We don’t need early Christianity, we need Proto-Christianity (making straight paths for a second coming)
Amidst all the claims that we need to return to an early Christianity (every new Christian movement seems to want to claim some return to the early Church, to the Church before Constantine, or before Greek thought or before the schisms – see my post entitled In Defense of Original Sin), we have eclipsed the truly revolutionary drive of Christian faith. A drive, not to return to the early church as such, but rather to return to the Event that gave birth to the early church.
The early church is an historical response to the Christ-Event, to the rupture that took place all those years ago. And as an historical response it is related to its historical epoch and the issues of that time. The Event that gave birth to early Christianity however can be approached in purely negative terms as an a-historical rupture within history (in the world but not of it). As a New Beginning housing a subversive new possibility. It was a rupture that took place within Judaism, a happening that pre-dated Christianity: as testified to in the common claim that Jesus was a Jew not a Christian.
What if this desire to return to the early church, to repeat it in a new context, interesting as it is, fails to grasp a more radical possibility? What if it misses a move that would not merely change the way in which Christianity is expressed but rather affect a shift that would reconfigure the basic co-ordinates of Christianity itself?
For is it not true that the church in its traditional and evangelical forms face issues today (in relation to subjects such as sexuality, biogenetics, environmental catastrophe) that cannot be adequately addressed within its currently existing structure. And that these antagonisms (irreconcilable in the current theoretical space) invite us to forge different structures that will bring effective resolution.
This does not mean that I think that all current forms of Church are doomed; rather I am making the claim that, at various times in history, the body needs to listen to a call that will shake its foundations. Some parts will heed the call and others will not.
The main problem we face today is that the wider church has lost the belief that there can be a universal call to re-configure the basic co-ordinates (it is worth noting that all established groups will find it difficult to accept this idea as it threatens the status quo). Instead we have embraced the idea of piecemeal change. Radical groups are thus labeled ‘new forms’, ‘fresh expressions’, ‘alt. worship’, ‘emerging’ etc. and are slotted into the current structure rather than seen as containing a message that could transform the structure itself. Their universal message to the whole church is thus reduced to a localised message meant for some segment of the church.
The problem is not that this proto-Christian call has yet to strike forth, but rather, at a more basic level, we do not even have ears that could hear it if it had. So then, amidst the cries to remain true to the foundation (making small changes to what already exists so that it better reflects the structures present values) we must counter with a call to return to that which shakes the foundations. Expending our energy in making straight the paths for the return of a proto-Christian Event (a second coming).
Tags: event theology, John Caputo, Peter Rollins, proto-christianity
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:39 am
the universal message (all of them) is enunciated as a local, idiosyncratic voice. the local must be carefully distinguished from the localized as the latter presumes a known that can be expressed in terms of some local (all that passes for “contextualization” and other like notions in missiological theory). the local is that from which we cannot but be. the local is the source and material substance of all ground-clearing utopic utterance and, beautifully, is that without which the aporetic could not be traced. it is the local that is the site of that which we call event–the binding heritage that we cannot but speak of, through and against: that material underground through which the event comes.
September 24th, 2008 at 4:06 am
this sounds to me like the voice of the prophet as evidenced throughout the judeo-xian scriptures. the more i hear from you, the more i do indeed see you as being a “truer christian” than most…being loyal to the christ-event, and betraying the institutions and religious security blankets. you love christianity :0)
September 24th, 2008 at 9:43 am
In answer to your questions, yes!
Just a thought, what if the most radical aspect of the Christ-Event was that it never happened at all?
Evidence? That so much could flow from so little – everything flow from nothing – sounds just like something the god I know might do.
September 24th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Who is Jesus for the 21st Century? Bonhoeffer again!
