Curtiss at Hector Rottweiler is signing off. Curtiss was one of the first bloggers I met when I started, and his blog encouraged me that this might be a worthwhile medium after all. Curtiss, I salue you, and I look forward to your next incarnation.
In his last post, Curtiss quotes Mike at Vitia to explain his departure:
Under empire, rhetoric cannot look to the future, and can exist in the present only as hypothesis and speculation. Its most significant role is in rewriting the past to suit the whims of power — but in this, it need convince no one, because of the very fact of power. It is nothing but an ornament, a diversion, a way for personal pride to pass the time. (emphasis mine)
The early Christians found a new rhetoric, and those of us who are not Christians should not underestimate its power. (Or, rather, what its power was). In place of “Caesar is Lord” they lifted up cries of “Jesus is Lord.” They found a radical cry from a new site of power: a backwater prophet killed by the arm of Caesar. They found power not under the Empire but in the shared life (koinonia) of the ekklesia, the assembly of followers of the Anointed One.
It was not long (three centuries?) before Caesar discovered the counter to this threatening rhetoric: adopt it as his own. But it was more than a counter: now Caesar could claim he ruled not simply for Empire but for the purposes of the Nazarene. The ekklesia, founded in opposition to the logic of Empire, would now enjoy the favors of Caesar.
I have not found in Christianity any but the most isolated examples of koinonia since Caesar took up the ekklesia’s rhetoric. Mere hints, really. Or projects doomed from the outset by an ambitious utopianism that was not the Nazarene’s own. Caesar will always topple alternative Empires (if they do not topple him and become Caesars themselves). What Caesar cannot topple is unEmpire, nonEmpire. His tools don’t cut that way.
Hey. Good thoughts.
I don’t think you understand exactly what he’s getting at. You are getting half the equation – the suffering of God which identifies and envelopes human suffering – but without the crucial element of the resurrection. Therefore, though God can sympathize and identify with human suffering, he cannot do anything about it. He cannot offer any victory or promise of victory, nor can he suggest any real solution. The resurrection is God’s Yes! to the No! of suffering and death, so that we who live in him will also reign with him. There is nothing in secularism that can promise this kind of overturning. Everything is but a balance between this and that. One’s suffering is meaningless against the vast tapestry of the impartial and cold universe. That is why Moltmann can say that those whose hope derives from the resurrection of Christ have a hope unlike any other. It is not dependent upon human beings, or the natural courses of the physical world, but upon the power of God who is able to resurrect the dead and to make living something from nihil nothingness.
Thom,
Good to hear from you. I ended up being able to come to the conference after all. Wish we could have got together.
There is nothing in secularism that can promise this kind of overturning. Everything is but a balance between this and that. One’s suffering is meaningless against the vast tapestry of the impartial and cold universe.
But I’m not relying upon secularism. I’m coming from Taoism, for instance. I guess I fail to see why “natural processes” aren’t a ground of hope. To me, the workings of Tao are endlessly meaningful, and it perplexes me that others don’t find them full enough.
I’m not particularly interested in being resurrected myself, so that whole symbolism is lost on me. I also don’t believe in nihil emptiness — I’m much more partial to sunyata emptiness.
So I suppose my point is that you have to swallow the whole Christian story for Moltmann’s point about “uncertain and unnamed hope” to gel. I reject the Christian story, so it feels to me like he’s just preaching to the choir.