) created a perpetual market and “powerful sector invested in continued violence.”  It is not a coincidence, says Klein “that the Israeli state’s decision to put ‘counter-terrorism’ at the center of its export economy [and primarily to America] has coincided precisely with its abandonment of peace negotiations, as well as a clear strategy to reframe its conflict with the Palestinians not as a battle against a nationalist movement with specific goals for land and rights but rather as part of the global War on Terror—one against illogical, fanatical forces bent only on destruction.”[38]

            Ironically enough America’s push for security so it might be a “beacon of freedom for the world,” is precisely a force keeping the Palestinians unfree.  And ironically it is in part the spread of American freedom of the free market pressuring “shock” reform (either induced shock, or natural shock used as opportunity) which became a major force squelching the Oslo accords (granted by a temporal coincidence, but this does not mitigate the basic point).

---

[1] Quoted in Graham Ward, Cities of God (New York: Routledge, 2000) p.52.

[2] Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009) p.96-98.

[3] Cavanaugh, Being Consumed p.2ff.

[4] Ibid

[5] Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, pp.14-15.

[6] Zizek, First as Tragedy p.80.

[7] David Bentley Hart, The Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) p.20.

[8] Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp.54-55.

[9] cited in Naomi Klein, No Logo

[10] Zizek, First as Tragedy p.58.

[11] Cavanaugh, Being Consumed p.20.

[12] Ibid., 22.

[13] Klein, No Logo p.69.

[14] Ibid p.80.

[15] Zizek, First as Tragedy p.65.

[16] John Gray as cited in Zizek, First as Tragedy p.10.

[17] Cavanaugh, Being Consumed p.1.

[18] Klein, No Logo p.195-231.

[19] William Cavanaugh, Migrations of  the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2011) p.73.

[20] Cavanaugh, Being Consumed p.41.

[21] For a first-hand account see: Sarah Stillman, “Made by Us: Young Women, Sweatshops, and the Ethics of Globalization,” the 2003 Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics, at: http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/EthicsPrize/WinnersEssays/2005/Sarah_Stillman.pdf

[22] Zizek, First as Tragedy p.82.

[23] Ibid p.81.

[24] Ibid p.54.

[25] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007) p.6.

[26] Ibid p.27-89.

[27] Ibid p.11-13.

[28] Ibid p.91-121.

[29] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998).

[30] Klein, The Shock Doctrine p.277.

[31] Ibid p.545.

[32] Ibid p.546.

[33] Quoted in Ibid p.543.

[34] Ibid p.542.

[35] Ibid p.547.

[36] Ibid p.549.

[37] Ibid p.550-551.

[38] Ibid p.555-556.