September 25th, 2008 at 3:55 am
I think the need for univesral change is often prompted by changes on the edge, however the imagination has been so colonised that real change is hard and the confusion you identify between the subject and objective self enables people to buy into the embrace that comes from the mianstream. Consequently there are very few stories that break the narrative or begin to offer a radical redefinition that is required. I really like the idea that we need to put energy into making a path, I wonder how narrow this path is. I have been playing withthe idea of collecting stories that break the narrative, but unless we can support the storymakers to remain on the narrow path they risk get subsumed into the mainstream broad path. I have bloged on some of this stuff http://www.sundaypapers.org.uk/?p=494
September 25th, 2008 at 10:41 am
[...] Rollins, excellent as usual, on why we don’t need early [...]
September 25th, 2008 at 10:57 am
There’s an interesting book out by Andre Comte-Sponville called ‘The Book of Atheist Spirituality” (Bantam Press, 2007 – English translation). He seems to suggest that simply celebrating ‘being’ is enough to generate a spirituality.
Curiously, this provides a good meeting-ground between atheist and theist, who also starts from the experience of ‘being’, and also, if she or he is honest, never progresses beyond it.
I like Richard’s comment about the colonisation of the imagination – what Richard Kearney is addressing, too, in his early book ‘The Wake of Imagination’? I wonder if the power to imagine afresh is built on the experience of just being, and if the conscious recollection of just being is enough to remind us we are on the narrow path if we ever fear we are being subsumed by the wash of stories around us.
September 25th, 2008 at 11:38 am
[...] PeterRollins.net » Blog Archive » We don’t need early Christianity, we need Proto-Christianity (… Amidst all the claims that we need to return to an early Christianity (every new Christian movement seems to want to claim some return to the early Church, to the Church before Constantine, or before Greek thought or before the schisms – see my post entitled In Defense of Original Sin), we have eclipsed the truly revolutionary drive of Christian faith. A drive, not to return to the early church as such, but rather to return to the Event that gave birth to the early church. 2008 25 Sep [...]
September 25th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
I think when most people talk about how wonderful the early church was, they are mainly thinking of a church that was independent and hadn’t yet been absorbed by political systems and Empire. It is funny to think of the difference in America and Europe today. Europe has state churches, but few politicians are very religious, while in America we have no state churches but our politicians are mostly very religious(or at least talk the religious talk). The question is, can the church divorce itself from Western political systems and continue to be relevant and survive?
September 25th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
BTW I’m actually quite fond of the early church, but I agree with Peter that it isn’t enough merely to go back to the way things were pre-Constantine, but rather we need to create something new. Not to say that Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard didn’t say important things, but they were writing for particular times and historical circumstances.
September 25th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
To be more precise the early church was a historical response to an understanding or perception or story of the Christ event at that time.
The ‘Christ event itself’ is of course a mercurial notion, a metaphor at best; something that illustrates Berkeley’s ‘esse est percipi’ more clearly & fully than perhaps anything else. What an individual, or group of individuals perceives as being the Christ event ‘is’ de facto the Christ event for them. And as such dictates and drives their own individual or communal space time response to that event. Creates, in other words, their church.
And so the perception of the Christ event predicates a meandering, sometimes self contradictory response through history … spawning ‘church’ as diverse as the Crusades and the Lakeland Revival – each in its own way an internally authentic historical response to the Christ event
And so, whilst I, having as I have a convergent understanding of the Christ event as you have Pete (well, I think I do anyway!); whilst I with that convergent understanding can and do resonate fully with the post; I need to temper that resonation with the understanding that ‘my’ Christ event is just that – ‘my’ Christ event, and thus my historical response my Christ event will differ from many, many other responses to ‘other’ Christ events.
So maybe I’m saying that it is the prophet who is more danger than the pastor of trying to universalise her or his own Christ event and in doing so to prophesy a new metanarrative. And one man’s metanarrative is another woman’s old wive’s tale.
Thus the search for me, is first to try to identify my own “Christ event’ and then perhaps to discover others whose perception, metaphor or story resonates with or at least has areas of convergence with mine; and with those others to respond in our time, and to create church.
