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One of the real gifts God has given me in the past few years is the friendship of Jonathan Tran. I believe that Jonathan knew Tim Chung at Duke, encountered my blog somehow, and then ended up at PLNU for two summers and participated in our lives at Mid-City. Jonathan teaches in the Theology Department at Baylor. He has become a good conversation partner for me, if at times too intermittent because of the intensity of life that comes both our ways. Jonathan and his family's arrival at Baylor tripled the percentage of Vietnamese present at the university. I figure that given Jonathan's giftedness, his confinement to the middle Texas is a good thing, if nothing else, keeping him humble. He also can observe carefully the strange habits and likes and dislikes of white people, a strange minority in the world who think that they/we are "normal," not white.

In the fall, Jonathan published a book entitled, Foucault and Theology (T. & T. Clark). Foucault is the most influential thinker from the end of the 20th century - his influence spreading across multiple "disciplines" within the Western academy. This was the project for Jonathan's second summer at PLNU - a difficult summer for him that included a broken nose and the deep pain of a miscarriage. Jonathan engages the Foucault text with acumen, but without trying to baptize him. It seems to me that his book has not received sufficient attention, so I would like to blog about it in the coming couple of weeks. One of the good things about the book is that it is readily available through Amazon's Kindle at a very inexpensive price.

Perhaps most humbling for me is how he uses our conversations to frame his book. I have become very distrustful of the church as "counter-culture" or "resistance" language. Jonathan accurately describes our conversation in the book, and gets what we try to be about at Mid-City right in the process. I'd like to just quote extensively from the book to begin the review that relates to Jonathan and mine's conversation and his observations of Mid-City:

"I initially wanted to subtitle this book, "Power, Resistance, and Christianity. My good friend John Wright reminded me how ill-conceived 'resistance' as a preamble was, namely because it presupposed a state of affairs that posited God as at best interfering on a prior ontological arrangement, that Christians need to "resist" powers before, more immediate than, and superior to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Within such a framework, the allure of 'resistance' would be similar to certain Romanticist strains of Enlightenment thinking that sought to revitalize a world desacralized by Kant. Resistance comes to signal, in this frame, the radical stance of those who hold firm while everyone else caves in . Who wouldn't want to think of themselves, in that line of thought, as 'resisting,' just as who wouldn't want to be sided with right? Throughout my reading of Foucault in the pages ahead, I presuppose, in contrast, that Christianity does entail resistance, but not in this way. The church's resistance, instead, is internal to a more pervasive disposition: witness. Resistance is only one of multiple forms of witness" (pp. 3-4).

Later Jonathan picks up a description of our work at Mid-City. We would probably describe some of this differently, but I'll let his words stand:

"These issues are more than academic for my previously mentioned friend John, who, along with teaching theology, has for years pastored a multi-congregational church in downtown San Diego. John's church has seven congregations, only one of which speaks English. His church feeds hundreds homeless and needy people a week. One could say his church is 'resisting' the crushing pressures of poverty brought on by global capitalism, but John wouldn't put it that way. Rather, his church witnesses to God's goodness and so cannot help but see capitalism as but a flash within the drama of God's Trinitarian life. Instead of capitalism, 'the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the Good News.' I have often puzzled at John's fascination with the movement known as Radical Orthodoxy and its assertions of trinitarian peace over against ontological violence. What I've come to understand is how Radical Orthodoxy's version of things re-articulates the biblical narrative into which John emplots the life (and death) of Mid-City Nazarene Church. If he did not have the victory attested by the Gospel's primacy, what could Mid-City be but a meager if admirable mode of resistance? To be sure, Mid-City has had its share of victories, including its weekly distributions to the poor, beautiful modes of Christian discipleship, and a regular presence in San Diego's municipal politics. Still, by standards both inside and outside the church, Mid-City is not much to brag about. It's English-speaking congregation seats a mere 50 people each week, most of whom are idealistic students from John's theology and Bible classes at Point Loma Nazarene University. Its working budget is a pittance compared to the lavish budgets of many American churches. Outside the Nazarenes (no loadstone of Protestant influence), few people have even heard of the church, much less mimic its food distributions, multi-congregational polity, or vibrant modes of faithfulness. One could deem Mid-City 'successful' if one were motivated by the rallying cry of 'resistance.' Accordingly, Mid-City succeeds to the extent that it resists (in the same way that a speed bump slows down) the powers that be. But again, that is not how John would talk about his church.

