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This week has continued to humble me. Internet sources have emerged about tent cities emerging in the United States; the governor of California has opened a fairground in Sacramento for housing for people. Unemployment continues to rise in California; it hits minorities and the already poor disproportionately. San Diego County finished 85 new housing units in February; four years ago it was over 1000. There are some indications that the hotel industry may have been a little higher than expected – but only because of the drug violence in Mexico has brought more college students to San Diego. Two of my neighbors are unemployed.

Our distribution numbers have dropped from over 1700 to a little over 1500 a week. I imagine that this is because the Mid-City neighborhood is becoming de-populated some; perhaps some “tourist industry” jobs have picked up with the spring. Apartment signs now have arisen in the neighborhood. Obviously people are moving to cheaper places, or doubling up more, or moving to the streets. Sadly we received notification that Feeding America food bank in San Diego is not able to keep up with rising demand for food. Beginning in a week and a half, they will no longer distribute on Mondays. I don’t know yet what this means for our Tuesday distribution. We have indications that the San Diego Food bank, from whom we receive a monthly distribution, is experiencing a similar lack. As supply is dropping, demand is growing. Of course, people who are hungry result. Whereas the government can subsidize investors willing to risk buying “toxic assets” of banks, direct supplies of food have not received attention. And this is in the United States; my understanding is that emerging countries are suffering more dealing with the increased commodity prices that never have gone down after their rise a few years ago. Now, however, less exports and trade and markets mean less jobs and income.

Downtown Tuesday night at the Salvation Army was profoundly moving. Early in the morning, blocks away from where many slept, three persons were shot and killed by a disgruntled public transport worker at 3 in the morning. Many were awakened by the shots and sirens. Houses and locks grant the illusion that we are safe from such stupid violence; when one lives on the streets, one recognizes that one has no real security while one sleeps. We read from Jeremiah 31:31-34 to read of the new covenant, written on hearts. There was a holy attentiveness as I preached. On the way in, I met three friends who I have come to know – they were turned away from the meal because capacity had been reached for the meal. New faces arrive now weekly. Some of the regulars are getting closed out. With the Major’s help, I smuggled some food out to the streets to give to those with whom we regularly eat.

The area around the Salvation Army is changing. The library and the post office provide well lit areas. Every evening a small “suburb” springs up in the area. I counted six tents popping up on the sidewalk. Sleeping bags and blankets come out, neatly laid in rows. The area is kept clean. Every morning at 5:30 am, the people must vacate and move on for the day. After business hours, around 6:00, the neighbors re-emerge and begin rebuilding their home and neighborhood. Conversations break out as person chat in their “front yard” on the side walk as they pass the evening away. It has a certain Midwestern village feel about it, kind of like when I’d sit on a porch on the main drag in Winamac, Indiana with Dorothy. I wonder what will happen in a few weeks when Padres games start, if the city will continue to permit the “instant village” to emerge. These are persons seemingly recently displaced. I met one man who had a MBA in marketing the other week -- John. He lost his job and then lost his house and didn’t have the extended family networks to support him. He had not been able to get a job. He spoke to me about applying to a 7/11 store, and getting turned down because he was “over qualified.”

The Samoan congregation within our multicongregation seems suffering most. Many have skilled construction trades; with construction drying up, it disproportionately affects the whole congregation. I pray that no one may lose their housing. It’s tough for everyone and the congregation as a whole.

By Steve Gilbert’s graciousness, the worst spots in the disintegrated parking lots now have concrete patches where the asphalt had been broken up in the entryway by truck use. We received the “left overs” or “dregs” from the concrete company jobs where he works and patched it. A truck full of concrete came to finish the “patch;” as it poured, those there became aware that the truck was sinking through the asphalt. We therefore had a new area to patch. It was suggested by someone that a truck comes through to different areas patch by patch so that we eventually can replace the 1 inch asphalt with 6 inch concrete with fiberglass binding. I just hope that we don’t ever have to dig that concrete out like others had had to dig out the asphalt! We have a coming PLNU health fair and concern for the parking lot and safety in walking over it had been a concern. One could not even roll bread racks over it. We are very, very thankful at God’s goodness for things like concrete in a parking lot so that we can distribute the food that we beg to the neighborhood.