And the next challenge when we do that is to understand that there is no metanarrative of christ and/or church, there are just a few books of short stories…. and ‘my’ short story sits where it sits in the collection, alongside what might be some very strange and unintelligible (to me) neighbours. But who’s to say that their historical response has any less or any more authenticity than mine?
I love the church…. I always have ….. but only when the metanarratives are fully deconstructed – those that pertain to the Christ event as much as those that pertain to the historical response. It’s a huge big diverse thing, and the issue is never if any particular historical response is or was ‘right ot wrong’…but only whether it is consistent with the Christ event of those who are trying to make that particular response work in their own particular lifetime. …. Put another way? “Does this particular short story ring true? Does it have voice and internal cohesion?”
After that, we should make sure we don’t get too precious about any of them … as anyone worth her of his salt will perceive several (probably widely divergent) Christ events in her or her life, and should hold all of them lightly as they will probably change tomorrow.
But as the wonderous Bultmann would have it …. it’s only the existential Christ experience (which I would now interpret as the perceiving afresh of the Christ event) that really matters anyway.
September 26th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Well stated. I’m really looking forward to the Emergent Mid-Atlantic Conf.
September 26th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Paul said, “I Press on toward…”. Your right, we need to seek the purity of the Bride & to look toward to the next Christ event.
Acts 3:19-21
“19Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.
20And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you:
21Whom the heaven must receive until {the times of restitution of all things}, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. “
September 29th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
“What if it misses a move that would not merely change the way in which Christianity is expressed but rather affect a shift that would reconfigure the basic co-ordinates of Christianity itself?” …….. “So then, amidst the cries to remain true to the foundation (making small changes to what already exists so that it better reflects the structures present values) we must counter with a call to return to that which shakes the foundations.”
Pete, as I read what you write here and also in the ‘In defense of original sin’ post … I am troubled ……. there is an event that gave rise to Christianity and to the early church, the degree to which it is a historical event is of course questionable, and indeed is probably not that critical, but there is a cultural event and the christ-event that impacts us now, that we experience now is a product of of our cultural/ historical setting now rather than any re-constructed, guessed event of 2000 ago. But my huge concern that by focusing on the foundations of Christianity, even if its to shake them, is not shaking enough. The proto-Christian event is hermeneutical presupposition that shuts up to many possibilities. The foundations of Christianity are self limiting parameters that will threaten, for me atleast, the project that is before us of finding a coherent language for ‘event’ we traditionally have called God. For me Caputo is at his most compelling when he teeters on the edge of abandoning the name of God for that event. Re-defining the co-ordinates of Christianity feels like a language that is stepping back from that exhilarating but vital edge. Likewise whilst I understand what you are saying with the references to Original Sin, any notion, however loosely conceived that once humans were better but we are worse now or that there is some universal standard which we don’t live up to are such loaded / flawed concepts that they are too dangerous to adopt (personal opinion obviously!).
I read an interesting quote from the poet Kenneth White (who I mentioned to you a while back but I would really encourage you to enagage with)who was speaking about Samuel Beckett whose writings continually reflected on the ‘endgame of civilization’ but how White seeks to push out beyond the endgame. I feel we are in the same territory, we are circling the endgame of Christianity but need to push out beyond it. My fear is that language around reconfiguring the co-ordinates of Christianity or trying to reframe original sin keep us in endgame territory when the gauntlet thrown down by Derrida / Caputo is to go beyond that…. recognizing that even in the act of doing that we may save what we leave behind…….. but whether we save it or not …. we must go beyond.
Ok … I could critique these comments with caveats … but I will resist!!!!
September 30th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Hey Alistair
Great points. I guess I would say 2 things in response,
1. In many respects the term ‘proto-Christianity’ is attempting to reference that which is outside Christianity and that which founded Christianity. As some’thing’ outside Christianity it is a rupture that shook the foundations of Judaic practice and Roman authority. It opened up a different possibility that cut across the social and political powers of the day, giving birth to some of the most radical formulations of Christianity. It was a negative gesture which shook the positive powers (a non-all that challenged the all – in Lacan speak).
