To the extent that liberalism's structures have been undermined or at least shaken by these analyses, the perspicuousness and usefulness of distinctions long assumed -- reason as opposed to faith, evidence as opposed to revelation, inquiry as opposed to obedience, truth as opposed to belief -- have been called into question. And finally (and to return to where we began), the geopolitical events of the past decade and of the past three years especially have re-alerted us to the fact (we always knew it, but as academics we were able to cabin it) that hundreds of millions of people in the world do not observe the distinction between the private and the public or between belief and knowledge, and that it is no longer possible for us to regard such persons as quaintly pre-modern or as the needy recipients of our saving (an ironic word) wisdom...

... When Jacques Derrida died I was called by a reporter who wanted know what would succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy. I answered like a shot: religion.

Firstly, thanks for bringing this debate between Miroslav Volf and Daniel Bell to my attention. Believe it or not, I don't really follow RO stuff. I tend to read Volf for what he is good at, and then people like Bell and Philip Goodchild when I want to think about theological perspectives on economics and their vision of global political order.

In any case, I just downloaded Bell and Volf's exchange in Modern Theology to get a sense of what they're on about. I won't bother getting into too many details as the issues are complex with a lot of baggage attached to them. I would say this though, the difference between them is a good example of the ways in which RO political impulses are largely incompatible or nonsensical to Protestant traditions rooted in the American context. For instance, Volf critiques Bell's understanding of desire as Pelagian. This is an echo of Luther's critique of scholasticism. So too, Volf maintains a separation of ecclesial and state polities, even arguing to some degree that the church should not understand itself as a counter political organization to avoid any attempt at theocratic statecraft. Bell counters of course, but the counters are rooted in a series of reappraisals of premodern sources that don't make much sense if you are rooted in a humanist Reformation tradition as I think Volf is. In other words, how you understand the metaphysics of modernity makes all the difference when appraising the church's response to capitalism today.

I would add, that part of the reason I worked on Barth while researching here with Graham Ward was because Milbank dismisses him too easily as a modern liberal. This leaves Protestant traditions without one of their great voices of the last hundred years. I personally think that if political and social transformation of the church in America is going to take place, then the RO tradition will need to engage much more explicitly and closely their own appraisal of the humanist Reformation tradition. At the moment, there is a dismissive attitude coming through that I find counterproductive. 

It seems to me that Protestant traditions cannot abandon and redress medieval and modern sources quite as radically as Milbank might want without doing so from within some of their key sources. So, the Finnish scholars in Helsinki are really important insofar as they are re-reading Lutheran metaphysics. My work does the same to some degree by comparing Heidegger and Barth's concomitant explications of Luther. Furthermore, Milbank's concession that thinkers like Hamann (the Illuminations series with Blackwells is publishing a book on Hamann soon) offers Protestants a truly radical orthodox voice in the heart of the modern era is inadequate precisely because Hamann is too obscure to connect very directly with Reformation traditions. Personally, I think we have to find key Protestant theologians that the majority of the tradition is familiar with, like Barth, and begin to highlight the issues they were raising and dealing with in a way that helps Protestants come to terms with contemporary political challenges.

In this sense, I am with Volf insofar as I want to engage a modern Reformed discourse in order to challenge and revise capitalism in particular and theological politics in general. But, I am deeply persuaded by Bell that our response to capitalism and the state cannot rest on the kind of pragmatic positivism nor the modern metaphysics upon which such pragmatism finds its justification. Part of why I have enjoyed studying in England s that it has given me some crucial distance to begin to see just how serious the political economic problems are today, and how much more thorough Protestant Americans are going to have to be if they are going to address them.

All that to say that the debate between Volf and Bell seems to me to be a matter of conceptual slippage. Bell has absorbed, by and large, Milbank's read of modernity from scholasticism forward (e.g. his citation of the need to return to a Thomistic participatory ontology). Volf has not. As such, they disagree about a whole host of matters that find sharp focus when they both start to talk about capitalism in particular in the terms inherited from the manner in which they have come to terms with modern metaphysics.

Many people who care about democratic practices and institutions are worried by the power of the religious right in the United States and the rise of militant Islam elsewhere. They fear that democracy will give way to theocracy if these forces triumph,and they want to know how to prevent this from happening. One increasingly popular answer to this question is secularist. It says that striving to minimize the influence of religion on politics is essential to the defense of democracy. My purpose in this essay is to raise doubts about the wisdom of this answer.

What these examples suggest, it seems to me, is that democratic reform may indeed be achievable by democratic means in places where the majority of the citizens are religiously active if citizens are prepared to build coalitions of the right sort. If major reform is going to happen again in the United States, it will probably happen in roughly the same way that it has happened before. It will not happen because of secularism, but in spite of it. And it had better happen, because if it does not, our political life will cease to be democratic in anything but name.