It’s been a little disconcerting that we continue to unload the truck each day without the benefit of a lift. Though we’ve been trying for two months, we’ve only raised about $1500 of the some $9300 necessary for the lift. I’m afraid we’re really risking an accident moving 60 tons a month by hand off the truck. Those who do have developed the skills and the back strength to somehow do it; there are certain necessities that one would rather not have for which to compensate.

Chris Fuerstenau has down a magnificent job with the web site: http://www.midcitynazarene.org/ On it we have a “widget” to accept donations for the lift. Any little bit helps if readers of this blog could help. If congregations want to help, we still are an “approved Nazarene mission” site for your 10% world mission giving!!!! Sign up where you are and watch the wonderful slide shows.

My guess is that we will have to develop new, deeper commitments to remain faithful in sustaining the practices that God has given us, both in terms of the commitment of time, work, and finding wider networks of financial support. I thought this week of Jeff Kane’s one time idea about getting a city approved “vending truck” to feed soup from downtown – persons miss supper so that they can sustain their places on the sidewalk. Rent supplements for the multicongregation and neighbors come more to us. I’ve had three ask for help to move into apartments. The good news is that this is becoming (1) available and (2) cheaper.

The most amazing thing that I discover is that people remain thankful, whether in our lines, in setting up, watching concrete trucks sink into asphalt, even walking away after being turned away from a meal. There is an awareness that even among the trials of this life, God is love, and every good gift comes from God, and the sufferings of this age are not to be compared with the fullness of life in the resurrection in the age that is to come.

What will emerge economically? God knows. No matter what the economic situation, the poor have different challenges. Our task is simply to keep obedience to Jesus: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, overseeing the sick, clothing the naked – and allowing the Spirit to make us holy in the process, to teach us love of God and neighbor. And to this, we will continue.

Posted by johnwright at 7:29 PM | Comments (14)

Yesterday I had the distinct honor of attending the 2008 Kyoto Laureate Symposium that honored the work of Charles Taylor at the University of San Diego as a VIP -- a guest of PLNU's provost John Hawthorne, who knew that I had read and admired Taylor's work. I'm not used to such treatment -- special parking, a golf cart ride to the site of the lecture, seating in the reserved section at the front, seats away from the Japanese ambassador to the United States, a fancy luncheon afterwards, where I thanked the CEO of the San Diego National Bank for providing such an opportunity for me and my students (and probably made an inappropriate joke about the importance of Taylor's lecture given the current state of banks in the United States resulting from a loss of locality after he said that the San Diegans were more interested in the technical prizes rather than the thought and ethics prize). I ate with the academic administrators from USD, itself an interesting experience. There was a blessing before the meal, prayed to the "Creator God" rather than the "Triune God." I found this wonderfully ironic given Taylor's historical assessment of this "more subtle language" and its anchorage in 18th century deism and romanticism.

The lectures, however, were the highlight. Taylor was brilliant. He spoke of two narratives with the rise of the modern liberal nation-state. One narrative is the end of exclusion and intolerance from the absolutist predecessor. Taylor argued that indeed, there is a truth to this narrative. Yet simultaneously, he argued that their is a second narrative, a darker side, to this narrative. That in the attempt to redraw and organize all around a single political identity of the state, this narrative produces its own version of exclusion, intolerance, and violence. By recognizing this second narrative, Taylor hopes that space may be made for different types of political identities within the state to resist its absolutist political claims. Given, however, the absolutist claims over coercive violence of the modernist liberal state that shows its historical origins in early modern absolutism, I am not sure how capable liberal political theory and practice can change to allow such a genuine multiculturalism that does not work for to produce a single political loyalty (a term I think is much more descriptive than 'identity').