Resistance language, which the reader will find amply used in the book, fails theologically when it does not begin with the abundant goodness of the Father revealed by the Son made present through the Holy Spirit. The 'powers' are not some thing that must be defeated in order for God's reign to be restored; rather, the powers have already been made subject to God's eternal reign. John's church witnesses to that reign. When Mid-City feeds people it seeks to make publicly known what is already the case: God, not capitalism, rules. As such, it is capitalism, not Christian communities like Mid-City, that resists through active rebellion a rule that can be at most resisted, though not ultimately denied. Mid-City's ministry looks like resistance only if you think capitalism has won, and if Christians think capitalism has won, no amount of resistance will save the church. John's church operates as it does because it believes the world belongs to God, not power. There are things the church and he as pastor 'resist' - namely, sin -but such resistance is secondary to a state of affairs such resistance must always presuppose. To put resistance prior to witness is to concede that only resistance remains, that there is nothing left to witness to. Hence, in starting, we need to begin with a Christian understanding of power that both allows us to take seriously what Foucault offers without endorsing the ontology it can invite. This is important to John, and it should be important to us. It is important for John to know that when he hands out produce to the luckless Cambodian woman, he doesn't understand it as a hand-out, a concession amidst capitalism's otherwise dominance. Rather, he understands it as sharing in what he and Mid-City have been given a share of, God's giving of his body that makes capitalistic notions of property, scarcity, and competition literal privations of the good. Such bodily sharing is not charity; or, it is charity of a different kind, charity between God and his people, which Mid-City and the luckless together share in by their sharing with one another. This is not resistance but simply what one does when Jesus is Lord, when the Kingdom has already come, when one believes, amidst the atheistic strictures of capitalism, the Good News. To witness Mid-City's multi-congregational sharing as worship is to see power as diffuse and polymorphic as Foucault claims, and to acknowledge that Foucault is wrong about power in at least this basic sense" (pp. 5-6).

I have never used the words Jonathan uses precisely in the way he does - I am not that eloquent. But he's spoken better for me than I can speak for myself. It is also why it is hard to incorporate people at Mid-City who come for it to be "successful" - either through "compassionate conservativism" (i.e. "compassionate ministries") or "social justice." If the issue is between being "successful" or "unsuccessful," of course we desire "success." But those terms presuppose a wider understanding of what the Good is, and if the Good is found in the eternally Triune God, then success becomes subordinated to faithfulness is receiving the gifts God has given us. It is hard to remember in the atheistic dialectic between capitalism and socialism in the United States, that Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." But I am thankful that Jonathan provides words to explain what often is difficult to, particularly when we understand that the sin that we must resist, and from which we must be cleansed, runs straight through us.

Posted by johnwright at 9:47 AM

It was an exhausting morning at our distribution at the church. We struggle with our lines some, a combination of cultural differences with people who desire to scam our system that depends upon trust and working for a common good. Persons shaped by a prioritization of self-interest over what is good, entitlement over thankfulness, tend to throw the whole ethos of the distribution out of whack. Everything becomes more difficult, then.

I was surprised when our friend, John, the private security guard, came into the courtyard as we gathered to pray before opening up the doors for friends to receive their onions, potatoes, crackers, feminine hygiene products, and bread. He demanded to talk to me. I asked him to wait until we prayed, and then went to him. On my way I was met by a young man who said that the check cashing store's manager was threatening to call the city to send police because we were blocking the sidewalks. Sidewalks are crowded at the start -- largely because we have not developed a good way to help the genuinely disabled from those who scam or who then attach themselves to the disabled for their own gain. Occasionally some can move to the street to avoid working their ways through the crowd -- even if it is dangerous with the cars moving only University Avenue. Of course the check cashing store is deeply exploitative of the neighborhood. The thought that it is possible to use the city and police to support their unjust business by making our job more difficult of distributing free food as ordered by Christ shows how hard it is to negotiate through the political structures in which the church is embedded. Our inability, however, to establish an appropriate, just line in the face of these cultural pressures and scamming, provides an excuse to allow the conflict to ensue. Muddling through, finding the creativity, wisdom, and presence necessary to overcome this. Certainly learning Vietnamese would help so that communication could take place easier.

Upon returning home I opened the paper to the "Local" section. I believe one of our friends from downtown was pictured on the front page of the section. It caught my attention. I looked at the headline: "Homeless Count: Prominent figures join mandated annual tally of street population." The article starts out well, describing how carefully people who live on the streets have to prepare for new days. Friday was a day for the federally required "count" of those who live on the streets. The count plays a role in receiving federal funding, etc; locally it also gives goals to city officials to provide a certain number of beds so that they can enforce the "illegal lodging" ordinances against the poor, criminalizing poverty. The article quickly shifts its focus, however: "In recent years, the count has become something ofa celebrity event." The article listed the mayoral candidates involved, as well as federal and state officials, especially the VA.