I have been thinking about the recurring nature of the question "What is metaphysics?" in Heidegger's thought for the past few weeks. Found this image to go with Heidegger's essay, "The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics." Here, he develops an analogy between philosophy and a tree, arguing that the tree trunk and branches, or all we see, is what the sciences explore. Greek metaphysics inquired into the roots. But what of the ground the roots grow within? In asking about the ground of those roots Heidegger calls for a kind of Metaphysics of metaphysics, or Ontology of ontology? Heidegger's Metaphysics are puncuated with a question mark because by the end of his philosophy in essays like "Time and Being," he talks about leaving Metaphysics to itself in favor of another path to thinking (Denkweg) altogether.

What is meant by this other kind of post-ontological thinking remains difficult to understand. For instance, in "The Question of Being" Heidegger crosses being out in order to remind th reader not to objectify being. Rather Heidegger wants to inquire into the event of being as it gives existence to beings, i.e. human beings. Derrida, in his "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," comments on this crossing out of being in Heidegger's thought and suggests that Heidegger did not go far enough in his attempt to leave ontological thought behind. Being remains under the sign of the cross, still haunting his philosophy. Derrida's alternative is what he sometimes refers to as a "khora" or a more radical nothing point out of which language and thought might arise.

My considerations as of late concern the logic of Heidegger's thought and the manner of the end of metaphysics which he described. In his essay "The End of Philosophy and the New Task of Thinking," he makes it clear that the end of which he speaks is a completion of metaphysics. In this sense, metaphysics must be fulfilled not abandoned or be completely banished from our thinking. In the end, it is still human beings who are thinking and inquiring into the manner in which being gives us our existence. As such, being must remain under the sign of a cross if only to remind us that although our inquiry must go further than being by looking into the event which arises out of the relation between being and beings, it is nonetheless this event which is under discussion. My contention with Heidegger, like Derrida, is also with the adequacy of the cross which covers being. Unlike Derrida however, I consider the cross to be a necessity insofar as Heidegger's reflections upon the transcendent event of being remained, ultimately, incarnational. That is to say, could it be that a more adequate crossing out of being might allow us to see the event all the more clearly? Could it be that it is precisely here that the early Protestant investigations of Heidegger return him us to Luther's theologia crucis?

Evidently this album finds its inspiration in Spanish churches and artwork such as the cover art of Frida Khalo's painting with the banner Viva la Vida or Long Live Life screaming across it. "Viva la Vida's" lyrics have this revolutionary tone which, I am going to suggest, go beyond the Spanish revolutionary backdrop the album claims for itself. Rather, there is a kind of post-colonial anomie which looks back to an empire "when I ruled the world," when "revolutionaries wait for my head on a silver plate," and "for some reason I can't explain I know St. Peter won't call my name."  Given the backdrop of emancipatory revolution against oppressive powers, I'd like to suggest that the song isn't glorifying colonial power so much as challenging the manner in which colonial power is still fetishized in popular memory. In this regard there are other current artistic events in England which may add further light to this new post-colonial feeling.

There is a gallery exhibition called Unpopular Culture at the De La Warr Pavillion at Bexhill on Sea in London at the moment which was put together by the British artist Grayson Perry. Perry trawled through the catalogue of 8,500 pieces in the British Arts Council Collection where he was "drawn to three distinct categories of art, figurative painting, bronze sculpture and documentary photography." This exhibition struck me insofar as it documents British culture's recent past such as Lowry paintings of urban Manchester and photographs of women wearing head scarfs for fashion rather than as a symbol of religious piety or political insurrection. Perry is as interested in this past for its own place in popular memory, as it is a kind of memorial glance back at the time just past the fall of the British empire.

It seems to me there is a connection between Coldplay's song and Perry's skull. Both attempt to represent the past glories of empire, British and otherwise, with a kind of critical lament that does not degenerate into remorse. Rather, the feeling seems to take more confidence in the current status and position of Great Britain today, and as such looks back at the gone glory days with a willingness to move on with some sense of relief that empire is over. In other words (and I wonder here) the coming generation of English people may be beginning to genuinely move on from the sense of loss that past generations felt after the sun set on their empire. Now, the quest for empire itself is seen as a burden too great or maybe just pointless to try and bear.

It could be the popular post-colonialism I am correlating between Coldplay and Perry's work finds as much inspiration from the shadow of American empire as it does their own historical and social consciousness, but both in their own way announce a post-colonialism which subtly attempts to go beyond a fetishized nostalgia for the glory days.

