The Case for Christian Anarchism - part IV

The revelation of the church, the revelation to the aesthete

4. The Bible has nothing to say to the secular world. It could not because they do not understand the notion that faith precedes ethics, metaphysics, and all other Christian thought. To speak as a Christian is to speak from faith as a fact; to speak as a Christian in secular terms is to speak from a position which is not Christian.

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Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you; but rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ’s sufferings, that when His glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy. (1 Peter 4:13-14)

We have made steps to propose a theory of ecclesiology which rejects our basic opposition to arbitrary collapsed “not yet”—”already” dialectics, overeager abolitionism, or pale-faced quietism. As is so often the case here, my reader, I have no intention of painting myself as a Reformer or a genius who can right the wrongs of the church and stand glorious, triumphant over the wreckage that we tear down—therefore, we shouldn’t mistake this point to be when we declare that the church should be razed to the ground or that the priests should be paraded through the street. No, my reader, we attempt to construct our new world in the shell of the old not because it is rotted to the core, but rather because the flower of the ideal must emerge from the dead matter of the earth. If God is as we say He is, then there is no excuse for those who recognise what they ought to do but don't because the world is not there to clap in approval; the ought weighs on us, the ought is true qua existence-communication, even in times when it appears there is no gain.

It will not be enough to lay out an analytical expression of the Bible’s opposition to the world. Not only is this uninteresting for the one without eyes to see, but it actively works against the interest of the disbeliever’s guiding principle—the demand for a display of power. In that sense, if we are ever to show that the Bible and the message of Christ it communicates offers us an alternative way of being, then we must not begin with the navel-gazing of abstracted metaphysics (best reserved for serious publications) and instead begin with a doing. And, through that doing, we can unearth our responsibility to God, to Christ’s sacrifice, to ourselves, and—after all the offence is cleared away—the salvation of our enemies.¹

The Function of the Church

In at least some sense, the world that we live in, with its rather indelicate understanding of how we assess what any particular thing is or becomes, cannot recognise the church. It can be difficult to imagine, in a world which demands the aesthetic experience of any particular thing in order to acknowledge that it is indeed there, that there could be anything worth doing if there is not only a publicly-available, immediate reward for doing it, but believing that it is there at all. While church buildings and cathedrals make for impressive viewing, testaments to the ingenuity and skill with which those responsible for them possessed, they are not, ultimately, the church. They are a place where the church can go, can congregate together, in order to find God, strengthen faith, and offer penance as a collective of individuals—in short, there is a subjective side to the church, something only recognisable to the one who is changed by Christ and desires to grow holier in that change. The notion of subjectivity is unimportant to the world, however, something better suited for teary-eyed dramas and sentimental gift cards than serious thought; the idea of anything hidden from us, something that we are not immediately granted access to but rather met first with a “no!”—unthinkable.

In some sense, learning to breathe must precede learning to live.

However, this is the church that you and I, my reader, were called to and chose to turn to: the invisible church that constitutes the Body of Christ, almost comically hidden in plain sight. It is not, as the world demands, a matter of the number of pews or “the Crowd” that fills them²; to be called and to answer the call to the Body of Christ is not a matter of identitarian resource management, where the nature and number of Christians is determined solely by a declaration and not by the response to a proclamation.

In an age that wholeheartedly prefers the a posteriori ahead of any other option—if, indeed, it occurs to this age that another mode of knowledge might be possible—the first port of call is to assert the Father’s hiddenness and those protected under the wing of His Son, the invisibility of this mission. “No!”, we should respond, the Christian is not an identitarian self-creature that you can select from the masses, but a form that applies itself to being—with the stark implication that there may have only ever been and may only ever be one genuine Christian, one single individual in the entire history of creation, that rose to that formidable height. Or, to put it another way, Christian faith is not something that I decide for myself any more than I decide my salvation—it is something that conforms to a prototype³. For that reason, making a clear distinction between “the-church-as-it-ought-to-be” and “the-church-in-reality-here” is the first step towards making a functional theory of the church. In that sense, the “existence-communication” sets the τέλος for where we sojourn and the mode by which we answer, contra the world’s demands for riches, for fame, for some kind of aesthetic success of some kind, is the Lord reaching into time and filling it with the fullness of eternity before us⁴—or, in short, we must find what God does, not merely what the professor hands us in the pro forma.