In response, Robert Bellah spoke. Bellah argued that "identities" are never singular, but always multiple. While he argue that this was not against Taylor's thesis, but complementary, the gist seemed to be that liberal states, especially the United States, already has the capacity to ward off the danger against which Taylor rightfully warns. Bellah then turned to the specific history of the United States to argue his point. In so doing, he gave a wonderful Puritan jeremiad. He surprised me by recounting the history of the violent atrocities of the United States. I thought, "Wow; has Hauerwas influenced him so much to give up his commitment to the goodness of civil religion as a type of mainline Niebuhrian liberal Protestantism?" His jeremiad climaxed with discussing the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- interesting in light of the Japanese sponsorship of the event. At this point, Bellah's narrative changed. He cited one group that morally opposed the dropping of the bomb -- the National Council of Churches via the words of, guess who -- Reinhold Neibuhr. He moved to the contemporary scene. Having lost hope in the United States in America, he had now found hope again in the election of a black man with a Muslim middle name to the presidency. The forces of exclusion and violence and nationalism of which Taylor had warned had been overcome by the return to the ideals of the founding fathers and Lincoln (suspension of habeas corpus?) in Obama. The shear messianicity of Obama as the embodiment of the liberal neo-orthodoxy, Niebuhrian mainline Protestantism in Obama promoted by Bellah, with its undercurrent of USA nationalism fascinated me -- particularly in an event sponsored by the Japanese in honor of a Canadian scholar.

More fascinating was the audience's (or did it become a congregation?) response. Taylor's lecture was met by light, polite applause; Bellah's was met with a rigorous, standing ovation (except for some of the Japanese and one PLNU professor). In the luncheon, the conversation by others was not about the brilliance of Taylor's analysis, but Bellah's passion and speech. All I could think that the event mirrored types of the evangelical intellectual responses to the presidency of George W. Bush that this same demographic found so horrible because of its theological zeal. Now that the political hands had moved to the liberal Protestant Neibuhrian realism from the conservative evangelical Protestant Wilsonian idealism, it seems that the liberal Protestant (um, I mean Catholic) have their own messianic hopes inscribed in the Oval Office. Such a version of American civil religion still lives!

If this is indicative of larger cultural movements, it would seem that the decline of mainline Protestant churches, and evangelical churches that can absorb this into their discourse without abandoning their older constituency, will now have the upper hand in the free-market of ecclesial enterprises. Evangelicalism's thirty year coalition with the Republican party will become a detriment; a politically liberal pietistic civil religion will emerge.

For myself, this probably means that I will continue to be perceived as "conservative" rather than "liberal" as I was in the 90s and early 2000s. As committed to the evangelic, catholic, and orthodox faith given to the saints -- and as I age -- it is fascinating to see how the shifting cultural/political movements around me. The task, among swirling manifestations of the same civil religion, is to keep going in unity, constancy, and peace.

Posted by johnwright at 3:52 PM | Comments (16)

This past weekend, the Wesleyan Theological Society met at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana. I think that the WTS is meeting is more important than the SBL or the AAR meetings, even as it now tends to subordinate scholars work to the "more universal" guilds -- which actually have a much narrower constituency than the world wide churches that the WTS now represents.

Unfortunately I was unable to attend -- in part because of my earlier papers given at the SBL meeting -- I never claimed consistency -- and other factors that arose. I was on the program, and Mark Mann, the Director of the Wesleyan Center for 21st Century studies, stood "in" for me in a panel on Nathan Kerr's new book, Christ, History, and Apocalyptic. Nate is a friend, and it was an honor to participate in the panel -- I have yet to hear how it went. The work has created quite a buzz on the internet, and I had responded already to his chapter on Stanley Hauerwas.