In one sense, religions have gained a kind of glossy currency in contemporary society. They are chic, sexy and hold potential transcendental states of mind, body and spirit which go beyond what we can experience in any other part of consumer culture. Five years ago advertisements used words like "extra," "ultra" and "supreme." Now, cosmetics advertisements in particular use language like "sublime" and "derma-genesis," and we shop at stores called "All Saints and "Religion." Increasingly, what the advertisements teach us comes after "ultra" is the transcendent offered by religions. Religious language is co-opted to sell the next step in consumer experience. But of course, religion is just a word with a set of associations here. People feel the need for something more, and religion seems to have this potential more-ness. Even that weird little tingly feeling which goes from the back of the neck right down to the back of the knees after you purchase the latest widget can go numb. We need a spiritual experience that touches the inner core of our being. This hunger for reality finds its greatest nexus in the idea of a pilgrimage or religious quest that one can purchase like an all inclusive package holiday. Such is the journey we are taken on in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited.

The Darjeeling Limited is probably one of the best cinema examples of deconstructing religion as of late.  The film follows a trio of brothers played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman on a "spiritual" journey across India. They seek out the Hindu hot spots in an attempt to come to peace, tranquility, and that oh so elusive transcendental state.

Like all Wes Anderson films we are taken into the inner world of their family through carefully written and idiosyncratic dialogue. We begin to feel their utter desperation in the face of their father's death, and lives which have left them numb. The brothers' abnormal quirkiness is accentuated as they literally carry their father's baggage with them around India searching the shallows of their idea of religion - an idea, I would suggest, which is deeply rooted in the dead end consumerism which sees it as what comes next, after, and beyond the "ultra" they were sold five years ago.

There are a number of touching scenes. In one temple the brothers kneel to pray together. they begin quibbling over a belt which one brother borrowed. The control-freakery of the elder brother begins to grate on the nerves of the middle brother. Finally, exasperated, the middle brother gets up to leave. "Where are you going?" "I'm going to pray somewhere else." 

Translated in terms of the Christian tradition, it struck me just then that Jesus's teaching "that whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone" (Mark 11.25), could and maybe should be read that it is impossible to pray if you are at odds with your brother. It is impossible to settle your heart and mind upon God when your brother nags you in your ear. It doesn't really matter if your brother is still speaking, or whether his pesky voice just echoes in your mind. Reconciliation between God and people is inseparable.

The scene just described however, is a good example of what the film explains about religion, and is an insight shared by many university classes which introduce religious studies to new students. As I summed up in one review lecture this year, the whole point of the first few weeks of class was to help you see that what you think you know about religions doesn't relate very well to what people actually practice and do in particular cultural contexts. As it turns out, Christianity is far more colloquial and syncretistic than many Christians would like to admit. So too, this is the case with Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In short, it becomes very difficult to talk about religion. Rather, we can talk about how Christianity is practiced in, say, Manchester, or Seattle and/or begin to note the particularly Protestant influences upon much of global western culture today.

At its worst, the word "religion" is just another shiny simulacrum, a surface without depth or meaning. Like the characters in this film, the term religion floats around without much concrete correlation to what people actually experience and go through in life. It is, as one commentator of religious studies puts it, a reification. Reification is a Marxist term which refers to the way in which words become illusory or ideological. Because the word is no longer meaningfully related to a concrete context or practice it loses its descriptive efficacy and becomes susceptible to ideological illusions. The brothers in the film are consistently confronted with their reified notions of religion that have little impact on the tragedies which haunt their lives. Their lives are meaningless, and the film takes us through their realization that their understanding of religion is also meaningless. 

About the point at which the viewer is starting to become as lost and hopeless as the brothers, one of the most compellingly tragic moments in the film explodes onto the screen. The brothers have been kicked off their train and are walking with their luggage along a river canal. Up ahead they see a group of Indian boys ferrying a raft across the river. Just as they do, the current catches the overburdened raft off balance and threatens to flip it over. This moment is filmed like a singularity. Time slows down. The brothers see the need of the kids on the raft and they instantly spring into action. All their shallow idiocracy falls away in the moment they see the need of the kids struggling against the current. In a kind of chaotic baptism, they leave their baggage behind and dive into the water to save the kids. Two brothers save two kids, but the third brother played by Adrien Brody cannot hang on as the raft flips over. An eternity seems to pass before the third brother arises with the drowned body of the third Indian child. 

The boys and the brothers are separated by language, culture and religion, but they are united in their most basic humanity. Anyone could see the tragedy for what it was. Wes Anderson takes all of us back to the village where the boys came from. The dead little boy is carried into the village by the soaked to the bone Brody whose sorrowful countenance now make perfect sense. There is little dialog, but none is needed. A son has been lost. A father grieves. A village grieves. The brothers stay the night, and are asked to stay for the funeral. Wes Anderson has been flashing us back to the brothers' father's funeral in New York. The brothers' denial of death, reality and their own grief is captured in a scene where they try to pick up the father's Porsche from the repair shop before the funeral. Now, as the brothers find themselves in a funeral in this rural Indian village, the Hindu rituals give more meaning to the little boy's death than anything they experienced before. All their searching for "religion" left them empty. And yet, as they touched down in the human drama of a village's loss of a son, they experienced the heart of religious practices.

