Marginal Christianity

Joy, as the authors of Joyful Militancy conceive it – (re)connection to our true selves and sources of strength and creativity – entails two movements inextricably related and mutually reinforcing. I think that even though these authors are not believers the pattern they have discerned in their work with various activist communities in resisting the reach and grip of empire is easily transposed and deepened in a Christian framework. Those interrelated movements are what an older Puritan theology would call mortification and vivification (vivid terms worth retrieving, I think). The putting to death of the old life and its ways and embracing the new life and its ways – the rediscovery of joy enables and spurs both movements and they deepen our joy the further we enter into the process. Gen.11 tells am instructive tale about the early empire of Babylon. It’s worth a brief look here. -it was totalizing (one language, vv.1,6) -it created an ideology that promised to address ou...

Empire, the milieu in which we live, stamps out joy because joy means we have become connected to our strength, our source of creativity, and collective energy. Joy overcomes the sadness (in the Spinozan sense of shutting us off from that which Joy connects us to) Empire sponsors as our way of life. It enervates, exhausts, and dispirits till we come to accept the way things are as the way they will always be.    Empire trades us happiness for Joy. Happiness becomes another of subjection to it. We are told to search for happiness through consumption, consumerism, and upward mobility. Indeed, that is our job in life under imperial domination. “Under Empire, happiness is seen as a duty and unhappiness as a disorder. Marketing firms increasingly sell happy experiences instead of products: happiness is a relaxing vacation on the beach, an intense night at the bar, a satisfying drink on a hot day, or the contentment and security of retirement. As consumers, we are encourag...

Theological Journal – March 11 Empire and Joy Empire is a cluster of processes acting and interacting simultaneously with each other. Their actions both consolidate empire’s hold on us and at the same time separate us from sources of potential power and the capacity and energy to connect. Empire is not invulnerable, however. Arounds the edges, at the margins there are fissures and slippages where its powers are incompletely formed or not present. It is in these spaces that energy and room for joy and transformation exists. And those energies are constantly brewing. Empire is ever vigilant, though, in seeking and crushing them. Empire cannot stop Joy from coming (it is a gift of God to his people, after all) but it can attack its recipients so as to denature and dilute its reception and practice. And that is what we see in the church all around us in North America. Without attending to Empire’s presence and power our practice of faith will never break out of the confines it ...

More on Empire Joy is the chief mark of Christian existence in the world. It can be emotional response to pleasant occasions or the expectation of God’s deliverance or rescue from oppression or distress. It is also an affection, disposition that determines the tone and tenor of our lives in good times as well as bad. This latter joy is not an emotion or feeling though it may involve them in particular circumstances. It is based on the conviction that Jesus is Lord and has triumphed over the powers that seek to divert and undo our following Jesus. Chief among these powers is the overarching reality that forms the environment in which we live. For God’s people throughout most of its history that overarching reality has been empire. Empire is a spirit, a way of doing things, a pretention to know how and have the power to order human life in the most fulfilling way possible. Empire (seeks to) shape the whole of our lives and make us over into its image. Such empire is a good thin...

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be a militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.” —Michel Foucault (“Preface,” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], xi–xiv) Yesterday we heard from theologian Jürgen Moltmann who argued that, contrary to popular perceptions, joy and pain or suffering are not antithetical realities and are in fact implicated in one another. Far from being an anodyne insulating or isolating us from pain and suffering or a compensation in another for the privations and difficulties we must accept in this life, joy opens us up to, thrusts us in the middle of, and makes grappling with pain and suffering inescapable. We live in a world run by empires – political, military, financial. Though they compete with, sometimes collude with, and sometimes fight with each other for dominance and control of human beings’ hearts, minds, loy...

The Spirit Jesus poured out at Pentecost on the Jews in Jerusalem births a new Abrahamic community and the risen Jesus promises them the Spirit will do the same through them in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the earth (1:8). As that work unfolds throughout this dispersal of the church throughout the earth we can watch the Spirit forming these new Abrahamic communities as the form of Jesus’ presence in their world – his coming again as I have called it. And I find four “C’s” marking these new communities: conversion, community, compassion, and conflict. Listed below are texts in Acts where each of these four “C’s” are seen: Conversion - 2:37-41; 4:4; 5:14; 6:7; 8:26-40; 9:1-19 (parallels in 22:6-16; 26:12-18), 35; ch.10; 11:21, 24; 12:24; 13:48-49; 14:1, 21; 16:5, 11-15; 17:4,12,34; 18:8; 19:26; 28:24 Community - 2:42-47; 4:31,32-37; 6:1-6; 9:17-18; ch.10; 11:26; 13:1-3; ch.15; 18:23; 20:2; 28:28 Compassion - 3:1-10; 4:30; 5:12-16; 8:4-8; 9:17,18,32-43; 11:2...

Ch.2 Jumping into Revelation “Few writings in all of literature have been so obsessively read with such generally disastrous results as the Book of Revelation (= the Apocalypse). Its history of interpretation is largely a story of tragic misinterpretation, resulting from a fundamental misapprehension of the work’s literary form and purpose. Insofar as its arcane symbols have fed the treasury of prayer and poetry, its influence has been benign. More often, these same symbols have nurtured delusionary systems, both private and public, to the destruction of their fashioners and to the discredit of the writing.”                                                                ...