I am four days into my ‘Lessons’ tour and so far loving it. My time to date has been spent in Calvin College engaging in fascinating debates with Kevin Corcoran, Jason Clark, Jamie Smith, Lori Wilson and Michael Wittmer. Many subjects have been covered, but perhaps the most pertinent one revolved around the place and nature of belief in faith.

At one point in the proceedings someone asked if my theoretical position led me to denying the Resurrection of Christ. This question allowed me the opportunity to communicate clearly and concisely my thoughts on the subject, which I repeat here.

Without equivocation or hesitation I fully and completely admit that I deny the resurrection of Christ. This is something that anyone who knows me could tell you, and I am not afraid to say it publicly, no matter what some people may think…

I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.

However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.

This evening ikon will be exploring the phrase ‘You Must Be Born Again’ in a rather unusual way. We will begin and end at the John Hewitt bar for anyone who would like to join us. I will post some of the reflections used in the coming week.

It hasn’t been that long since I got home, but I am starting to get ready for my next speaking tour: Lessons in Evandalism. The basic description of the tour is as follows,

The current religious landscape is cluttered with various expressions of faith that claim to rethink Christianity at the dawn of a new cultural epoch. However such groups often accomplish little more than the repackaging and redistribution of faith as we currently understand it. A repackaging that involves flashing lights, video projectors and ‘culturally sensitive’ leaders who can talk about the latest mediocre pop sensation.

Throughout his Spring 09 tour Peter will be arguing that, in the midst of this arid landscape, there exist small but fertile sites of resistance. Groups who offer a way of thinking that not only challenges the way we express faith but fundamentally ruptures the way we understand it. He will argue that these pockets of resistance represent a growing, organic movement that are proclaiming the death of God, church and religion as we know them in preparation for their resurrection in a radically different form.

Through a mix of parables, philosophy and discussion Peter will be exploring the theoretical kernel of this emerging movement and addressing its dangerous, revolutionary and transformative potential.

This tour will take me from Grand Rapids to Columbus, Dallas to Birmingham, Richmond to Washington, and Hollywood up to Edmonton. You can find out more details on the ‘Speaking Schedule‘. However here is what I will be doing in Edmonton,

Hope you can join me

In the film What Women Want, Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) has an accident and is suddenly able to hear the inner monologue of woman. Thus he now has the ability to know what woman want. Ironically one could say that the basic flaw of the film is one perceived by the very individual who inspired its title. For Freud questioned whether we really know what we want or, in other words, whether what we think consciously really expresses our inner desires. The Freudian question here would thus be whether the ability to hear the inner monologue of people around us would really help us understand their real desires, i.e. is it possible that we not only lie to those around us about our desires but also to ourselves, at least in day to day life (because those desires are socially unacceptable).

This insight is hinted at in the question that lovers often ask, ‘do you love me’? This question is rarely posed once but rather is repeated. Of course the question may be repeated at a different time as a means of ascertaining if the person still loves them, or it can be asked repeatedly at around the same time if the individual is suspicious that the other is lying to them. But can we locate another reason for the repetition? Is it possible that some people ask this question repeatedly because they implicitly understand that the answer they seek is not located at the level of conscious thought? That if they could hear the inner monologue of the person they are addressing saying, ‘yes, I love you’, there would still be some level of anxiety. That they would still want to respond with, ‘yes, ok, but do you really love me’.

In other words, the lover who asks ‘do you love me’ is implicitly acknowledging that the split which the above film makes between speech and thought is not really the significant split. Rather the significant split occurs between what we consciously (think we) know and what we don’t know that we know (the things we act out yet don’t acknowledge at a conscious level). For instance a person can easily say, and wholeheartedly mean, that they love someone yet engage in activities that deeply hurt them, or would deeply hurt them if they knew (for example promiscuity).

This means that, in many ways the question, ‘do you love me’, while addressed to the conscious person is really aimed at the others unconscious desire, and thus is structurally always denied an absolute answer (because we are addressing the wrong location). Perhaps the only time that we can really approach an answer to the question of whether we love someone is retroactively, at the end when all is said and done and we can look honestly at how we acted towards them.

I have just completed two draft chapters for a forthcoming book featuring Jason Clark, Kevin Corcoran, Jamie Smith and Kurt and Lori Wilson. These chapters will be presented at a Calvin College conference taking place at the end of January. The chapters have been provisionally entitled, ‘Beyond the Colour of Each Other’s Eyes: The Worldly Theology of Emerging Collectives’ and ‘Transformance Art: Reconfiguring the Social Self’.

As a taster I thought I would include the opening of the first chapter here,

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The apostle Paul once famously remarked that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.  He does not say that there are both Jews and Greeks, both slaves and free, both men and woman. Rather this new identity with Christ involves the laying down of such political, biological and cultural identities. This is not an expression of ‘both/and’ but rather ‘neither/nor’. Today this idea can seem almost offensive to our ears. In many churches we find flags proudly hanging in acknowledgment of our nationality and we seek to express our political and religious ideas as a vital and irreducible part of who we are. But what if the church is called to provide a space where, just for a moment, we encounter one another as neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free? And what if Paul didn’t just mean these three categories, as if all the others remained intact? What if he was implying that there is neither black nor white in Christ, neither rich nor poor, neither powerful nor powerless? What if we could go even further and say that the space Paul wrote of was one in which there would be neither republican nor democrat, liberal nor conservative, orthodox nor heretic? Indeed, in the spirit of the text, what if we could offer an interpretive translation  of Paul’s words that would read,

You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither high church nor low church, Fox nor CNN, citizen nor alien, capitalist nor communist, gay nor straight, beautiful nor ugly, East nor West, theist nor atheist, Israel nor Palestine, hawk nor dove, American nor Iraqi, married nor divorced, uptown nor downtown, terrorist nor freedom fighter, paedophile nor loving parent, priest nor prophet, fame nor obscurity, Christian nor non-Christian, for all are made one in Christ Jesus

…One of the fundamental gifts that the nascent movement called emergent has to offer the wider church is a way of locating the power of that eschatological vision of Paul within the here and now. While we cannot step out of historical time and enter the eschaton, while we cannot enact this radical negation today (for we cannot really forget our gender, our job, our sexual preferences, our political opinions, our nationality etc), some emerging collectives have developed a space in which we are able to symbolically enact this step. A place where we engage in a theatrical performance of Paul’s vision. It is the creation of what we may call ‘suspended space’.

This suspended space has a number of important elements. Firstly, there is a call for all who have gathered to engage in the symbolic enacting of God’s kenotic moment, the moment when God emptied God-self in the person of Christ Jesus. This Kenosis is described beautifully in Philippians when we read, ‘our attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing’.

This ritualistic enacting of the divine Kenosis, where we keep our shoes on but symbolically remove our ideological commitments, allows for those who have gathered to encounter each other in a different way than they normally would outside of the liturgical space. This encounter was beautifully summarised by Emmanuel Levinas in an interview when he commented that, if we see the colour of someone’s eyes, we are not relating to them. One way of interpreting this is by pointing out that, if we are not really listening to someone, we will be well aware of their external features, such as the colour of their eyes, the clothes they are wearing etc. However, once we get into a deep and intimate conversation will no longer notice these external features, we will no longer see the colour of the persons eyes. It is not that they have become invisible to us but rather that we have entered into what Martin Buber called an ‘I/Thou’ relation in which the objective nature of the other is encountered as emanating their subjectivity.

By forming a suspended space in which we theatrically divest ourselves of our various identities, we allow for the possibility of encountering others beyond the categories that usually define them. We encounter the other beyond the colour of their eyes, beyond the contours of their political and religious commitments…