Religious traditions live and breath just as people do. At their best they provide the life of a community just as oxygen does to a body. Like it or not, deny it or not, we are all human beings. We are born, we live, we die. What gives meaning to these experiences? What helps us understand and appreciate the significance of a birth? of a death? of all the joys and tragedies in between? The Darjeeling Limited takes its audience to the place where religion becomes real in the lives of people.  

For my own part in the Christian tradition, I found this film poignant and challenging. It reminded me as ever that the reason Jesus remains such a compelling religious figure is precisely because he is human. Christology, and the doctrine of the Trinity, play a vital role in Christian honesty about itself. What makes Jesus so compelling, I would suggest, is the point at which his life and teaching touch down in our lives in concrete practices that give them meaning and purpose. Jesus taught about real life. He lived real life. What good is a God in heaven if he never becomes real here on earth? This question goes beyond the historical cross to the church today. It is a question of the Eucharist. It is a question of baptism. It is a question of the sacramental character of our lives and how God finds his way into them. If there is a prism for ecclesial practice this is it: do those Christian practices which bring about a real and meaning-ful life. If there is any truth to The Darjeeling Limited, then there is a hunger for this in the West today that no fetishized food stuff can fill. People are hungry for a full bodied Christian realism again.

"And so we are left with a simple conundrum. Photographs reveal and they conceal. We know about al-Jamadi’s death because of Sabrina Harman. Without her photographs, his death would likely have been covered up by the C.I.A. and by the military. Yes, at first I believed that Harman was complicit. I believed that she was implicated in al-Jamadi’s death. I was wrong. I, too, was fooled by the smile. Abu Ghraib is all about the blame game. M.P.’s blaming M.I. M.I. blaming the civilian contractors. And everyone blaming the 'bad apples.' Harman didn’t murder al-Jamadi. She provides evidence of a crime, evidence that this was no heart attack victim. She took photographs to show that 'the military is nothing but lies.' At the very least, to show that she had been lied to by her commanding officer. It is now our job to make sure that her photographs are used to prosecute the people truly responsible for al-Jamadi’s death."

Morris's brilliance is his ability to create a sense of gravity around the meaning of Harman's smile.  It's a catchy way to engage the story because of some very basic features of our humanity. For instance, we tend to smile when smiled at. Part of the reason this picture evokes such horror is because we realize Harman is smiling over a corpse. We associate her smile with sadistic pleasure over a death she must surely be responsible for. The picture doesn't give us the context. Rather, it enraptures our basic primal fears and anxieties about death, which, in the end, must find a scape goat. That scapegoat, inevitably, became Ms. Harman. Morris's point is that when you look at the evidence, she and her fellow guards realized what had happened to the detainee that had died. Upon seeing the man's injuries they realized he had not died of a heart attack as they had been told by their superiors. From Harmann's diaries from this time, it is quite clear she was not happy, nor without disgust concerning the lies being propagated by the system at Abu Ghraib.

But the picture remains. Why the smile? Morris brings in a facial expressions expert to prove that it is not genuine joy expressed in the picture, but rather a "say cheese" smile. This is consistent with Harman's own testimony. It is also consistent with they way they went back to take more incriminating evidential pictures of the body which had been beaten to death, then cleaned and covered up in a body bag on ice in a padlocked room.

There are a couple of further points which I'd like to make that Morris comments on, but doesn't draw out their political consequences.

The Power of the Personal Camera

The first concerns the use of the camera at Abu Ghraib. In my Master of Arts dissertation, The Urban God of Surveillance Society, I argued that the surveilance camera distances and fragments insofar as it takes the position of an all seeing deity and demands unique identification markers to single people out and police them. Furthemore, the experience of being under surveillance, as Michel Foucault points out, creates a kind of subjectivity. It shapes the way we think about ourselves in relation to others. The technology was applied to prisoners in the past and still is. Now, however, it is applied to the wealthy insiders who can afford to live in the recently Disneyized city centers and gated communities around the world.

I am not a Luddite. Although I question the uses of surveillance in our cities, and argued for the need to develop communal practices that foster solidarity and community in our cities, I also argued that the personal camera may be a way in which the more sinister aspects of surveillance societies can be challenged. I specifically cited Abu Ghraib in this example as a concentration camp which was radically reversed by the use of a private camera. The surveillance camera fosters distance, fragmentation, and disengagement. However, the camera in the hands of the individual fosters reciprocity, emotion and engagement. The angles are from below as people look at each other and take pictures. They are not above, but at a human level. So too, they are close, detailed and able to capture emotion much better than the surveillance camera typically does. Thus, in the center of a concentration camp like Abu Ghraib, people caught in a dehumanizing system were able to humanize it. 