By taking the VA tact, the article returns to the persons -- and provides an accurate portrayal of the dynamics of living on the streets -- limited income, moving in and out of hotels to make money stretch as far as possible, orderly living conditions that people construct for themselves, how they tear down and build up carefully each day. If one can link living on the streets with military service, it now becomes a social obligation that can be looked upon sympathetically. Without recognizing the irony that to get VA benefits one has to go to La Jolla, the article ended: By 9 a.m., most of the tarp-wrapped carts at Union and A were neatly parked off the sidewalk next to trees. . . . Business people hurried down the sidewalk, holding paper coffee cups and talking on their cellphones. It was another day in downtown San Diego."

The intermix of these complicated networks is with the poor who have no property rights downtown with the poor who sustain marginal property rights in City Heights. If the reporter would have been downtown around supper time, she would have noticed the presence of the church in various forms making sure food was available in various non-bureaucratic but very present forms. There again comes the tension between civic interests via control by the "law" and the church's presence for a common good.

After reading the article, I looked next to the column next to it: "Luxury yacht drops anchor in harbor and raises eyebrows." "Forbes reported four months ago that only three traditional yachts are longer . . . Attessa IV's owner is a construction and mining tycoon whose wealth is estimated by Forbes to be $5 billion. Washington purchased the yacht . . . in 2007 for a reported $50 million. He then poured an estimated $200 million into adding 32 feet, a fifth story, a theater, spa and interior design features that include antique fireplaces and Dale Chihuly art."

I wonder how many others will even notice the irony?

Posted by johnwright at 10:39 AM

With any extra time I am working on a paper that I have committed to give at the Wesleyan Theological Society at the beginning of March. I am trying to use some of the concepts in chapter 2 of Telling God's Story with chapter 2 in my upcoming Postliberal Theology and the Church Catholic to tell a particular story of the sociological pressures that have overdetermined the development of the Wesleyan Theological Society that past thirty years. It has brought me into conversation with what is called "the new sociology of ideas" -- a vibrant and fascinating field of study.

Last weekend I worked through a book by Neil Goss on Richard Rorty: Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). Rorty gave the author access to personal correspondence and Gross combines a biographical study of Rorty with a network/sociological analysis of changes in American culture and the American academic world. It is a fascinating read.

Biographically Gross traces Rorty's educational path from his parents background through his MA thesis at the University of Chicago (written under Charles Hartshorne on metaphysics!) to his PhD program at Yale and his dissertation (again, a metaphysical dissertation). He then follows his immersion in the American analytic tradition in order to gain tenure at Princeton and then his isolation within his department as the analytic tradition become more and more technical and isolated. Finally, he shows how Rorty broke from within the analytic tradition to address analytic/continental philosophy issues. I remember well in graduate school when Rorty called "an end to philosophy" as an academic department and moved to the University of Virginia.

In chapters 9-11, Gross argues: "The argument that I now want to make is that the developments considered in chapters 1-8 reflect not Rorty's idiosyncratic and entirely contingent biographical experiences but the operation of more general social mechanisms and processes that shaped and structured his intellectual life and career. . . we can construct a more theoretically informed explanation for Rorty's moves if we see him, not as a being spinning out ideas on the basis of a transhistorically rational consideration of their objective merits or as someone pushed this way and that by his personality or character, but as a social actor embedded over time in a variety of institutional settings, each imposing specific constraints on his opportunities and choices and influencing him with respect to the formation of his self-understanding, his evaluation of the worthiness of various lines of thought, and ultimately his intellectual output" (p. 234).

What interests me, however, is a process wider process that I think Gross misses because he doesn't see Rorty working within a wider tradition. Rorty, the most prominent American philosopher of the end of the 20th century, was the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, author of Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) -- the prominent social gospel pastor/theologian. As I read Gross's treatment of Rorty I thought of Stanley Hauerwas's argument in A Better Hope that Rauschenbusch's program placed the mission of the church in a mediating position for Rauschenbusch's hope to build the kingdom of God -- the United States and liberal democracy as that which defines "social justice" as a Christian concern. The object of Christian ethics for Rauschenbusch is the United States as American exceptionalism overtakes the church as the end of the witness of the church.

