I am keen to lead some reading groups dedicated to introducing and exploring the work of key theorists who are contributing important insights into Christianity. These courses would involve reading both secondary and primary material. I would introduce the evening and guide the discussion to ensure that we get the most out of what we are reading. Each course would come with the tag ‘beginner’, ‘intermediary’ and ‘advanced’.

While the advanced classes will be very difficult for people not familiar with theology this does not mean they would be of no use. Often we learn most by placing ourselves in an educational context that is currently beyond us. When I started studying theology and philosophy I was twenty-two and had no proper educational background. But I attended all the philosophy conferences and theology symposiums I could. For a couple of years I understood virtually none of what I heard. But eventually, like one of those Magic Eye pictures, it all began to become clear.

To kick things off I am wanting to run an advance reading group in Belfast over the summer exploring the work of dialectic materialist theologian Slavoj Žižek. Žižek blends a provocative mix of Lacan, Hegel and Marx in his theological project and comes to some fascinating insights. This will be a five week course in which we shall read two secondary sources and two primary sources.

If you would be interested in attending this reading group please email me here.

In the future I am keen to run courses on (to name but a few),

John Caputo
Terry Eagleton
John Milbank
Dietrich Bonheoffer

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).

So there seems to be energy around Bonhoeffer still (even if it is just to say that we should move on from Bonhoeffer). Instead of continuing the ever-growing comment section of the last post I thought I would write some thoughts in a new post. This means that people don’t need to read 40 comments before writing something. Before I make my main point I will however say that I am surprised at myself for returning to Bonhoeffer, for if you asked me a few weeks ago what I thought of his later writings I would have likely said that I thought they were mere fragments of thought done to death in the 60’s and that other thinkers have done the work that Bonhoeffer signaled and hinted at (thus rendering the letters of interest only for their historical value). And while part of me still thinks that might be true another part of me thinks of him in the same way that I think about Feuerbach, i.e. as an important transitional thinker. In particular Bonhoeffer opened up a way of thinking (or at least expressed it) that was not exhausted in the Radical Theology of the 60’s but which is a prophetic utterance concerning a much more virulent strain of theology that is vibrant and historically significant (what I am about to say relates to the great comment by Ian below – BTW I think Moot is a wonderful example of a community exploring this stuff).

Interestingly, Bonhoeffer does not attack religion as such. However he reflects that in the 20th century (though he sees it beginning in the 17th century) religion has become possible for less and less people because it has been problematical. Not because it has changed but because human beings have entered into a different epoch (my words not his, he talks of “man come of age”). In this new historical situation a religious expression of Christianity places God at the edges of human life as the Deus ex machina. Why? Because religion, for Bonhoeffer, is the belief in a metaphysical absolute from which everything hangs (onto-theology), and as human knowledge increases the more things in our existence do not require this metaphysical explanation. Religion is now exposed as advocating a God of the gaps. In addition to this the God of religion is only for those who feel a need to ask the metaphysical question, “Why”, and in a ‘world come of age”, this question is asked by fewer and fewer (a Nietzschian point par exellence). Indeed Bonhoeffer attacks with great passion those believers who would use the idea of death and illness to get people back to that metaphysical question (and even implicates existentialism and psychoanalysis in the same insidious project – which I would, of course, take issue with).

Bonhoeffer’s great insight in LPP as far as I can see, was to dimly perceive that, while religion was a predominant guise for Christianity throughout history this did not need to be the case – that Christianity could affirm all its central tenants without religion as he defined it (God could be affirmed without metaphysics – again he was not saying that this was ontologically better but rather was becoming historically nessesary). He saw religion as having served its time well, but which had finally reached its twilight.

This is interesting to me because I think it allows us to understand Fundamentalism in a different way. Namely, as an impotent reaction to the loss of religion. The attempt to place it back in the centre. Fundamentalism can thus be seen as the very evidence of the growing redundancy of religion. It is the violent kickback against the continual loss of ground that religion has had to concede in recent years. But for Bonhoeffer there is a way beyond an anemic religious Christianity that places God at the edge and a violent fundamentalism which impotently seeks to place religion in the centre and this is what he was hinting at. It has been left to others to explore what this alternative is (but for Bonhoeffer it was deeply Christocentric and exhibited itself in an unwavering concern for the world – just to relate to the important question that Lori asked).

I have recently been re-reading the later Bonhoeffer to help with my current writing and have been staggered by the insight contained in many of his letters from prison. Because he was writing under difficult conditions and only begining to formulate his thoughts on ‘religionless Christianity’ his writing is often fragmented, frustratingly embryonic and wed too tightly with his previous perspectives. However it feels, while reading these letters, that we are witnessing a metamorphosis taking place before our very eyes. It is as if we are glimpsing the very moment when a caterpillar begins to reconstitute itself in the process of becoming a butterfly. Yet, as we know, before the transformation was complete his life was snuffed out.

His letters are clearly marked by a serious reading of Nietzsche and can thus be seen as one of the early theological attempts to reflect on what faith looks like after ‘the death of God’. In these letters he imagines a church radically transformed, one which rethinks, at a core (ontological) level, its purpose and expression.

I am sticking my neck out here, but I believe that we are beginning to witness the development of dynamic faith collectives which Bonhoeffer would have recognised as concrete manifestations of his lonely prison thoughts (though there are fewer of these groups than one might imagine – for instance I do not include the vast swarm of neo-evangelical, crypto-evangelistic communities which so often cloud the horizon). While ikon, the group of which I am a part, is not in any way perfect I see it as a key experiment in this new movement (others include Aldea in Tuscon and The Garden in Brighton).

Anyway, here is a quote from Bonhoeffer (which I might use as the opening quote in the book I am currently working on),

“And we cannot be honest unless we recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [even if there were no God]. And this is just what we do recognise – before God! God himself compels us to recognise it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering”.

I would recommend John Caputo’s wonderful book, The Weakness of God to see an example of how this can be fleshed out.