One concern here was that the personal camera was also used to exploit at Abu Ghraib. Wasn't it just part of the surveillance system in the hands of the guards? This is, in some sense true. But, in fact, as Morris argues, without Ms. Harman's photos the system would have covered up a murder. Furthermore, she was in fact as horrified by what had happened as we all were. She came to realize that a cover up had occured, and they went back to document it. Morris points out how her fake cheesy smile proves it.

Radical Homo Sacer

The second issue I want to raise concerns the term OGA. OGA is a military abbreviation for "Other Government Agencies."  As Morris puts it:

"The C.I.A. and various associated groups are referred to in the military as O.G.A. – Other Government Agencies. Curiously, 'O.G.A.' also refers to prisoners not 'logged' into the system, prisoners without identification numbers. The fact that they are not logged into the system rendered them officially 'not there,' even though they were. Another term captures their status of 'being there' and 'not being there.' They are called 'ghosts' – ghost detainees and ghost interrogators. Many soldiers refer to Swanner’s interrogation of al-Jamadi as 'an O.G.A. interrogating an O.G.A.' – preserving the sinister double anonymity of the scene in the shower room.

This is a really important point. OGA refers both to groups like the CIA, but also to prisoners not logged into the prison, but who are clearly there. Morris interviewed a fellow who came into the prison and had too learn its procedures. Upon asking about detainees not on the books, he was told they did not exist in the prison, i.e. they were not there.

Another way to talk about OGAs is in terms of an extreme form of homo sacer. This is a term Georgio Agamben's develops for the political identity of those who are not given full existential rights as citizens, but nonetheless are still people and are not to be killed. The prisoner in Guantanamo Bay is a kind of homo sacer, insofar as the laws of the United States do not fully apply to them. They can be held without trial, for instance. The prisoners in Abu Ghraib, were, in a sense a kind of homo sacer as well. They existed in a no man's land with limited legal rights such as those ensured by the Geneva Convention as well as military imprisonment laws, but little else. Because of the "state of exception" under which they are held, it becomes possible to begin questioning the degree to which they should be protected as full human beings. They category of citizen becomes a stand in for their existential status more fully. It makes sense then, that questions about torture are often couched in terms such as special treatment. Special treatment for special kinds of people stored in special no-man's-lands. Torture is wrong, but are some forms of interrogation possible for special cases? Killing is still wrong, but does it really apply to the people who don't really exist? Out of the context of Abu Ghraib or Guantanimo Bay, these questions seem absurd. And yet, they become possible precisely because of the political categorizations applied in these circumstances.

The OGAs are, therefore, a kind of radical homo sacer. Because they are not listed on the records, they do not technically exist under whatever law or convention which might apply to them.

What I find interesting about the radical category of the OGA is that it applied both to captor and captive. This seemed to create a kind of biopolitical zone for these OGAs to work and do their business within. No one was supposed to die. This was off limits. And yet, because they all had been given freedom from the constraints of a recorded existence, exploitation and eventual death was sure to occur. Why? Because once the law is gone, all people are left with is the pressure a life can take. All we are left with is the biology, the flesh and bone. There is no intrinsic value of the person given to them by God or a legal system which assumes a law giver. People become things to be exploited.

Questions for Today

The creation of sacred antinomian zones where people don't fully exist is important to pay great attention to for a number of reasons, but two stand out to me at the moment:

Firstly, because the creation of homo sacer is a pattern which we see time and again. When do genocides happen? How does it become possible to destroy an entire race or category of person? The first stage is they have to be given an in-human status. Their existence under the law has to be eroded, changed, and or removed. This is what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany.Those that didn't recognize it quickly enough paid with their lives. It continues to happen however, to refugees around the world. Just this week in South Africa, residents lashed out at refugees flooding in from Zimbabwe and other oppressive regimes and war torn countries. The lesson here is simple, if you live in any society without full rights under the law, you are vulnerable. When the chips are down and people start to look for scapegoats to appease the loss of their job, rising food and fuel prices, etc. foreigners, the not fully real citizens, often pay. It'd be nice if this didn't apply to other western countries as well, but we only need to look at the human trafficking records to note that whole categories of enslaved people are being exploited all around us. The first step to adequate response is to give people, no matter their circumstance, full political and ontological status. Just becuase a person is a prostitute, does not mean that they can be overlooked, discarded, or simply flitered out of the snazzy down town into some seedy suburb nobody cares about.

