The Conservative Turn...How Did I Get Here?

I'm struggling to remember what it was like to read and contemplate theory. A few years ago I was reading Judith Butler, the Gender Studies maven, as I recall, the conclusions and "unpacking" of gender roles she provided made complete sense in a roundabout way. Now I can't remember why exactly. These thoughts come to me as the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, my, for the time being, intellectual and spiritual preserve, has voted on the liberal side of the sexuality debate. This is partly because the traditionalist have already left the church and have no representation to offer. I guess, as I alluded to in a prior post I was hoping for an eternal stale-mate on this question. I can only assume that my prior life as a professional student would have openly welcomed this decision, but my place and activities have changed from the days of sitting around reading theory. While I don't think I'm necessarily any smarter than those days, I don't think I'm any dumber, or less contemplative about matters either. So the question becomes, how did such a change in thinking occur?

My best approximation: Place determines one's position

The academic environment informs opinion differently than the business world. I'm not thoroughly saturated in the business world, but I didn't want to use a phrase like "real world" as the alternative to the academic environment. I don't think that I have upgraded the milieu in which I live, but I do get different answers than before. So how do we reconcile the different places that we live in and the different prespectives that we garner from our respective places? Absent a universal or public good, how do our competing conceptions of good hold any preference outside of our place?

My father teaches math on the weekends to a group of students who aim to be the first college bound people in their families. He tries to prepare them for success in that environment. Every once in a while a truly talented kid will come through the program. Several years ago one such kid was mentored into applying to Princeton and subsequently received a full ride there. His parents, who did not exist within a framework where going to Princeton is a great achievement could not understand why their kid would need to go all the way to New Jersey, far away from his entire family to go to school when UT Permian Basin was in Odessa. The kid ended up going to UTPB. He could have chosen to go Princeton and followed the narrative of luminaries like Sonia Sotomayor, but he didn't. His place configured success differently than that.

And while we do have the law, which judges narratives as corrupt or not based upon legislation, a gang member might have a fully functioning rational narrative to take someone's life, but society has judged that as an unacceptable narrative, there seems to me few other frameworks with which to judge which narratives are successful and which ones are not.

So in the case of the Episcopalians, we have rival conceptions of Christ's church, informed by differing narratives in which majority rules. This makes me uneasy, I would prefer a framework of doctrine or creeds or authority, of course only when it complies with my perspective, to help adjudicate decisions like these. Even then, such tools are not stable.

It seems all I can do is make the narrative, or the opinions that my place has informed as attractive as possible and try to win as many as possible. A few weeks ago I was comforted by a passage in Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation in which he advocates a more other peoples conception of the good are none of your business attitude: "the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside." This is all well and good, unless child molestation helps one to find God. It also does nothing to alleviate the anxiety I feel about my own positions. I would prefer to be "Right" within my own opinions, whatever that means, but subscribing to the idea that my opinions are the outcome of my place makes that hard to do.

I'll end with a witty quip by Terry Eagleton. Speaking on the adoption of Scientology and New Age Spirituality by celebrities he has this to say: "you wouldn't believe that if you only had $38.00 in the bank". I think that quote can apply to everything I wrote today.

Piety Unbroken by Laughter Spills Blood

I just recently read the graphic novel Watchmen and saw the movie. (If gratuitous violence and sex offend you, stick to the book and avoid the movie. Apart from those excesses, the movie is actually a pretty faithful adaptation.) My wife encouraged me to write a blog post on it, which I’m assuming she did because she got tired of hearing me talk about it all the time and wanted me to redirect it to someone else. So this post is in part an effort to be a more considerate spouse.

(No spoilers anticipated.)

Watchmen rules. It's probably one of my all time favorite works of fiction. It’s a super(anti)hero comic book story about what the world would look like if people in real life traipsed around in costumes taking the law into their own hands. The book has a lot to say about politics, philosophy, ethics and psychology, and Alan Moore designed each of the six main characters to represent six different ways of viewing the world. I’d like to address one issue raised by two of those characters: Rorschach and The Comedian.

