Beyond the colour of each other’s eyes
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,
—
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…
Tags: Emerging, Neither Jew nor Greek, Peter Rollins, theology
January 5th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Posted on my blog with a link to your post!
GREAT stuff Pete!
EP
January 5th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Oops, i forgot the link above! Another Lyme Moment! LOL!!!
This is the link is this: http://www.existentialpunk.com/existential_punk/2009/01/pete-rollins-take-on-moving-beyond-the-colour-of-each-others-eyes.html
January 5th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Thanks. Hope you got an email today from Alyson. Hoping to still get to Richmond if we can make it work
January 5th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Is the effect of this suspended space at all related to the second chapter, on our reconfiguration? I hope you’ll speak of that too. It seems that to “divest ourselves of our various identities” in willingness to encounter another beyond label would mean also encountering ourselves that way… maybe experiencing beginning flashes of ego dissolution. It would make etymological sense to me if reconfiguration is preceded by this kind of deconfiguration, where we can become less attached to our own gender/job/sexual/political/national/etc identities, our labels not only for the other but for ourselves.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Peter, I love this, and it reminds me a bit of that interpretation of Christ’s “Good Samaritan” parable which emphasizes the point that the victim had been stripped of his garments. People’s dress in those days “told” a lot about their identity – who or “what” they were in the world, what groups they were connected to, etc.
Might not Christ have meant the element of nakedness in the victim’s “person” to provide the key to understanding the point he was trying to make about the real “goodness” of the Samaritan? – not so much the example of his acts of ministry, the cleaning and dressing of the wounds and provision for his convalescence, but rather the recognition that he “saw” this fellow in the same universal Neither/Nor sense you find in the teaching of Paul.
He saw him on universal or “heavenly” ground (suspended space) and had compassion without need of first “identifying” him upon the earthly ground of material identities. By the same token, the real failure of the Levite and the Priest was not in their neglect to act but in their failure to “see” the human and spiritual “relation” of this poor fellow to themselves, obscured as it was by his lack of outward, material identifiers.
Christ’s parable of the Samaritan, like your “suspended space,” offers a stark deconstruction of the common concept of “neighborliness” which we get in those tight little in-groups that take very good care of their own kind – but do not grow.
January 6th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Very often the organisers of this ’suspended space’ gathering offer reflections, art, ritual etc designed to persuade/challenge/provoke the listeners (who play the role of passive participants) of the legitimacy/plausibility ot the distinctive theological assumptions that underlie their contribution which is not a bad thing in itself but is the actual reality.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:32 am
[...] 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 not 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” (from Peter Rollins on “Beyond the Colour of Each Other’s Eyes”) [...]
January 6th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Reader, that is BEAUTIFUL. I’ve never heard that interpretation – that connects for me so much more powerfully than how I’ve read it before. What a super illustration of this truth – thank you so much. Man… in flashes I’m finally starting to see why I couldn’t let go – what good language is here, and so much more possibility than the en-small-ing things I’ve thought.
January 6th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Love this!
Gives added meaning to my tribe’s goals/focus/purpose ::
spaces of grace
intentional relationships
relevant truth
January 7th, 2009 at 12:21 am
I’ve read this blog spottedly and have never commented; that’s my disclaimer…LOL…I’m wondering, though, whether or not this description of Paul’s words simply advocates for a creation of a space that exists as one of uniformity? And, if we follow Christ in the kenotic event, into what identities are we re-invested, as God invested God’s self in the identity of a 1st century Jew? Moreover, where else is this played out in Paul’s writings and how does it balance with Paul’s insistence of various aspects of his identity in Acts and other Pauline letters? (Roman citizen, Hebrew of Hebrews, etc.)
January 7th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Zihna Says: “It seems that to “divest ourselves of our various identities” in willingness to encounter another beyond label would mean also encountering ourselves that way… maybe experiencing beginning flashes of ego dissolution.
I would agree that the divestment Peter is talking about has to be a two-way street (divestment of self and others) but I don’t think the release of self-and-others from false-identity requires a step in the direction of ego dissolution (unless by ego you refer to nothing more than the earthly, falsely-identified self)
Identity itself is not the problem. There must be true identity as well as false identity. But my current personal structure of identity (insofar as it has a false stem) is worth nothing in the transcendent future – nothing but death. Only where my “I am” has gathered genuine spiritual predicates (I am/ you are … a child of God) can it be said to have a spiritual root that renders it worthy of whatever it was Christ referred to as “eternal life.”
I realize that this way of putting it adds some evangelical urgency to the work of divestment, but I like the urgency, and I agree with Peter that there may be an ideal worship setting which represents a place to get into the practice.
-John
January 7th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
Reader, you’re right: it was sloppy of me to use “ego” in referring to false identity dissolution. My question is really whether “release of self-and-others from false-identity” is engaged essentially via this divestment. It suddenly strikes me that way from Peter’s post; almost by definition. It seems you might agree, and you offered this truly predicated identity as its counter… perhaps consciousness of that is conjunctive? Are there other factors that you’ve found? I’m very interested in this false-to-true-self conversion, especially how to bridge the gap between cognitive recognition and a new degree of this seemingly ontological change. Best I know, the will is impotent here. Rather it’s letting go into this suspended space and Something Happening. One or the other alone seems to be insufficient.