The Christian, or, at least, the one striving to become Christian, strives to become a criminal in this world⁵, a traitor to his country and an antagonist to “the ethical”; the Christian can only become a Christian by entering into the Body of Christ qua learning to follow Christ ahead of serving the world. There is an a priori conception of what it means to living Christianly, but not a mold that we must fit—no, a transformation of the individual and one that he must freely fit. On the path to this, the church, as the community of believers, can offer two modes for the individual to become an individual—and the world recognises neither of them.

The Loneliness of Confession

I am aware that this turn might strike you as odd, my reader: in vindicating the Melancholic Dane in his apparent radical expression of pneumatic heroism, we start again back at the single individual within the given church reality. More so than that, we turn the individual into their solipsistic self-reflection that forces the individual before God—the confession of sin.

Hannay notes that, in confession, we lose our sense of being a particularly special individual and become simple and relatable to others, like a child⁶—the particular folds into the universal, by recognising the error made in the deliberation between the lowly creature and the “negative concept” of perfection that hangs over the individual⁷. This process, when taken with the “purity of heart” that allows proper self-reflection which produces change in the world of the one who confesses, is a function that allows the anti-liberal identification of one’s own imperfection, the recognition of failures that can be changed, and “closing in” of self-reflection that allows for the flower of the self to appear. Confession brings with it the way to see what omniscience means—not a detached, professorial assessment of the “maximal knowledge objects that can be assigned a truth value” but, rather, the unveiling that there is One from Whom we can keep no secrets⁸.

In this moment of unveiling, so rare that this “godly stillness” should rip through the bustling busyness of the day-to-day life⁹, you, my reader, can find the “floor” on which you shall rest your feet. The God-relationship, found in that burning recognition that I am seen and can see, starts from the position that the individual is reduced to nothing against the perfection of Christ—the humble admission that I have sinned, dear Lord, starts the function of the church. In the blessedness of falling upon one’s knees¹⁰, of admitting that a man has no true idea of how concealed a corruption his sin is and that he must be informed of this by a revelation¹¹, and reminds us that “[Christ] actually required that his followers have such inwardness that confession follows of itself—when it is required. The same inwardness can also be silent and just as pleasing to God, but this same true inwardness surely cannot be silent—when confession is required.”¹² Against the kerygma, understood in the imitatio Christi, the individual is reduced to the sinner before the Lord that they already were; the act of confession will force the air out of your lungs, which seems to become all the more laborious when we try to assert control over ourselves as if we were the very ground on which we stand and not merely stewards of something grander¹³:

“This difference alone: what I have to say requires quiet almost like that of an individual in the confessional – what the others say is better off the more thousands there are to hear.”¹⁴

We have breathed in, my reader—the church, at its most basic, provides a place for breathing in. Under the weight of the world, against the impossibilities which we are called to face, over against the divine intercession to draw away our pretensions that we, those in constant danger of becoming “the Crowd”, could possibly bring about change by the sweat of our brows and the blood on our hands, the Spirit presses down by and through the individual: you must learn to breathe in, you must learn to become nothing. “It is an experience that swallows the human being whole. To become nothing in the face of society is the greatest danger; to become nothing in the face of a God is the beginning of salvation.”¹⁵ The confession draws us out into the unveiled, stops us short in reminding that thou shalt not go beyond¹⁶—the task you have been assigned is eternal, therefore you should not expect to complete it in half a lifetime.

