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…