Another discussion trail strikes me from your words: In all the many ways we die, it is only false self that can die? So then this interminable life-death cycle while living – if we can let it – brings us closer to true self?
January 8th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Zihna, you bring up more than one problem that attracts me also; here’s a further view in regard to “whether release of self-and-others from false-identity is engaged essentially via this divestment”
To keep us down to earth I would look first at the kinds of divestment which we might know are possible when the worship hour achieves the quality of suspended space which Peter describes. It is my view that the divestments of this hour must be dependent upon the quality of communion – with God first, and neighbor second, if we are to speak of it as an essential engagement. At first we might think, “No, it should be neighbor first (whom we can see) and then God (whom we cannot see).” That is a scriptural order which I don’t intend to break in the ultimate sense, but only to view paradoxically, as my example might show.
In my own church I have come to learn over the years that there are about equal numbers of conservatives and liberals. These socio-political labels cover lively material values and personal identities which, during an election year, can leave me wishing at coffee hour that I had never discovered this fact of “our differences.” But in the hour of worship, in our singing of hymns, our prayer, our sacrament, I can attest to the fact that those labels occasionally lose their meaning content; a larger truth supervenes, allowing me to get a foot down on that holy ground (suspended space) upon which our differences have no real gravity, do not weigh in.
Now, I know there is no “magic” in the performances of the hour, but that the whole miracle lies in the strange gravity of that holy ground. I therefore must conjecture that what I have experienced is only a window of grace which must open upon a way of life that is possible in constant real time.
I want time to get a view of some of your other good thoughts if I can, later.
-John
January 9th, 2009 at 10:29 am
It was gratifying to read “z”’s blessing and thanksgiving on my first writing here, on Tues.
I am a word-of-mouth “capture” of the American Tour. I am an amateur, in that I must work another field to earn my bread, and have only personal time for religious reading, reflection, and writing. Last week I clicked a link to one of Peter’s short videos, recommended by a seminarian on one of the religious blogs I read regularly. I heard a vital voice and mind, and have discovered, for now, a new orientation for my favorite pastime.
z, I found that interpretation of the Samaritan many years ago, but don’t know which gospel commentator first suggested it.
Peter, I haven’t read your books yet, but have access and must soon. In the meantime I am quite content to devour chunks of your writing at this place.
-John
January 10th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Buber: “Man becomes an I through a You. What confronts us comes and vanishes; relational events take shape and scatter; and through these changes crystallizes, more and more each time, the consciousness of the contant partner, the I-consciousness. To be sure, for a long time it appears only woven into the relation to a You, discernible as that which reaches for but is not a You; but it comes closer and closer to the bursting point until one day the bonds are broken and the I confronts its detached self for a moment like a You – and then it takes possession of itself and henceforth enters into relations in full consciousness” (p. 80, I and Thou, trans. Kaufmann 1970). Yes – yes.
I had to deep-mine a story on Solomon once. When he asked God for wisdom, the Hebrew is actually “a listening heart.” That relationship feels true to me too, maybe the best definition I know. Listening (openness, encounter) can only happen in presence; it seems we need to really be here if we want to know anything, not attached/clinging to a past feeling, a future projection, an identity that we’ve created for ourselves or for others. Maybe presence and its compassion are the starting place of everything real – including conversion.
January 11th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Hi Zhina, you asked earlier, “In all the many ways we die, it is only false self that can die?”
I cannot say yes, because I see reason to differentiate between (a) “the many ways we die,” and (b) the death of a “false self.”
In statement (a) I might find reference to real events of growth which confirm the fact of a second birth. In each of “the many ways” of death, we are simply shedding one-by-one the errors which support the false predicates of cognitive, evolutionary identity. This follows naturally from an identity struggle that is predicated on at least one living truth – [I am … a child of God]. In and through the “little deaths” we are feeling our way toward that Neither/Nor recognition that Peter writes about – the truth that breaks the bonds of religious error, the truth that [God is … spiritual father of all] see Romans 3:29).
Now, statement (b). Because each of us is only one self, I cannot conceive of a “false self” as anything other than a person still wholly and falsely identified with the body, the evolutionary physical. Granted it would be rare to find anyone depended for all their growth and value only on the cognitive range of material facts which support the common strategies of self-preservation and self-gain (mere physical survival, avoidance of pain, realization of pleasure). But it is my view that the predicates which complete the identity of such a “false self” rest ultimately in nothing but atoms and the void, and the confines of its own evolutionary mind, all of which is mortal. All of which is doomed to dissolution and death.
-John
January 12th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Dan Lowe was wondering “whether or not this description of Paul’s words simply advocates for a creation of a space that exists as one of uniformity?”
The equation of union with uniformity might constitute a logical fallacy, or a spiritual fallacy. My once-adolescent daughter used to argue this kind of equation against the concept of an everlasting life of eternal perfection. “Wouldn’t we all end up exactly the same?”