Philosophically, the two characters are mirror opposites of each other. Rorschach believes in moral absolutes; the world is comprised of clear-cut distinctions between good and evil. His mask, an inkblot pattern that constantly changes shape, seems to symbolize this. Life is black and white, and while the boundaries between right and wrong continuously flow into and displace each other, blacks and whites absolutely never mix into greys. He is willing to operate as an illegal superhero, savagely torture people who have information he needs and kill evildoers in a variety of colorful ways, as long as it means achieving retributive justice in the end.

The Comedian, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in anything. As you can infer from his name, he thinks life is a joke. He is a superhero because it’s fun, he kills innocent people because he can, he sees no existential difference between the just and the unjust, and he’s a devoted crime fighter even though he thinks the efforts of superheroes are futile in effecting any real change.


What’s interesting is how similar they are when it comes to how they live. Both are merciless killers who will go greater lengths than other superheroes in violently suppressing enemies. They don’t get along well with others, but they do have considerable respect for each other. And they’re both sociopaths. This reminds me of the great lesson learned about the alliance between the Nazis and the Soviets in World War II: the extremes of two opposing ideologies end up having more in common with each other than with anyone in the middle. As Bryce is fond of pointing out, the political spectrum looks more like a horseshoe than a straight line.


I’m interested in the relationship between righteousness and laughter. To me they are like opposing forces: righteousness is very serious, heavy matter, and laughter is as light as air. Righteousness should ground laughter with meaning and laughter should teach righteousness to loosen up a bit. But one with out the other is insanity. Rorschach never laughs and The Comedian never uses “ought” language. They are both sociopaths because they each live out unmixed commitments to either righteousness or laughter.

It might seem counterintuitive, but a life of pure piety is deadly. John Caputo says in Against Ethics, “Piety unbroken by laughter spills blood. Excommunication, extermination, execution, exile, exclusion, extra ecclesia nulla salus est [There is no salvation outside the Church]: that is the outcome of pure piety and of preoccupation with saving powers.” (I will proclaim boldly, without caveat, that Against Ethics is the single most satisfying work of philosophy I have ever read.) We tend to forget that the Spanish Inquisition came out of a time of rekindled interest in Catholic spirituality and holiness, and that purifying Europe of foreign, contaminating elements flowed from the same urge to renew Christianity. It was concomitant with a golden age of Spanish spirituality (St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila). A similar kind of spiritual revival impelled the 12th century Crusaders. So Rorschach’s brutality is not a dismissible symptom of a pathological love of violence—it has its eye on justice itself.

Uninhibited laughter is no less disturbing. The Comedian’s freewheeling, carefree life of hedonistic laughter is the consummate expression of individual autonomy. No kind of external obligation hinders him—his rule of life is auto- (self) nomy (rule) in the strictest sense. Laughter is as light as air, but even the highest mountain can’t stop the wind; it’s frictionless. Balancing his point against purebred piety, Caputo says, “In certain situations free agency should be made to tremble. When agents produce patients, people who suffer, I want to let agency waver in insecurity, to let autonomy and spontaneity and creativity and freedom feel their own murderousness—instead of singing hymns to them”.

I wish there was some account of Jesus laughing in the gospels (I appreciate The Passion of the Christ, if for no other reason than that it showed Jesus making a joke). Even though laughter is not mentioned specifically, I think Jesus’ way of life embodied the right mixture of laughter and piety. He made fun of and publicly embarrassed the Pharisees for taking themselves so seriously, but he also stood in righteous silence before the sardonic laughter of the Roman guards. As for me, most days I can’t decide whether I should put on sackcloth or just laugh. Trying to live out both is a difficult balance to strike. Maybe that’s why there don’t seem to be any good Christian comedians out there.

Does Love Supplant Justice?

For my birthday I took the liberty of ordering two books that have been bouncing around theology blogs for the past month or so. I started Justice: Rights and Wrongs by Nicholas Wolterstorff, which seeks to ground, to the exclusion of any other narratives, the idea of inherent human rights within theism. I'm struggling through it for several reasons, the main being that I'm not adept enough in his fields of interest to know whether he is pulling a narrative over my head or not. This is not a case of the unreliable narrator but a case of the unreliable reader. I have little knowledge with which to judge his claims so I have to read suspiciously lest I be convinced of ideas that I don't want to, or that I'm not supposed to be convinced of. Ahh the life of a lay-anything feels so unrewarding at times.