2. The reason why I want to link it to Christianity (purposefully don’t mention God in the post – in a move not unlike that found in much of the Jewish tradition, and I might add Luther, I would prefer to keep Christianity rather than God, and so agree with your concens) is because I think that there are strong elements of the Christian tradition that seem to chime with this rupturing new beginning in history that challenges the hegemonic powers. E.g. lots of the gospels, neither Jew nor Greek… etc. I wish to repeat the Christian tradition in the sense of repeating differently. Of unearthing that radical potential at work there (burrowed deep in its past). Of bringing to light the potentiality that we have lost.
I think that the slight difference between us boils down to how we think we ought to engage, or not engage, with Christianity. I think you are happier to break away, to find a different language (but you will still need a language!), while I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition houses a sufficient language and sufficient plasticity.
Indeed I would go further than the word ’sufficient’. I think that the liberative potential of Christianity is huge; with the biblical figure of Christ showing a way of fully engaging the world in such a way as to change it (rather than mere withdrawal from the world or full immersion in it).
I like Christianity because I view it as having a narrative that facilitates (at its best) a more fully engaged interaction with the world rather than withdrawal from it. However I also think that this potential within the narrative has not been fully mined and I want to pick up a shovel and do my bit to unearth it (standing beside Zizek’s pneumatic drill).
Is that useful?
September 30th, 2008 at 2:57 am
Hey Ian
Again, great response. My problem however is that I think once we chart the basic topography of the ‘Event’ (as a negative rupture that unsettles the powers, the outside within the inside that breaks it open etc.) we can have some very precise tools with which to judge which narratives do justice to this founding event and which do not (here, after the fact, is where hermeneutics comes in, and that is always a little messy).
But as I said to you recently I am not seeking narratives which are true or false at this point but rather to discern which are better or worse (using reason and empirical methods). I want to ask ‘which narratives bow down to the powers or leave them be and which challenge them’, ‘which narratives oppress people and which liberate, ‘which narratives are full, arrogant, powerful and which are weak, humble and powerless’.
While we might struggle to agree on which are and which are not we do not struggle concerning the field of our struggle. To make the distinction that Zizek brings up. I am not too bothered when we operate in the same field of struggle, I am interested in the debate between the fields.
I should also say that I do not think Christianity enters the world as another way of seeing the world (on the same level as other ways of seeing the world), but rather as a way overthrowing the way the world is seen… championing the unseen and opening up a third term (beyond whatever affirmation and negation currently exists). So then I don’t think that Christianity in its inception was a ‘narrative’, let alone a ‘grand narrative’ but a negation of all currently existing narratives. Thus Christianity should not be approached in a purely hermeneutic manner.
I understand that this last paragraph might need unpacked!
October 1st, 2008 at 10:18 am
>>but a negation of all currently existing narratives.
negation? hmm. not the right word i should think. perhaps a haunting. or, a regarding disregard–the using without using of “the things of this world.” perhaps even a parabolic unsettling of that which is inherited: the fisher in the heritage itself that is the desert, the other in the same. or the viral unforgettable forgetting of non-native traditions of gesture that become the non-hermeneutical subversion of a living social system and its functioning ideologies… (forgive these ponderous spectres being proposed where some would rather the torches of revolution burn…).
“Christianity” seems too strong of a concept in your last comment (that speaks of it in the singular). the events that came forth from the living of the jew joshua son of joseph where an unbound multiplicity from the start that became rolling configurations of the One nearly instantaneously after the simple transformative localisms of the apocalyptic age were chased east and plowed under by the romans. so then… hmm hmm hmm… perhaps some anachronisms are still worth the embarrassment of their articulation: the kingdom of g-d, the gathering, trust and transformation, a religion of left hands not knowing what right hands are doing… the weak language of local, material transformation that has no harbingers to speak for the whole, no source of federation to bring leverage and amplification to that which functions as the local, on the scale of the human. if we are to utter the c word at all perhaps it is only proper to do so in uncapitalized plural form, as the christianities, unless one is speaking of the claim to the One made by any particular community’s embodiment of the term (that suspect universal only ever called forth from the particular).
