if you want to waste a minute...

Here is a music cut from an in-home session yesterday (monday)

The Bethel Confession, 75 years later

Written in August of 1933, the confession would turn out to be a failure, and, in comparison with present theological sensitivities, it was in many respects naive. Still, the Bethel Confession, for the effort and courage that it represents, remains a positive reminder that the church should be ever-conscious of destructive attitudes, prejudices, and practices.

"This was a period in German church history that for many religious leaders called for a confession of faith. For this reason, the Bethel Confession has a special significance in the history of the church struggle as that struggle pertained to one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of the turmoil: Christian solidarity with the Jewish people. The Bethel Confession is a landmark in this phase of the church struggle, not because of any success it had in sensitizing Christians to the evils of nazism but for the way it expresses new beginnings in the church’s attitude toward Jews" (TTF, 134).

On April 7, 1933, the passage of the Aryan Clause excluded Jews from civil service. This legislation, along with boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, led Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a handful of others to respond in question and criticism of the increasingly visible phenomena of anti-Semitism.

"As the German Christians assumed more power in the church, the opposing pastors united more closely in the struggle for what they hoped would supersede that power, namely, truth and justice. It was a time begging for the confession of faith Bonhoeffer had urged in his sermon of July 23, 1933. Many confessions were, in fact, being formulated by ministers concerned about what was happening within their churches. But these were too scattered to be effective in arousing individual and community consciences. Bonhoeffer and Professor Herman Sasse of Erlangen were deputized by the Council of Young Reformers, therefore, to retreat to the community of Bethel, a Christian settlement grown out of a treatment center for epileptics, to produce a confession of faith that would challenge the German Christians. The aim was to compel the German Christians to declare their beliefs openly. They also wished to create a new creed to combat distortions in the church struggle. What they finally wrote [in August, 1933] was a solid, uncompromising, statement of the theological basis of the church struggle. It contained, moreover, a spirited defense of the Jews. Bonhoeffer and Sasse reiterated God’s choice of Israel in wholly theological terms and insisted that God had not retracted that choice...

"The Bethel Confession, despite its obvious shortcomings in properly assessing Judaism, is a clear repudiation of Aryanism and the Nazi attempt to rid nation and church of any Jewish presence. The confession was then circulated to some twenty theologians, who proceeded to whittle away at its call to uncompromising commitment in the struggle. Attempts were made to dilute criticism of the state in the document. For Bonhoeffer, the suggested corrections were an emasculation of the challenge he had incorporated as one of the central purposes of the confession. Disappointed, he refused to sign the final toothless copy" (TTF, 17).

"The church teaches that God chose Israel from among all the nations of the earth to be God’s people. God chose them solely in the power of God’s Word and for the sake of God’s loving- kindness, and not because they were in any way preeminent (Exod. 19:5-6; Deut. 7:7-11). The Sanhedrin and the Jewish people rejected Christ Jesus, promised by the law and the prophets, in accordance with Scripture. They wanted a national Messiah, who would bring them political freedom and the rule of the world. Jesus Christ was not this, and did not do this. He died at their hands and for their sakes. The barrier between Jew and Gentile has been broken down by the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ (Eph. 2)...

"We oppose the attempt to deprive the German Evangelical Church of its promise by the attempt to change it into a national church of Christians of Aryan descent. This would be to erect a racial barrier against entering the church and would make such a church itself a Jewish Christian community regulated by the Law" (NRS, 240-42).

TTF -- A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Ed. by Kelly and Nelson–Rev. ed. New York: Haper-Collins Publishers, 1995.

NRS -- No Rusty Swords: Letters, Lectures and Notes, 1928-1936. Ed. by Edwin H. Robertson. Trans. revised by John Bowden and Eberhard Bethge. London: Collins, 1970. Cleveland, OH: Collins-world, 1977.

