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.