Note, my reader, that we don’t need to commit ourselves to a particular traditional approach to confession. However, there is a certain benefit of the Catholic, Lutheran, or old Methodist approach to confessing before the other that brings us from a potentially irrigorous approach to penance: while it is true that we are, in the end, alone before God, this charge for the individual in this life is a tall order.

The Sociality of Communion

Of course, we have no desire to leave this individual out over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep”¹⁷. While Christians since Paul have understood that while we are judged individually by God, the inherent sociality of the Trinity, of God’s creative act, and Christ’s presentation of the prototype make this an impossible solution. A Christian without a church around him has failed to understand the gospel at all:

“Even if a person is willing to share [meddele] his earthly goods, at every moment in which he is occupied with acquiring them or is engrossed in possessing them, he is selfish, just as that is which he possesses or acquires. Not so with the goods of the spirit. In its concept, the good of the spirit is communication [Meddelelse], its possession merciful [miskundelig], in itself communication.”¹⁸

From the place of confession, where the individual, reduced to a child before the Father, emerges alive in the cold air of the new day, we find communion. Inherent in the act of turning to Christ, of receiving Him not only alongside His body and His blood but also within and through Him, we find that lift of Christ¹⁹ that allows one to replicate miracles: not only can we rise out from under the Lord Who presses down on the throat of the sinner with the “no!” of divine intercession, but, through the “yes!” that allows the potentiality for the new creature to walk out the “70,000 fathoms of the deep”—like a foal from its mother, like the Christian from “the Old Adam”²⁰. In the meeting of Christians, those striving to become holy, holy, holy, with their Saviour, the ribcage expands, the air rushes back in, and the academic loses his grasp on the term omnipotence. It does not and has never meant a matter of assigning truth values to the propositions that God could turn from true to false or false to true: omnipotence is, first, the capability to create all that we see around us, glorious beyond our wildest imaginations and filled with that we could possibility need to find that holy manna; but, second and more importantly, it is the power to both make something free and then step out of the way²¹—to “invite onto Him”, to call forth the individual, a child now once again filled with the sweet air of life-giving strength, to become once again like a child, to become a self. In joining with Christ, through His mediation to the Father, we do not so much as understand the Lord but renew our relationship—we undergo repetition.

“The task for me has been to transform the individual and make the individual able to believe in the tradition. And so instead of theology being a set of conceptual accommodations [to special interests] it looked to me as if theology should have a disciplining effect on the individual... to make belief in God, judgments and confidence in one's own self plausible through old-fashioned things like repentance, faith, hope, love.”²²

Against collectivism or individualism in all its iterations, S. K. and those who have followed in his footprints have lead us to a new path that we can walk—by learning to trust the Word in this world and learning to cast off the professor’s admiration for God in exchange for fear and trembling, we are not collectives nor individuals but rather becoming both individual and communal at once, becoming both particular and universal in this world. Together, but separated by the presence of Christ, we can learn to become Christians in this world by virtue of our continued, historical existence as those who have turned to God in the pursuit of the good. Faithfulness, not effectiveness becomes the message of the church²³; first and foremost, one’s rightness with God through the neighbour and the collective’s rightness with God through their brethren are protected from collapsing into the nihilism of the world, “the Crowd”, and maintains itself not as a quietist opposition to impossible challenges of secularity but as an alternative way of living that exists in the tension²⁴. Despite the pressure from the world, Christ offers us an alternative: “Christianity means precisely this: in self-concern to develop an indifference towards externals.”²⁵

Even in a world that knows no good, the church has a duty—not as a collective unit, but as a congregation of individuals pursuing one τέλος—to be the church in the freedom that communion offers; first, with Christ, and then, with one another. The “one another” behaviours²⁶ in scripture draw an image of a world that is not “not yet”, but rather “already” possible and has always been possible. The Eternal Miracle of Pentecost has occurred in history, my reader—this is possible because it has been done time and time again.²⁷ Learning to become a self requires learning to believe, to sojourn, as if anyone could possibly believe that, with God, all things are possible (Matthew 19:26); learning to become a self amongst selves requires learning to believe, independently and together, to sojourn, as if anyone could possibly believe that, with God, it is truly possible that we, friends, shall love one another (1 John 4:7). It is impossible, unthinkable—yet it has already, always already happened.