In Review: Dis-Enclosure, Atheism and Monotheism

"Atheism and Monotheism", Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. By Jean-Luc Nancy, Trans. by Gabriel Malenfant & Bettina Bergo.

Marking out atheism as invention and inventor of what is called Western-Greek thought, Nancy highlights the shifting paradigms (a superiority of reason over destiny or determinism) which constructed Plato's theos---uniquely lacking a proper name, appearance, and genealogy. Nancy states:

"In Plato's theos, we can say that the gods disappear...Gods are departing into their myths...that the invention of "atheism" is contemporaneous and correlative with the invention of "theism" (15).

In this unique theos (the essence of which is more a premise or principle than an immortal figure), alterity and relation between god and man are in revision. But what are we inferring by the term a-theism? What are we inferring by negating this principle? Furthermore, is atheistic thinking possible? "Atheism states the principle of the negation of the divine principle...the configuration of an entity that is distinct from the entire world of entities, and for which it would hold the first cause and the final end" (16, italics mine).
...
Despite philosophical desires, Nancy does not believe us to be capable of this kind of strict anetiological and ateleological thinking. Such thinking is defective (though it does not constitute a legitimization theism). Defective, perhaps. Nevertheless, with the collapse of the premise in contemporary thought, there has followed no new understanding of the collapse. Thus, Nancy sees atheism continuing to form a horizon, "a limit, a dead-end, and an end of the world" (18). However, paradoxically, in this atheistic limitation, theism is given its expansion.
...
Atheism qua nihilism is forming a boundary of thought in the world, while, at the same time, as nihilism, it is giving rise to the question of "getting out" or making an "exit"---pointing toward something else. This leaves us with an aporia of forcing sense beyond the senses.
...
From here, Nancy directs more specific attention toward monotheism, tracing Jewish montheism's confrontation with the West, as it unfolded through Christianity:

"Jewish monotheism, understood in its unfolding and its spread throughout the Greek world, opens into Christian thought...It prepares nothing other than the simultaneous evaporation of all divine presences and powers, and the designation of a principle that no longer has a 'divine' anything but the name--a name dispossessed of all personality, and even the ability to be uttered. Considered from this angle, the whole history of 'God'---the 'God' of the West---unfolds nothing less than the trial or process of atheism." (21).

All this came to be confirmed in the onto-theological, a priori deductions of Anselm, the modes and attributes of Spinoza, and Descartes' idea of a 'perfect being', all of which resulted in 'God' denoting "the premise or principle of a presupposed totality, founded in unity and necessity" (21). Thus, Jewish monotheism, as unfolded through Christian thought, constitutes (a)theism's second condition of possibility---along side Greek atheism as described above---as it converts divinity from "a present power or person...into a principle, a basis, and/or a law" (22).
...
Why should atheism have or need such a strong rooting in the West? Why a "double constitution" of Greek a-theism and Jewish>Christian monotheism? What does this heterogenous doubling communicate? We have here questions for which reason cannot account. Nancy states, "It is strange to think that our civilization in its entirety posits, in principle, the weak, corrupted, or foreign (i.e., non-Greek...) essence of what has not ceased to constitute something like its internal lining---and this for more than twenty centuries." Any atheistic logic attempting to master the premise, or overcome it or deny it, only denies itself. Rather, the premise will only collapse in its own positing. To put it simply, perhaps, this binding together of theism and atheism seems to reshape the task of each so that, in effect, the positing of one is but the positing of the other, the collapse of one is the collapse of the other.
...
Nancy believes that the task of monotheism is "to elude itself, to withdraw from itself, to pull away from itself, or again to deconstruct principation on the basis of itself." For monotheism to exceed it must oppose that very premise itself. Monotheism must think and act atheistically (in the sense that has been describe so far). Nancy relates three traits of what this might look like, traits which are well grounded in the monotheistic tradition:

1. Creation (creatio ex nihilo which Nancy takes to mean the emptying of nothing of any quality as a principle. That is creation.)
2. Holiness (which is not a principle, but something that opens to man or in man.)
3. Faith (which Nancy describes as the firm fidelity of reason to its own atheology.)