the onslaught of zizekian-hegelian Christianity are a little too trendy for me, but i am fascinated to watch this appropriation unfold.
back to the fields. i must continue to salute the pure multiple as the ground of presentation while the age of capital reigns.
cheers.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
[...] PeterRollins.net » Blog Archive » We don’t need early Christianity, we need Proto-Christianity (… Rollins argues against a mere primitivism within the church and points towards what he calls a proto-Christiniaty. The early church is an historical response to the Christ-Event, to the rupture that took place all those years ago. And as an historical response it is related to its historical epoch and the issues of that time. The Event that gave birth to early Christianity however can be approached in purely negative terms as an a-historical rupture within history (in the world but not of it). As a New Beginning housing a subversive new possibility. It was a rupture that took place within Judaism, a happening that pre-dated Christianity: as testified to in the common claim that Jesus was a Jew not a Christian….The main problem we face today is that the wider church has lost the belief that there can be a universal call to re-configure the basic co-ordinates (it is worth noting that all established groups will find it difficult to accept this idea as it threatens the status quo). Instead we have embraced the idea of piecemeal change. Radical groups are thus labeled ‘new forms’, ‘fresh expressions’ [...]
October 13th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Hi Pete,
Its taken a while to get time to pen a response to your response partly coz I finally get time and partly because of your ‘Christians make good atheists’ post and partly coz of my brief reading of the intro to Zizek and Theology which finally arrived through the door today have given me a lead on a response.
I think I would say I am fully on board with you with your views on the Christian story still having some mileage in providing a engaged interaction with the world (and when I hear that word I hear a word of ethics, human interaction and the buzz of human culture – good and bad) – so count me in on that project. And when you (or Zizek) speaks of a materialistic God it reads like it is in that context. Oh and by the way I totally agree with your comment about keeping us engaged with the world – ethically, politically, socially – rather than detached in abstract thinking.
But our context is a wide one, that of our human place in the cosmos, the landscape, the natural order of what is and my big fear is that if we do not (and excuse my poetry) do our thinking with the wind in our face and the rocks and earth beneath our feet then we will have to do a whole load of rework later on because we didn’t get the co-ordinates right before we started reconfiguring. I am not arguing for a return to some sort of Celtic Christianity or native peoples mentality (thought there is doubtless some value in there) but that the same phenomenological rigor is applied to the God / nature / man space (which you could make a good case for arguing is the primary source of the event that we might call God) as to the God / man / man space which is (I think) the focus of Zizek and others. My impression (and you are far more knowledgeable than me!) is that Neitzche and Heidegger drew context and inspiration from an engagement with the landscape (I think particularly of Heidegger, his hut and the wilds of the Black Forest !!).
So I am fully with you on your comments and following you every step of the way, my argument is for more and for the fact that if the context of our current thinking does not lift above the human ‘world’ into an engagement of human thought with the cosmos, with the total scope of ‘what is’, then our compass will be very unreliable in the long term and indeed we won’t have a workable context for many of the challenges that face us as humans / planet today.
October 13th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Ha ha … just re-read my first post after posting the second… whilst accusing you of hermeneutical presuppositions I now realize I was failing to disclose my own! When I wrote …. ‘The proto-Christian event is an hermeneutical presupposition that shuts up too many possibilities. The foundations of Christianity are self limiting parameters that will threaten, for me atleast, the project that is before us of finding a coherent language for ‘event’ we traditionally have called God. ‘ …. it sounded gloriously open ended but in the second post I own up to the fact that I think that a deconstruction of our human relationship with the cosmos and the landscape is the possibility that I feel that the some of the current christianity focussed work is closing up and that I feel is more foundational than what we are all trying to do with the Christian story. ….. I guess that becomes pretty obvious in the second post and I guess you knew that anyway but I wanted to link the two!