“Crushing, nameless anxiety: that is the soil of the impossible, the soil in which the impossible grows, the queue that repetition waits for from off stage. Enter: repetition—this time, one would hope, in the final act of a serious drama, not a farce.”²⁸

Learning to Breathe

Through confession and communion, the individual learns that the soul “contracts and expands”—one learns to breathe before God.²⁹ The dialectical interplay of the law and the gospel, drawing the individual into self-awareness until the point of the extraordinarius’ panicked self-recognition and then opening up the “drawing unto Him” that releases the individual from the world’s expectations for how he should interact with the God, with the other, and with “the Crowd”. In this dialectic, the individual is and, from this position, the individual is within the collective too—aware of his charge, aware of his neighbour, aware of the love of Christ.

“In community, the individual is; the individual is dialectically decisive as prius in order to form community; and in community the qualitative individual is essential and can at any instant become higher than “the community,” namely, as soon as “the others” fall away from the idea [namely, the constituting commitment of the ekklesia].”³⁰

These are not novel solutions in the history of the church, but they be novel solutions for you, my reader. So that you may breathe when the panciked called comes in and attempts to draw you, in that tender moment when the petals roll back and the beauty of faith is revealed to the world in its fragility, so that you might find your feet rising up over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep” and—somehow, against all reason, against all expectation—find your walking on water, so that you might resist “the world” just long enough to find your way back to Christ—that is something worth doing. We would learn not to choose what the world demands of us and to proceed as if we really believed that we were “new creatures” who have heard the existence-communication in the God-relationship.

Here, in the state of exception, where particularity and universality co-exist and are co-dependent, the individual finds the freedom of Christ: in the interplay of the “infinite qualitative difference”, where transcendence obliterates any possible claim to power and superiority that the other could wield over the individual, there is no possible way in which the over-determining nature of the state can impose upon the individual³¹. In the meeting of the positive affirmation of faith in the life of the believer and the negative reaction at the hands of the sovereign’s arms, the state’s attempt to impose negation in accordance with its own value can only find fresh air when the individual does not value what it is told to—when the individual meets the power of the state with indifference³², when it refuses to serve two masters, when the state of exception is not a matter of treading water in the crashing waves but learning to breathe.

And, when one learns to breathe, faith becomes stated as a fact. That, the world will never understand and will never forgive.

Discipline in Breathing

There is an annoying tendency, in Christian and non-Christian circles alike, to declare our actions, no matter how small, as apparently revolutionary in a way that “really matters”. S. K. himself battled against the liberalizing tendencies, themselves mere integrationism and reductionism, of Grundtvig³³, Schleiermacher³⁴, and Mynster³⁵. Something as small as friendship or charity can be seen as an act which sets the whole world against itself, the as of yet unrecognised Archimedean point around which we—you, I and, “the Crowd”—shall turn the earth upon an axis that we have chosen. No, my reader, that’s not my intention; in fact, I would suggest that such notions have completely sold out both the offensive message of Christ and the message of the well-meaning but misguided revolutionary chatterers³⁶ that these thinkers draw upon so readily. These actions are not the actions of revolt nor can they contribute to revolt—indeed, they are calls for reform, a reform that centres first and foremost on the individual within the collective, “carrying and being carried”³⁷ in the active life of faith that rests upon, not erects, the revolutionary intercession of God’s breaking through into time and revealing of the eternal in time³⁸.

