Marginal Christianity

Well, pretty much everything, we’ve discovered. Imperial domination of our lives reduces us to a simulacra, a parody of the life God intends for his creatures. It robs us of our energy, strength, creativity, and power rendering us somnambulent unparticipants in our living. Joy restores all that to us and for us. It is a gift of God that often unexpectedly lays hold of us and reorients our lives back to their true north. This paragraph at the beginning of 1 Peter says it well: 3  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4  and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5  who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6  In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, 7...

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...

Theological Journal – March 5                                                                                                                          What’s Joy Got To Do With It? 1.        Joy is not a sedative that insulates the church from its struggles or a consolation prize that salves the wounds it incurs for not “winning,” This is the first item I...

“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy We’ve discovered a bit about why that’s so in our previous posts. I want to transition away from my original question about how it is possible to “count it all joy” in the midst of suffering, persecution, or distress that befalls us for following and serving Jesus Christ to some of its effects and consequences in our lives. Chief among them for me are these four: 1.        Joy is not a sedative that insulates the church from its struggles or a consolation prize that salves the wounds it incurs for not “winning,” fire in belly 2.        Joy mobilizes the church to “keep on keeping on” with its struggle and resist the allure of settling in and settling down. increase of power 3.        Joy is not a soft, “touchy-feely,” inner thing opposed to a militant resistance ...

What is J3-Joy? Joy of the J3 variety is a disposition or affection that grounds and sustains us amid difficult times. Affections are “the deep-seated dispositions, the settled and abiding postures of the heart, that qualify or color everything that we know or do” (Kendra G. Holtz and Matthew T. Matthews, Shaping the Christian Life: Worship and Religious Affections [ Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006], 14). Sam Storms adds “Affections are more than ideas or thoughts or intellectual notions in our heads. They are lively and vigorous passions, for example, of either delight, love, joy, and hope, on the one hand, or displeasure, hatred, grief, or despair, on the other. When we evaluate our response to someone or something in life, we use such terms as sorrow, happiness, revulsion, attraction, bitterness, anger, peace, fear, and delight” ( https://www.samstorms.org/enjoying-god-blog/post/peter-and-jonathan-edwards-on-religious-affections ). ...

The perhaps surprising dominant note in the New Testament is joy. All three kinds of Joy we looked at yesterday are present in it. N. T. Wright offers helpful insight into this matter in his article “Joy: Some New Testament Perspectives and Questions” ( http://faith.yale.edu/sites/default/files/wright.pdf ). He briefly examines the Old Testament and concludes regarding the reasons and character of joy, “The reasons include a mighty act of God to bring about victory over evil and the rescue of God’s people from its grip. The character of joy includes the vigorous and vibrant celebration of the goodness of the created order, expressed through the activities which signal and symbolize human well-being – eating, drinking, the joy of marriage, music and dancing” (2). Israel’s return from exile in Babylon is a threshold moment. The Lord has brought the people back to the land, to be sure. But something was missing. The great promises of Isa.40-55 and Ez.36-45 had not been fulfi...

Welcome to Lent 2020! I hope you have a “joyous” (in the sense we will exploring it from here on out) Lent! So, according to James, as a church struggles to be faithful to Jesus, their faithfulness will evoke opposition and rejection. To make it through we must set our minds and hearts that we are suffering for Christ in spite of it all and we will hang in there in the struggle. In this endurance we will find joy, the sure mark of God’s presence with us, and God’s work in us will continue moving us to good end he has designed for us. In the Bible three types of joy texts can be found: -J1: joy because certain events or occasions evoke it (here we find texts in which joy, gladness, mirth and the like are the expected or natural human responses to a variety of occasions, such as festivals, worship, or other occasions associated with the temple activities (Num 10:10; 2 Sam 6:12; 1 Chr 15:16; Ezra 3:12-13; Eccl 10:19), the naming of a king (1 Kgs 1:40), weddings (Jer...

Here are some of the thoughts of Orthodox theologian John Behr: In this interview at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, Father John Behr discusses the implications of a theology of joy for our living today. Indeed, joy, for Behr, is ultimately joy of life, the joy of being alive, a comprehensive intellectual, physical, psychical, and spiritual mode of being. As such, joy is much more than a matter of acquisition; it requires a work of cultivation, a work eminently figured in the life of Christ. God is the giver of life, and Jesus claims that he is life. Life is, therefore, not something we possess or try to grasp, but something to receive in joyous thankfulness, something in which we can dwell, the highest expression of which is to give life in return. We enjoy life by giving life, in living for others. For Behr, this sacrificial way of living was instituted in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. The feast of Easter celebrates Jesus’s radical inversion of life, ...

“God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness there is in the world and in ourselves can separate us finally from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us. We have God’s joy in our blood.” (Frederick Buechner, “The Great Dance” in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons , 240) So far we have seen Karl Barth suggest the joy is the chief attribute of God, evoked by his glory. That joy is a chief mark of God’s people and that the New Testament makes some rather startling, intimidating claims about the place of joy in a Christian’s or church’s life. My focus in this series is to try and make sense of joy impacts or should impact my life with God. I suppose the place to start is to distinguish between happiness and joy. Simply put, happines...