There is much, much, much positive about Nate's book. He has really helped my thinking become more precise, and shown me where I really need some work and help. I share my response in honor of Nate's work; I don't try to represent it all here, but focus on the last two chapters. I hope that the review helps whet your appetite to read Nate's work.

Goodness in Search of Beauty:
Reflections on Nate Kerr’s Christ, History, and Apocalyptic
By John W. Wright
Professor of Theology and Christian Scripture
Point Loma Nazarene University

It is an honor to participate in this panel, even if I have reduced myself to a textual trace, present in my absence through Dr. Mark Mann’s vocal vibrations. I apologize to those gathered here (or is it there?) for my absence, and thank David Belcher and Nathan Kerr for their gracious inclusion of my presence nonetheless. My inclusion via Dr. Mann highlights the sign of the Kingdom of God to which Dr. Kerr calls us – “A disposed sociality. A sociality of dispossession” (p. 195). In a proper Gospel practice of reciprocity, I too desire to participate in this sign of the kingdom. Even as I have asked Dr. Mann to speak for me, his voice is his own. At the conclusion of these words, he must become dis-possessed of the Wright voice in order to become the real Mann. In anticipation of that-which-is-to-come, I offer these reflections on Kerr’s brilliantly creative text offered in the form of Christ, History, and Apocalyptic.

Perhaps I find Kerr’s work so intoxicating because he captures so much of my own life. The genealogy traced by Kerr narrates the formation of my body, not least during years when I moved from holiness movement institutions to encounter the radical reformation and Derrida at the University of Notre Dame. The encounter with historicism in this genealogy from Troeltsch to Barth to Hauerwas to Yoder, with Derrida and de Certeau echoing in the background, has moved me to a life lived, usually naively and against myself and my will, doxologically among a out-of-control, dispossessed people who live a diasporic mission with and amid the poor. Kerr’s ecclesiological words in chapter 6 form deep resonances with the world I encounter in my local parish: “Our own participation in the politics of Jesus emerges as a missionary politics of liturgical encounter with the world” (p. 161).

I write this even as a policeman searched our building before our services today, rendering extremely anxious my brothers and sisters recently escaped from war in the Congo. Kerr writes with such concrete bodies in mind. The gifts of God come unanticipated through a local parish, unasked for, even unwanted by me, but through whom I am dispossessed of myself so much that in other’s thankfulness for me (utterly undeserved), all I can do is give God thanks. How may one worry about one’s debt load when one encounters those who thank you for distributing, without any cost to you, another box of Vanilla Wafers and a container of reduced-fat Mayo with olive oil? Life is suddenly reoriented toward a future-not-yet-come as God refuses to let the powers control the future by the more that has come in Jesus Christ.

Kerr’s vision that “mission makes the church” anchored in the historical singularity of Jesus Christ rings with liberating force. As within the holiness camp-meeting liturgy, I want to shout “Glory!” when Kerr writes “As the work of the Spirit, such an ‘independence’ would need to occur at a point of missionary encounter between church and world and from within a complex liturgical space opened up everanew [sic] by the apocalyptic historicity of Jesus of Nazareth” (p. 175). We live in a world that turns theological “identity” into a commodity to fill a certain market niche in “civil society’s” cooperation with the nation-state. Refusal to take control, to be responsible, to reify the powers in trying to re-form them, and thus be re-formed by them, means constantly teetering on the edge of failure – personal and ecclesial. The difficulty, of course, is discerning when that failure results from one’s own sin or one’s faithfulness. Only a doxology oriented for the future through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ renders this distinction irrelevant. One learns to pray for Wisdom that one knows one can never possess, though one hopes one may occasionally be possessed by. Professor Kerr’s work helps me name the church and the world as I see it, especially in its porous messiness.