I can’t see how one could prevent the fallacy from entering into every scheme of transformation or perfection based on external rule-adherence and not based on a full appreciation of the very peculiar component which is transformed or saved – the God-identified human. God is indispensible in the transaction which yields both the new birth and ultimate salvation. But what is born and what is transformed and perfected is humanity and not deity, a unique child emergent from the material realms, whose personal reality perfects under “it’s own” sequence and formula without strict conformity to anything but God’s will.
I think it should be possible to use the concept of “identity” without swamping it with mental expectations of resultants that must be identical.
-John
January 12th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
[...] week Peter Rollins wrote (in the spirit of the Apostle Paul):: You are all children of God through faith in Christ [...]
January 13th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Dan Lowe asks,
(a) “Where else is this played out in Paul’s writings?”
(b) “how does it balance with Paul’s insistence of various aspects of his identity … (Roman citizen, Hebrew of Hebrews, etc.)?”
(c) “if we follow Christ in the kenotic event, into what identities are we re-invested …?”
Hi Dan. Great questions. I list last the one you rightly place first, because it goes deepest into the mystery. I have suggested that true identity is predicated thusly, “I am >>> a child of God.” Obviously there is more involved than the simple affirmation, but it’s my guess that all of what it entails cannot be shown to a soul before the kenotic event. I think we can, however, look at Paul, and ask the question again: “What were the identities into which Paul was “re-invested” after following Christ in the kenotic event?”
Allowing for this change in question (c) it’s answer can be illuminated by all of the possible answers to question (a) (the “where else” in Paul’s writings). My best current answer to (a) is Romans 3:29, where Paul asserts the premise of his new A/theology: “God is >>> a God of goyim.”
This heretofore unheard of identity statement for God serves us pretty well, not only because it perfectly represents the sense of Galatians 3:28 (“neither Jew nor Greek”) but because it also provides what you require in (b) – a “balance” to the religious eccentricity upon which Paul bases his identity in his famous genetic boast, “I am >>> a Hebrew of the Hebrews” (Phil 3:5).
In fact, Rom 3:29 applies such a counterbalance to Paul’s ethno-religious identity as to utterly overthrow the predicate of Phil 3:5, exposing the whole as a false identity. Because Rom 3:29 assigns predicates to God that are inconceivable in the context of any authentic identity predicated on a phrase containing the preposition “>>> of the Hebrews.” There is no longer the issue of “who’s chosen and who’s not.” None are chosen, because all are chosen, in the new light which Paul has found “in Christ.”
All of which Paul freely and quickly admits in Phil 3:8, in astonishing testimony that the deep structure of his “old” identity as a Jew remains nothing to him but loss, an empty shell in comparison to his new identity in Christ.
January 13th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Pete,
I like the point you make that it is not a “both/and” but a “neither/nor.” In many ways (before) when I read that verse, I still kept the categories of “Jew” and “Greek” on such people, but I somehow just act like those categories don’t exist for awhile. It seems that we must not just “act” like these categories don’t exist, but really BELIEVE THAT THEY DON’T. This draws us to pray for the Spirit to give us a humble understanding of each other so that we are enter this “suspended space” every day, every minute, every second and so on. These categories aren’t just “put on hold” but, by the Spirit’s power, they don’t exist anymore within us.
Great stuff!
Evan
January 15th, 2009 at 12:36 am
I feel I must retract my little flourish, “None are chosen, because all are chosen.” I was hurried.
I was trying to articulate what Paul’s words indicate he saw in Christ – that there can be no longer any single national group that is “chosen” by God.
Christ has destroyed the religio-political category of “the chosen.” In Christ, God freely chooses to dwell in and with all “nations.” But is a new religious category demanded by the destruction of the old by this light of infinite grace? I think yes, maybe something like “the Invited.”
I like “The Invited” because it is a category of tension, expectation, tempered by love. The invitation must be accepted.
Insofar as God chooses, God would choose all, but consumation awaits each one’s acceptance – to choose God, to “identify” as child and heir.
January 29th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
[...] recently was reading Peter Rollins blog where he posted the opening parts of a chapter based on his talks at the Calvin College conference. The chapter is [...]
February 4th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
I have always thought of myself as a ‘good listener’ and have had that view affirmed by others. However, I also have noticed a self-consciousness that pervades the space in which I’m listening. It is almost as though I’m in the role of observer as well as listener. I’m used to doing this in group meetings when trying to get an idea of dynamics and signs of exclusion/marginalisation.
I realise (and realised before reading Pete’s sample chapter) that I have more work to do, and could include in this Martin Buber’s book that I started and have not finished…
I know this because I am very good at noticing and remembering the colour of a person’s eyes.
December 6th, 2009 at 9:10 am
[...] about what exactly they do there, they would probably say that they try to create a “suspended space.” Specifically, a space where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor [...]
January 9th, 2010 at 2:46 am
[...] week Peter Rollins wrote (in the spirit of the Apostle Paul):: You are all children of God through faith in Christ [...]