(For critics who can offer a more authoritative analysis of the book, check out The Immanent Frame blog)

Regardless, I carry on.

The title question arises from this Wolterstorff analysis:

There has long been a powerful strand of thought in the Christian tradition that de-justicizes the New Testament. The New Testament, so it is said, is about love, not about justice. Justice is the theme of the Old Testament; love, the theme of the New. The Christian puts considerations of justice behind her. Love is her motive and guide. Many non-Christians have gone along and accepted that love supplants justice in the New Testament (96).

Obviously he is going to argue that this should not be the case, and I'm not there in his text yet, but I wanted to proffer the question before I get his answer to explore if we have experienced or assumed this to be true. In thinking on this, I keep coming back to a line President Obama said in his Call to Renewal speech in 2006 that seems to reinforce a similar interpretation of the New Testament. Describing a hypothetical Christian nation, Obama asks which scriptures should guide public policy and ends with this thought: "Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?" Now Obama is not advocating such a move, but his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount as so radical that any rights or obligations to defend oneself cannot be justified seems to judge the words of Jesus as having little to do with justice and a whole lot to do with the idea of love. Of course the matter is not settled merely by Obama's interpretation of a single passage in the New Testament, but it serves as one example of how I and others view the relationship between love and justice in the New Testament.

My thoughts on this matter have been shaped by the prevalent idea of the Kenotic Christ as example for the Christian and the Church. The well weathered chapter, Philippians 2 serves as the starting point to find the Kenotic Christ:

"5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross."

I have always related Kenosis, or self-emptying, to a relinquishment of power. With lit crit as my first introduction to theory, I've often viewed the sum of human relations as a vast network of Foucautian power dynamics. If we are to view Christ as the figure who willingly empties oneself of power, and if that is to be our example, than it does appear that a kenotic love supplants justice. (caveat: I play fast and loose with the scriptures)

This is clearly an idea that we cannot build a legal system on. The early Christians recognized that, and faced with the choice of either going down in a kenotic flame or developing a strategy to somehow instill order and justice, chose the latter and thus the saculem, or secular for all of us who don't read Latin was created. (I'm not quite making this up as I go along. Most of this analysis comes from theology books I didn't make adequate notes on.) Or, as Augustine puts it, there is the City of God and the City of Man. They have different ideas of time and different ideas of justice. If we view the Secular as the time before the eschatological event of Christ's return, than we can develop an idea of worldly justice immune to the radical kenosis of Christ. Which is what we kind of have. Although it makes the example of the kenotic Christ a little tough to apply.

Does that subsume the call of Christ into a form of private pietism while Secular Justice becomes the watchword of all humanity? Or does the New Testament have a lot to say about Justice? I get the feeling that a lot of theologians these days feel like secular logic and justification is in the process of collapsing on itself. There are some, like Rowan Williams who argues that Justice and Human Rights can be adequately grounded without the support of Christianity (listen to his fabulous LSE podcast lecture), but for others like the Radical Orthodox troop and Stanley Hauerwas, Secular understandings of Justice cannot substantiate the worth or rights of a human without eschatology. If I'm not totally off base here, I think they suggest that Christians should start infusing the public square with the kenotic ethic of Christ. What that does to Justice I have no idea, but I take it to mean that Christians should use that ethic as an example and follow it to its logical conclusion by adopting non-violent persuasions and learning how to, not fight for them, but die for them.

I realize I've been a bit too free-wheeling in my attempt to describe how I feel how the idea that love supplants justice might be true, or at least still finds some expressions in current theology. In order to adequately flesh this idea out it is clear that I need to do some work and fill in some holes with references and clearer thought, but after all, this is a blog, and I'm not quite there yet. But I do hope I have described a cogent, if not reputable narrative concerning the demands of justice and love. I do ask those of you who wade in the theological waters more deeply than myself to offer advice and admonishment as needed, especially if I have incorrectly characterized some thinkers/texts.