Yet I wonder. . . . I wonder if Dr. Kerr’s ecclesiological project so evacuates the church of being that it becomes impossible to sustain the truth of this witness in the world. I wonder whether Kerr grants too much to historicism, even in his wonderfully creative re-reading of the Chalcedonian Christological logic that disrupts it. If so, it seems to me that the powers themselves might easily co-opt Kerr’s ecclesiology of “a disposed sociality, a sociality of dispossession” into a Benjamin apocalyptic politics that leaves the singular witness of Jesus Christ as an obstacle to its privileging of “the excessiveness of singularity itself”.

Kerr is too wise, too careful a theologian, and too faithful a Christian not to have addressed this issue directly in his understanding of the apocalyptic logic of Jesus Christ. This is no mere philosophical politics of messianicity. Jesus provides what Derrida cannot: the “holding open” of history through a “more” already apparent in history. Kerr writes in a significant passage:
this [Christological] apocalyptic historicity ‘holds open’ history in a way that is irreducible to the kind of transcendental-historical ‘opening to the future’ that Derrida and postmodernism assume as the ‘given’ ‘universal structure’ of apocalyptic/messianic experience. Rather, history ‘breaks open’ – is irrupted—according to the singular logic of a concrete political action, which is operative in history as the excessiveness of singularity itself. (p. 159)

Despite Kerr’s care, my concern is whether Kerr’s commitment to a Derridean historicism itself renders it impossible to provide a sufficiently thick description of transcendence except as that which continually is collapsed back into immanence. In other words, I have no doubt that Kerr’s account of Jesus Christ seriously disrupts an immanent historicist politics; yet I wonder if the historicists, though disrupted, do not ultimately win and whether Kerr is left with a concept of “weak being” and it’s theo-political implications as seen in the work of Gianni Vattimo and the “weak God” of John Caputo. Once beginning within the straights of historicism, I wonder – and it is a genuine open question – whether one can develop an adequate sense of transcendence/revelation/apocalypse solely through the ethical that is not merely a disruption of history to be sealed by the powers before it is again, ruptured in an unending repetition of the new and improved coming kingdom of God.

Kerr writes that “a properly ‘apocalyptic Christology’ at once addresses the challenge and subverts the assumptions of modern historicism itself (as from the inside, perhaps)” (p. 134). The ‘perhaps’ dangles within the Kerr text, an unsteady stuttering that seemingly places the logic of Kerr’s position in tension with itself. In an important footnote, Kerr writes, “The concept and phrasing of an ‘open finality’ are borrowed from C. Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism. . . . There, Cunningham speaks of ‘the open finality of the Word as testified to by the work of the Spirit’. Whereas Cunningham speaks of the ‘open finality of the Word’ as that of ‘form’, ‘essence’, or ‘being’, however, I (following Yoder’s lead) want to speak of it in terms of life-history, history, and historicity” (fn 66, p. 156). Kerr finds the same end in the kingdom of God as found in the givenness of Benjamin’s politics of the revolutionary transformation of history: “It is according to this dual logic of ‘singularity’ and ‘excess’, I am suggesting, that Christian apocalyptic articulates the kind of action by which alone we make the kind of passage from historicist political ideology to the revolutionary transformation of history that we find Walter Benjamin calling us to in his conception of ‘Messianic time’” (p. 159). The theological significance of Jesus is emptied into the Messianic revolutionary politics within immanence of historical processes. In Jesus we may accomplish the same end in continuity with, but not fully provided by the non-Christian apocalyptic logic of Benjamin himself.