"What the name 'God,' or that of the 'holy,' rigorously attempts to designate in this atheological regime...refers not only to a ruining of the premise but...to "something,' to 'someone,' or to 'a nothing'...of which faith is itself the birthplace or the creative event."

Before closing with futher questions and allusions, Nancy cites the rather obscure Makarios of Magnesia, who gives demonstration or form to these three traits in his Apocritus, 2.8, stating: "The one who does the will of my Father gives birth to me by participating in this act, and he is born with me. He who believes in effect that I am the only Son of God engenders me in some sense through his faith."

Nancy, Jean-Luc, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Trans. By Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, Ed. John Caputo. Fordham University Press, 2008.

In Review: Dis-Enclosure, Opening

Being a compilation of essays, Nancy's Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, won't fit the normal format of review. Each essay will be reviewed individually, and published under the title In-Review.

"Opening", Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Trans. By Bettina Bergo.

"It so happens today that the so-called civilization of humanism is bankrupt or in its death-throes" (2).

Nancy is not proposing a return or revival of religion, and he is less concerned about recent indications of such a return than he is the waning of humanism. It would seem that humanism now faces the same sort of metaphysical closure previously endured by religion under Englightenment and Reformation rationalism. On the one hand, Christianity failed to refrain from an institutional form of metaphysics. On the other, humanism (abandoning reason and settling, instead, with understanding) has neither been able to deliver a decisive blow to metaphysics or provide a conclusive reason for metaphysics.

...

As a result of this double closure, Nancy anticipates the possibility of a (sur-)religious upheaval before us with an unprecedented politic, likely to redefine and redraw globalizing democracy--theocratically or as something new entirely. Nancy states, "It simply seems to me difficult to avoid recognizing the drying up of humanism and the correlative temptations of a spiritualizing deluge" (5).

...

The contemporary thinking of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Freud, Derrida, and Deleuze has underscored a sort of requirement of rationality, bolstered by their contemplation of that which is inaccesible, "to let the obscure emit its own clarity" (6). Furthermore, Nancy thinks it critical that this motion "be effected by way of a mutual dis-enclosure of the dual heritages of religion and philosophy" (6).

...

As for Christianity, it becomes a matter of opening up Christian alterity as opposed to discovering a "world-behind-the worlds"—opening up the Christian precept of living in the world as outside of it. An idea which is supplemented by Anselm’s paradoxical "majus quam cogitari possit" (thinking "greater that what can be thought"). And so, "Christianity is at the heart of the dis-enclosure just as it is at the center of the enclosure" (10).

...

Continue to review...

Nancy, Jean-Luc, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Trans. By Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, Ed. John Caputo. Fordham University Press, 2008.

To Emmaus: From blind words and presence to recognition and absence (in abstract)

Now they were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James ; also the other women with them were telling these things to the apostles.

But these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them.

And behold, two of them were going that very day to a village named Emmaus, which was about seven miles from Jerusalem. And they were associating with each other about all these things which had taken place.

While they were associating and disputing, Jesus Himself came near and began traveling with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing Him.

And He said to them, "What are these words that you are exchanging with one another as you are walking?"

And they stood still, looking sad. One of them, named Cleopas, answered and said to Him,

"Are You the only one visiting...

...Jerusalem and unaware of the things which have happened here in these days?" And He said to them, "What things?" And they said to Him, "The things about Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word in the sight of God and all the people, and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to the sentence of death, and crucified Him. "But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel. Indeed, besides all this, it is the third day since these things happened. "But also some women among us amazed us. When they were at the tomb early in the morning, and did not find His body, they came, saying that they had also seen a vision of angels who said that He was alive. "Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just exactly as the women also had said;

but Him they did not see."

And He said to them, "O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! "Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?" Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets,

He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.