Rauschenbusch's influence remains strong through the social gospel (mediated through the Niebuhr's in mainline American Protestantism and bifurcated in evangelicalism in the on-going controversy between "left-wing" and "right-wing" political action evangelicalism). Connecting Rauschenbusch with Rorty becomes more interesting than Gross indicates (to be fair to Gross, this is not a focus of his treatment) for I think that one sees, over time, the sociological implications of the "social gospel movement" as it moves across generations. While Rauschenbusch used the church and the Christian tradition as a means to legitimate his political agenda within and for the United States, his daughter, Rorty's mother, Winifred, de-churched her "spiritually-based" social/political concerns to move within a cultural productions network for the elite of the American society -- a leftist, American nationalistic artistic/literary program. As Gross shows, Richard's parents, "the Rortys had developed a comprehensive and well-integrated worldview that brought together leftists politics, anti-Communism, and a social ecological perspective, and they actively communicated this worldview to Richard (p. 304).

Rorty abstracted the political program for the United States from its "spirituality-based" presence into an atheistic nationalistic American pragmaticism. Gross shows how basic to Rorty the tradition into which his parents embedded him grew "with the increasing salience to him of the self-concept 'leftist American patriot,' an identity whose original meaning for him was bound up with anti-Communism but that soon came to stand opposed to the identity of cosmopolitan mulitculturalist" (p. 320): "'An unpatriotic left has never achieved anything,' Rorty asserted, suggesting that only patriotism, loosely defined in terms of national pride, is capable of mobilizing mass support for leftist goals" (p. 321).

Several concluding reflections. First, Rorty's career is not intelligible outside of the particularity of the Protestant tradition that produced him -- secularization is Christian accomplishment that is comes from within Christians own positions across time. Second, the social gospel, with its liberal Christological and ecclesiological commitments that separate it from the faith once delivered to the saints, does not provide a sufficiently thorough account of God and all things related to God to sustain itself across time. It always remains parasitic on the church committed to the faith once delivered to the saints, to produce the human and cultural capital to engage people in its social program. Over time, this social program either connects to something embedded within the mainstream of the culture (American exceptionalism) or it dies.

For evangelicals of the right and the left, the story of the sociological genealogy of Richard Rorty stands as an important lesson. One cannot abstract the social witness of the church in its concern for the poor and the de-humanization within the economic systems of the world from a commitment to the Jesus Christ, fully divine, fully human in one person so that Mary is the mother of God and participation in the life of the church through repentance and faith and hope in life eternal. To collapse the supernatural into categories of nature ends in a nihilism of the endless repetition of the new and improved.

Posted by johnwright at 9:05 PM

Today I celebrated Epiphany by grabbing my "Soccer Mom" chair and heading to the church before sunrise. Today was our first Friday distribution. Kathy spent yesterday making numbers that we re-introduced to help prevent a rush to the front of the line at the beginning of the distribution. Instead, I got rushed when I started to hand out the numbers before dawn, people got their numbers and then went home, and we still had a rush to the front of line when we began. We all survived. What is fascinating is how the anxieties to get the food turn into thankfulness when it is received. A particular interesting experience was one of our Ukrainian friends. We talked some. She is an Orthodox Christian. In her broken English she told me "Merry Christmas!" Then she said, "I am going home to cook for 50-60 people for our Christmas meal. Your congregation is helping us celebrate Christmas!" The wonders of the faithfulness of God!! Despite the church's fragmentation at one level, the visible unity of the church catholic still cannot be completely removed from the world because of our sin. Even with different calendars, the birth of Jesus still made this unity materially visible.

I have a new post up at the Colossian Forum blog (www.colossianforum.org/category/blog/. The entry notices the article published in late summer "No Money, No Honey, No Church: The Deinstitutionalization of Religious Life Among the White Working Class" (see www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/Religion_WorkingPaper.pdf). One additional reflection on the piece written there: it seems entirely possible that one unintentional consequence from the church growth, megachurch movements, the Republicanization, and the suburbanization of North American evangelical Christianity was the abandonment of engaging the increasing social and economic diminishing of the middle class in the United States. The de-industrialization and two-tiered economy has not provided resources to sustain congregational life and support those who have been downwardly mobile in the past 30 years. Instead the consumerism of the neo-liberal structures has worked itself out in serial monogamy (with or without marriage), instability for children and alienation from the moral life embraced by the church, and being turned over to the relativism of the culture.

This group had been the mainstay of the Church of the Nazarene in the United States -- as the church embraced the church growth, they absorbed the ethos of the republicanizing, upper-middle class of those who could finance the church in its services. Of course, this led to the academics absorbing the democratic, bohemian bourgeois ethos of the educated elite in opposition to local congregations. Focusing on "personal needs" rather than the Christological center for the church, the last forty years has led to the church merely duplicating the overall cultural contradictions and tensions. The full results, however, are starting to emerge. I recently saw statistics about the loss of youth in the Church of the Nazarene over the last decade -- a statistic that is directly affecting enrollment at Nazarene Universities -- and even seminary.