Kerr therefore accomplishes his goal “to correlate God’s interruption of history in Jesus Christ with a historicist ‘logic’ of singularity that is irreducible to or in excess of any presumed notion of historical or political ‘universality’” (p. 134). The absence of the Word and Sacrament, Scriptures, baptism and the Eucharist, in Kerr’s (non)ecclesiology is significant. In a modification of de Lubac’s phrase, “The Eucharist Makes the Church,” Kerr reduces the church to a similar mono-causal mark that “Mission Makes the Church: “it is the missionary space of encounter opened up by the singularity of Jesus which impels one to move beyond speaking of ‘the truth given sacramentally in a Church that remains a particular society’.” Theology becomes ethics that is politics continually (un)grounded in a de-stabilized anthropology. Transcendence gets pulled back within the endless play of immanence. Against himself, I wonder if Kerr provides a new repetition of Kant and ends up disciplining God by philosophy. Perhaps in the end, Troeltsch wins even as Kerr, Yoder, and Jesus, defeat him. As the church is evacuated of being, the communion of saints becomes absorbed within the slaughter house of history except in a politics within-history-that-is-and-is-to-come. “Was” evaporates into the immanent movement of history itself.

It seems to me that the Good, the political and ethical, in the modern world, does not provide sufficient force of Transcendence necessary to resist the logic of the late capitalist world. If I had a suggestion to retrieve, and possibly correct, Kerr’s careful and complex thought, I would suggest the importance of supplementing his theological apocalyptic logic of Jesus as the Good with an apocalyptic logic of Jesus as the True and the Beautiful through a development of an ecclesiology that emphasized the communion of the saints. Perhaps this could prevent his work from being dragged into the sublime play of Derridean historicist immanence. This would push his work to an account of the “open finality of the Word” closer to Cunningham in a different type of historicism, one more critical of Derrida and Benjamin. The Beauty of the Form of this politics might refuse the Sublime found within immanence. As von Balthasar writes, “in a world without beauty—even if people cannot dispense without the word and constantly have it on the tip of their tongues in order to abuse it – in a world which is perhaps not wholly without beauty, but which can no longer see it or reckon with it: in such a world the good also loses is attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out. Man [sic] stand before the good and asks himself why it must be done and not rather its alternative, evil” (The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, p. 19). Of course, such could not be expected within this single volume. Given the great creativity and profound concern for theological faithfulness that this volume evinces, I look forward to reading much more in the work of Professor Kerr.

Posted by johnwright at 8:47 PM | Comments (7)

The past five weeks have been intense, I guess as usual. Each day has enough concerns of its own. Last night my body caught up with my neglect, and broke down a little. I was able to teach through the day, but canceled my evening plans to rest. I finally finished Jennifer Herdt's Putting on Virtue, a text that I hope to blog on consistently. The rest seems to have done me some well -- I'm feeling a little better. So I thought I'd put a Lenten quote from Henri de Lubac's Corpus Mysticum. I found it at the first of January, but had not taken time to share it yet.

In the "Preface to Second Edition," de Lubac puts into words the project of "return to the sources" (pp. 9-10) that describes well his overall project. He speaks as a historian, but also as a theologian, even more basic as a Christian. I found resonance in his words:

Historians must first of all make contrasts stand out, if they are not only to trade in banalities. But they should not close their eyes to more fundamental continuities! As for me, my gaze will always end up fixed on the history of human thinking itself, and even more on that of Christian theology. I will always find peace and joy in contemplating them. Amid so many varied riches that claim my attention, I will always seek to act like a child of Plato, that is to say, every time that there is at least the possibility of so acting, I will not make a choice. A unity that is too quickly affirmed has no power to inspire, while eclectism has no impact. But the methodical welcoming of contrasts, once understood, can be fruitful: not only does it guard against over-eager partiality; not only does it open up to our understanding a deep underlying unity: it is also one of the preconditions that prepares us for new departures.

Here is a concept of tradition that does not close back in upon itself, but that provides the conditions to save the repetition of the past from a nostalgia that empties those who proceeded us of their power in the name of sustaining their form. It has the typical de Lubac paradox: by seeing contrasts theologically, one can grasp a deep underlying unity. This unity often surprises us, and God gives us memories of the past, both our own personal histories and the larger histories of which we are part as Christians, as the precondition that allows us to faithfully meet challenges that come after.

Posted by johnwright at 8:59 PM | Comments (0)