And they approached the village where they were going, and He acted as though He were going farther. But they urged Him, saying, "Stay with us, for it is getting toward evening, and the day is now nearly over." So He went in to stay with them. When He had reclined at the table with them,

He took the bread and blessed it, and breaking it, He began giving it to them.

Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished from their sight.

They said to one another, "Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road, while He was explaining the Scriptures to us?" And they got up that very hour and returned to Jerusalem, and found gathered together the eleven and those who were with them, saying, "The Lord has really risen and has appeared to Simon." They began to relate their experiences on the road and how

He was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread.

Though the idle tale, the bit of crazy nonsense, was not embraced by faith, the Lucan account traces its willingness to settle into the logoi --the words -- of association (homileō) and dispute (suzēteō)---exchanged (antiballō) between two disbelievers.
"I thought...but..."
"What foolishness...how?...besides, we saw...nothing!"

What are these words you are exchanging...? Not on any theological level, of course. Rather, a primitive moment in the genealogy of the gospel: questions...not answers; hopelessness...not assurance. His absence could not be understood. What did this absence signify, after all? His absence could have signified the foolishness of the women's words. His absence could have signified a verification of the women's words. "Him they did not see..."

What are these words you are exchanging? Yes, they did not see him. Yet, in these words of association and dispute--these words which concerned the women's words, whose words concerned the angels' words--in the words of these two disbelievers Jesus draws near to them(kai autos iēsous eggisas...autois). Through (or because of) the words, there is proximity. He is actually present. But he is not recognizable. He is a stranger, a migrant (paroikos). Two foolish men(?), slow of heart to believe were trying to see what was on the tips of their tongues.
The stranger spoke...
What was spoken in that which was written (tais graphais)? His dia-hermeneutic (diermēneuō) of that which was spoken in the written relayed to these disbelievers the necessity of that presence, that 'nearness' (eggizō) of the one who was, as yet, still a stranger. But in the written their malleable hearts were burning and they were confident that this 'nearness' and this 'hermeneutic' were to be welcomed.

"When He had reclined at the table with them,
He took the bread and blessed it, and breaking it, He began giving it to them.
Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished from their sight...
...He was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread."

And when he had taken some bread and given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to them saying, "This is my body which is given for you..."
...He was recognized by them in the breaking of the bread.

In words (logoi) and in the written (graphais) he was seen but not recognized.
In the breaking of the bread he was recognized but no longer seen.

Oh yeah...that book I bought and never read...

Church and Postmodern Culture has posted that a follow-up of Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge has been issued by the Quebec government---along with an abridged version.

Excerpt from a work in progress

For all who thought my Biblical Research paper was a lost cause...Know this: it is still a work in progress. But, for me, this long journey has been less about meeting requirements and more about creating something meaningful, less about laziness and more about finding worthy resources (and the funds to purchase them), less about stating what has already been said and more about thoughtfulness... Here is the tail end of the first section, somewhere around page 15, where I am discussing the "list" of privileges written out by Paul in Romans 9:4-5:

...As was mentioned before, it usually suggested that this so-called list somehow signifies a return to 3:1-2, where Paul initially began describing the benefits of being a Jew. Yet, at this point in the epistle (and in our present review), once each privilege has been closely examined in relation to what has been written before in 3:3-8:39, it is highly unlikely that we should still read these privileges as if they belong simply and exclusively to the Jewish nation—the outward Jews, those who are kinsmen according to the flesh. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that the privileges specified here were written totally unaware and unrelated to what has now been written since 3:1-2. Indeed, the privileges now exhibit themselves differently. Through Paul’s deliberate efforts, the terms now take on a Christological significance which is more universal in application, and we find those portions of the epistle which preceded ch. 9, particularly 3:3-8:39, forming a basis or constituting, what might properly be called, an index of re-definition. Thus, once each privilege is closely examined, we find in this list another example of the kind of correspondence-in-contrast which has been mentioned above....