Secondly, the creation of homo sacer, raises a question concerning the value of a strictly legal conception of rights and citizenship. In other words, when the law becomes the basis for a phantasy deity, a law giver, then once the law is removed from certain people, they lose their existential value. No God can save them. Without the protection of the law, people don't fully exist. It's like when you go to get a government certificate like a passport or driver's license and you are asked to provide identification. You don't have it because you are there to get it. Suppose your house burned down and you lost all identification and couldn't remember you proper numbers? You'd have a serious problem of existence at that point. Could you get health care? Could you hold your neighbor accountable if you have no legal status of your own? In other words, you become the immigrant, the homo sacer. It's important to imagine because I think most of us consider our existence to be self grounded. However, legally and politically it may not be. At least, this is a question that is raised by events at Abu Ghraib, and, as well, whenever immigrants are exploited or abused around the world. Is the law enough? Or do we, in the end, need a more thoroughgoing account of the intrinsic value of the human person that goes beyond their legal status? How do we ensure that such value is accounted for in our legal systems?

Certainly, we can assume that whenever homo sacer is created in our societies, it should be challenged and questioned before the consequences of such a status are lived out as they inevitably will be. But so too, we must be careful not to become complacent with the fiction that the law alone can protect us. Laws are made precisely because they have already been broken. They are retrospective of our account of the human conditions of the day. What is needed therefore, is an account of human existence which is grounded irregardless of what a person does or where they are located in any particular legal system, be it Abu Ghraib, South Africa, or, in our own cities and suburbs.

Lastly, no doctoral dissertation is written alone. I have my wife, first and foremost to thank for her love and willingness to support a calling which began in our pastoral ministry together in Seattle. Truly, “let her works praise her in the city gates” (Proverbs 31.31). As well, thanks are due to our parents whose financial support and encouragement proved invaluable during our years in Manchester. At its heart, this dissertation is the result of an academic adventure, and no one has been more responsible for my progress in that regard then Professor Graham Ward. Thinking is a practice which requires good guidance. Graham is one such guide. I must thank Universities UK for the Overseas Research Scholarship and the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester for their financial support during my research. So too, the Religions and Theology Subject Area provided vital financial assistance which allowed me to present papers at a number of important conferences relevant to my work. To Professor George Brooke, Dr. Todd Klutz, Dr. Jeremy Gregory, Dr. David Law, and last but not least Dr. Michael Hoelzl, thank you for all the pints, corridor conversations and encouragement you have given me over my time in Manchester.

In any case, they are very snazzy and, unlike the paper edition, there's no need to hire a sherpa when checking them out of the library.

The difficulty the Protestant church now faces today, is what difference there is between its symbols and say, the M from McDonalds or the L from Lexus or the N from Nordstroms. Are the symbols of the Protestant church just some of many in a vast network of cultural simulacra?

It seems to me Jesus spoke directly to this confusion in John's account of the feeding of the five thousand. The crowd responds to Jesus's miracle with "supersize me." They wanted Jesus to be the McDonaldization of their religious tradition, feeding their stomaches. Jesus responds with one of John's many "I am" statements. "I am the bread of life." In essence, Jesus tells them that there is a hole within them, a desire so empty, so profound and pervasive, that no bread can fulfil it. They need a restoration to wholeness that goes well beyond mere bread alone. They needed the very presence of Christ himself to fill them and redeem them.

In Luther's debate with Zwingli, he kept drawing attention to Christ's words at the last supper, "This is my body." For Luther, the is in that statement means something more than a mere symbolic representation. There is a call to remember Christ symbolically, but something more than a symbol is going on here. This is not mere bread and wine for the disciples. This is Christ himself. At one point, Luther wrote Jesus's words in chalk upon the table he and Zwingli were debating over. Eventually Luther became so exasperated with Zwingli he  would just point to the word "is" whenever Zwingli would make his arguments.

Do Christians believe they are eating Christ literally? No. Even the documents of Vatican II teach that the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic event is a mystery. But within this mystery is an ontological necessity for our times today. It is not enough to symbolize Christ in bread and wine. We today are ready to return to Christ's teaching at the feeding of the five thousand for the hunger inside us, is ultimately an ontological one, a lack so pervasive the nature of our very existence is at stake.

For me, it seems that much of my work over the past four years in my doctoral research has been an attempt to re-carve Luther's "is" back onto the table. It is vital that Protestant Christians in particular learn to affirm the real presence of Christ in more than just the preached Word, or the sung hymns. It is not enough to say that God inhabits the praises of his people, or that God spoke to us through the sermon. We must learn to articulate more clearly what we mean by this presence, and articulate how it is that we can say that Christ can be present for us in the utter mystery of the Eucharist. The "is" in Jesus's statement, "this is my body," is more than a metaphor and it goes beyond the simulacra. This, it seems to me, is a deeply Protestant notion rooted in some of the Reformation's seminal thinkers. It is as relevant to us today as it was at that Castle in Marburg so many centuries ago.