As the economy continues to bifurcate and the commitment of the church to the laissez-faire economics of the wealthy, the church will continue to lose its witness among the bulk of the population in the United States. Unless economic and institutional means are available to support congregations within the "marginaliy educated" with their economic struggles, the church's witness will continue to have less and less impact among these people.

Still, remember that tomorrow a Russian Orthodox congregation in a "suburb" will celebrate the nativity of Jesus because of food donated through a witness of another congregation from urban San Diego. All sorts of surprises happen, even as the combination of state and market seem to work together to weaken the life of the church in the United States.

Posted by johnwright at 6:59 PM

This morning I have entered the social media world. My adult children have all advised me away from Facebook -- creepy 50 plus year old white male not necessarily in an appropriate place. I have received clearance, however, to enter Google Plus. I have now began my profile. I would like to set up a "pastorjohnwright blog circle" as well as a "Mid-City English Congregation" circle. Given the fact that I am so old and such media is foreign to me, any connections would help me. It feels a bit creepy going looking for "friends" so I'm not sure how to proceed. I do hope that this helps me stay connected to friends, as well as find friends that I didn't know that I have.

This morning I found an interesting a fascinating commentary through calculatedriskblog.com -- a site that Scott Borger pointed out to me as we have and continue to pass through the economics of "the great recession." I have vowed to myself not to waste time following the American faux drama of presidential politics the next year. But as it brings out cultural commentary, I will stay connected.

The piece comes from the New York Times Economix blog and is written by Nancy Forbes (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/overclass-vs-underclass/). I think her observations of how the networks that fight to control the resources of the United States material resources through the "winner-take-all" is very accurate. What I want to point out, however, is the binary bifurcation of the discourse into the "vampire wealthy" and the "slothful poor" in order to try to support their particular network of loyalists and then try to increase the reality of their networks by using the language to ensnare them into their "side." The interesting thing, however, is that the threats constructed by the binary, oppositional dialectic (ueber-rich versus degenerate poor) masks that the categories participate in the same system -- it is only dialectical because deeper commonalities and differences are masked by the reduction of political economics to "rich or poor" as a threat to my existence. In both cases the "rich" and the "poor" become idealistic categories that are allowed to exist as oppositional because of social, material, and personal isolation has occurred from each other. Moreover, Christians are called in the name of a perversion of the faith given to the saints to pick a demon to oppose -- the oppressive, blood sucking rich or the morally degenerate, sexually profligate poor. Christian life is then determined by one's posturing -- picking the right position within the neo-liberal dialect already established in order to exercise one's moral self-righteousness ultimately shown in the privacy of a polling booth.

A pox on absolutizing such a dialectic! Of course there are the oppressive, blood-sucking rich and the morally compromised, slothful poor -- all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. But the issue is a binary network that acts competes only because it eliminates more determinative institutions and allegiances from even consideration. God's judgment will reign down on the church in the United States that allows such a dialectic to be more determinative than the life of particular congregations whose discourse is determined by such a dialectic rather than through centering it on Jesus Christ and the life of the church as witnessed to in the Scriptures and the life of the saints across time.

The refusal of Christians to be personally involved in congregational lives rather than "religious service organizations to meet their own personal needs" allows the construction of such a binary system. Congregations that embed their lives in the worship of the Triune God as revealed in Jesus, where "The Feast of the Holy Name" becomes more important than watching Dick Clark's skin streched to its plastic limits on "New Year's Rockin' Eve" have a chance to show control of the dialectic of rich and poor, master and slave, is not the proper form of human social existence. The binary opposition itself will be undercut if we will exhibit the obedience of faith in the works of devotion and the works of mercy. We can't permit such a system that reduces life to such a dialectic that produces the "right" versus "left" dialectic whereby the elite walk past each other in LaJolla with stern stares because they compete over the control of the networks with each other while never trying to hold a line in order for free food in City Heights.

The Christian life is not about posturing. It is about repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. The problem is never merely "them" but always recognizing that "them" is really "us," that is to say "me." Until we can find ways to complicate this reductive binary through a more determinative social network called the church, not to recruit into the sides of binary, but to live showing that there are deeper forms of social life than this binary construction, we will live in such times that thinks that the world will change with Presidential elections -- all evidence to the contrary absolutely ignored. God has already changed the world -- God became incarnate in Jesus. The issue is whether we will participate in this reality or not.

Posted by johnwright at 8:44 AM