Though inconvenient, this conception of truth demands that we seek, ask and knock, precisely because we have a healthy skepticism of our own ability to know. Christian doubt can be consistent with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment criticisms of human reason, but also hopeful that even amidst the obscurity, the truth does come to us in parts.  

Seeking the truth in the Christian tradition begins and ends in humility. We seek, but the truth ultimately has to be revealed to us. In Luther's words: deus absconditus, deus revelatus. We look to the cross and all we see is a bloody crucified man. God is hidden from us there. And yet, this is precisely where Christians are taught that God is revealed.

Today, there are many stories about Jesus, and many ways in which he is caught up in religious packages that are easy to dismiss. Jesus can be found on Christian broadcasting channels like TBN, but he is also obscured by them. Jesus is a good teacher, but there is more to him than that. Pilate gives us a good example to follow. Jesus is presented to him as a criminal. Pilate doesn't just take the religious leaders' word for it. He inquires himself and although he doesn't understand fully just who Jesus is, his encounter with Christ did lead to the truth in part: "I find no case against this man." The real question John poses is, having gained this truth, would Pilate do the truth? That is the tragedy of John's account of Jesus's trial. Pilate knew enough, but in the end it was going to be his life or Jesus's. The only person in the story willing to pay the ultimate price the truth demanded that day was Jesus.

My talk seemed to be well received, and you can download an mp3 of the 9am gathering by clicking here. The PowerPoint I used is attached below. The image here is my version of an image created by a local Manchester artist named Micah Purnell who made the cards I had handed out before the gathering.

My Side of This Story

My wife and I have lived in Manchester, England for the past five years so we don't get to see our family very often. However, my sister is one of the social glues which has kept me in touch with folks back home. The combination of her layovers in airport terminals and extra minutes on her cell phone package has meant that I have received a series of random phone calls where we've been able to catch up on family gossip and chat about  life. At some point (I don't recall just when) she mentioned she had been on a date with some guy and it wasn't half bad. Now this is strange. My sister is, how do you put this, extremely picky with men. She's mentioned that she'd been on a few dates before with some great guys on paper, but they got nowhere with her. So I considered it interesting that she was going on a second date with someone.

About a month later, another call and we go through the routine: how's family, what are you reading, any good films lately, and then a name: Roger. Evidently she's been seeing this Roger fellow and is almost impressed with him. Of course that's not enough for my sister though. I get the impression that she's been asking all sorts of gut wrenching questions to try and explode the myth that marriable men still exist. As it turns out, they had been spending long hours talking through their lives, their tastes, their beliefs, their values, their family and medical histories, etc. Another few weeks go by and I get an email with pictures of Roger, with a note something to the effect of, "he doesn't look half bad does he?"  Now I thought, hmm. Is she really interested in this guy or what? I'm getting pictures, but she's still quite hesitant.

Then things changed. I don't know when or how really. I still got random calls from Char, but now there was little talk of family and books. Our conversations had become long monological odes to this Roger fellow. I hadn't realized before then, but all of a sudden the guy wears his underwear outside his trousers. It's not just Roger, its "ROGER," cape flowing in the wind.

I have to admit, this is just my side of the story, distanced by the Atlantic Ocean and my own idiosyncratic way of interpreting Char's phone calls. But to be honest, it tracks pretty well with the Hollywood chick flick doesn't it? Boy meets girl, girl asks lots of persnickety questions, they play hard to get with each other, but eventually they fall in love.

Falling in Love

This term, "fall in love," is quite interesting to me. I half asked Char whether she'd tripped? Did she mean to? Was she looking where she was going? The answer to all these questions was yes. But we still reserve this kind of "falling in love" language for the early stages of a relationship. We're not always "in love" are we? We tend to reserve this "falling in love" language for the precarious part of new relationships. It's exciting, your stomach may be in knots at times, you don't eat, you spend long, late night hours talking about the romantic films and the nature of toast sweat. Socrates talked about this stage of love at one point in his conversation with a fellow named Phaedrus as a kind of disease. It takes hold of you like the flu and, when you think about it, he's kind of right. I often joked with Char about her sickness. But this was a disease she quite liked.

Loving Someone for the Rest of Your Life

So, Roger and Char fell in love. But now they're here with their families committing themselves to each other in marriage. Often when it comes to marriage however, our language about love changes.  In marriage ceremonies we say something to the effect of "I'm going to love you for the rest of my life." When we say we're going to love someone it can easily imply that it's something we have to give. Love is something we can apply to others. We sometimes forget that moment where we tripped to fall in love. We start to assume that the gooey lovey madness is a permanent  state, or at least it should be. It's almost like our language at this point gives the impression that love is something inside us like adrenaline or dopamine. It's a state of the brain or heart. We start to think love is something we own. Love is something we keep and contain to give to others. The relationship is stable, and now love is stable too. I wonder though, if it might make sense to try and reconcile this way of talking about love in marriage, with our earlier language of "falling in love."  I wonder if we think about it for a few minutes if actually, these two loves are the same.

The Mundanity of Marriage

I know we say we are going to love our spouses for the rest of our lives, but what does this really amount to? I want to suggest that what we actually do to express love in marriage is often rather mundane. In any other circumstance it wouldn't have anything to do with love whatsoever.

Love is to take out the trash. It’s to do the dishes. It’s to save the last cookie, with just enough milk for dipping. Love is to roll the toilet paper over instead of under. It’s to lift the toilet seat into its full upright position before take off. It’s to squeeze the toothpaste from the end (or buy a pump). It’s to give a foot rub when your wrists are killing you. It’s to write that little note and post-it on the mirror. "I love you. I think the world of you. You're brilliant, beautiful, true, and my best friend in all the world. I’ll be thinking of you today.Ps. Pick up your frickin' socks before leaving the bedroom."

But all these little mundane acts aren't necessarily love are they? A foot rub from the podiatrist is just another medical bill. When the garbage man picks up the trash it's just public service. We’re thankful for these acts,  but they're not quite love. In dating, you may love someone, but they don’t necessarily love you back. You buy flowers, you write notes, you share a meal together, but you can’t force someone to love you. These acts may be motivated by your own feelings of love, but they don't enact love between two people. That's something different. That's something that we rightly refer to as "falling in love."

What I’d like to suggest is that you can’t force love in marriage either. You can’t just take it for granted that it’s always going to be there. All you can do is create the context where it's easy to trip. Loving someone is like setting a bunch of traps. It’s about tripping each other up and hoping that they’ll fall for you again and again. That's what I think saying you're going to love someone for the rest of your life really means. I'm gonna do all those little things that you, my spouse and partner in life, like to trip over. 

Love Doesn't Change

Personally, I don't think love changes when we get married. Love is always something beyond ourselves. It’s always something we have to fall into. In the end, we have to accept that love is not something we can take hold of.  Love takes hold of us. This is also why we can say love never dies. It's why falling out of love isn't the end of love. All marriages go through rough times. But the bond of love that we speak of in marriage goes beyond the two people bound in that contract. It is precisely because love is something outside ourselves, outside marriage, beyond both people, that it is something that we can fall into again and again.

This understanding of love is deeply related to the way in which the Christian tradition speaks of love. John puts it best in one of his letters to the early church, "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love" (1 John 4.8). Notice that John doesn't say that love is God. The direction of the statement is not from us to God, but from God to us. John doesn't want us to confuse that gooey love feeling with God, nor does he want us to associate something within us that we own with God. No, for Christians, we never get to own God. Christian life is about acknowledging the truth that God owns us.

God is eternal and therefore love is eternal. God is true, and therefore love is true. God is good and therefore love is good. God is holy and therefore love is holy. And all this, this love which is eternal, true, good, and holy is something which takes hold of us as we trip on those little mundane acts which we do for each other. Isn’t it amazing that all the little things that we do for each other in all their mundanity and greatness can become something more when we trip over them and fall into love? Isn't it amazing that this happens to us whether our relationship is six months or sixty years old?

Keep Tripping Each Other Up 

Marriage can be mundane, and comfortable, and that's all good. But for me at least, I've come to think that all the mundanity of marriage adds up to something much, much more. There are things that I can do that my wife loves to trip over. Writing notes, a back rub, these aren't love, but they create the context where she likes to fall in love with me again and again. But the thing is, I keep learning things she likes. I've been married ten years this July and there are always new things that I learn about - new little mundane things to do to keep fostering a context where falling in love is easy. I've come to think that it's really crucial to look for those little games we can play to trip each other up, to encourage each other to fall in love. It can be work, but it can also be amazing.

Marriage can be scary. We all don't feel love all the time. There are dark parts of any marriage, because there are dark parts of ourselves which inevitably come out. As Luther said, marriage is the school for our characters. But even when our love seems gone, we can always hope that love will return once again precisely because it is beyond ourselves.

Really, this understanding of love goes for all of us. Whether we’ve been married for years or are still looking for that right person to trip over or to trip up. Love is always something to fall into. Loving someone is really about doing those little mundane things that our spouses like to trip over. But love is ultimately something which we always recognize is beyond ourselves, which takes hold of us and makes our relationships into something much, much more.

Barbie and I have a prayer we’ve prayed since we were first dating. Maybe you'll find it helpful. "Lord, thank you for who you are, a God of grace, peace, mercy and love. Lord, be our love. Be our love Lord God."