For this reason, my reader, don’t mistake the above for a radical theory of socio-political change: Christians, of course, hold that it is God Who drives history forward, Who turns the wicked into the neighbour, Who exposes the vanity of it all in the irony of time—and, as such, we are poorly qualified to offer solutions to the world’s problems. We cannot take the world by the reigns and cannot declare that the Lord adopt the position the deist desires for Him; no, we require Him at every step of the way in i) building the church, ii) maintaining the church, and iii) turning the church out into the world. Anything else is supererogatory in the sense that it is ours to choose—we are free and freed to work together, despite varying approaches, due to our groundness in the faith which proceeds from breathing before God with the help of Christ and through the love of the neighbour. We start from here in order to learn how the Christian speaks: with the full lungs of the one that the Lord has brought along on the journey for existence, a passion for the possibility that precedes us as individuals and collectives. With that earnest belief, we abandon the utilitarian, pragmatic, and self-congratulatory theologies of revolution in the place of a quieter—but not quietist—goal: we shall become a church, a collective of individuals striving towards salvation in the glory of the possibility that God has given us.

“This [passion for possibility], Kierkegaard is convinced, is impossible without the passion of possibility—a passion that does not despair in the face of the sufferings and temptations of real life, the limitations of an imperfect reality and the constraints and necessities that we have to put up with because we cannot change them. Instead, it sees everywhere possibilities that arise in life unexpectedly and surprisingly, making it an adventure that cannot be calculated or channeled through the past, but for which every present becomes the starting point of a new future.”³⁹

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If you would like to read more, see the following:

• The Case for Christian Anarchism: On transcendence and immanence

• The Case for Christian Anarchism: Responsibility, irresponsibility, and you

• The Case for Christian Anarchism: That single individual—amongst others

See also:

1. “Jesus and the Social Embodiment of the Peaceable Kingdom”, from The Hauerwas Reader, p. 134, S. Hauerwas, ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright

2. “The religious situation” in Articles in The Fatherland, from Attack on "Christendom", p. 31, S. Kierkegaard

3. “The Cares of the Pagans” in Christian Discourses, p. 42, S. Kierkegaard

4. “That eternity arrives in time, or that eternity breaks through time: this can neither be understood on the basis of analogy nor on the basis of the logic of correspondence. The infinite and incommensurable distance marked by the abyss of the absolute disjunction can’t be traversed by any analogia or correspondence.” The Political Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 49, S. Brata Das

5. What Christ's Judgement Is About Official Christianity, 16th June 1855, from Attack on “Christendom”, p. 117, S. Kierkegaard

6. Kierkegaard: Existence and Identity in a Post-Secular World, p. 57, A. Hannay

7. Comment on “Kierkegaard's Attack on Hegel”, M. Weston, from Thought and Faith in the Philosophy of Hegel, p. 140, ed. J. Walker

8. Works of Love, p. 284, S. Kierkegaard; “The Divine Attributes: Kierkegaard’s Broodings on the Godhead”, J. D. S. Rasmussen, from Clark T & T Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 198, ed. A. P. Edwards and D. J. Gouwens

9. “Discourses at the Communion on Fridays” in Christian Discourses, p. 270, S. Kierkegaard

10. “The Tax Collector” in “Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays”, from Without Authority, p. 134, S. Kierkegaard

11. JP IV, 4035

12. “The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses”, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, S. Kierkegaard, p. 322

13. “In Wesley’s view, “a steward…is not at liberty to use what is lodged in his hands as he pleases, but as his master pleases.”” Quoted in “Revisiting John Wesley and Divine Command Theory”, W. S. Stepanenko, from Wesleyan Theological Journal, vol. LX, p. 118

14. JP 4:4965

15. Kierkegaard's Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno, p. 32, B. Ryan

16. Fear and Trembling: a Dialectical Lyric, p. 110, [J. de silentio]

17. Works of Love, p. 363, S. Kierkegaard

18. “States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering” in Christian Discourses, p. 116, S. Kierkegaard

19. Pilgram Marpeck: His Life and Social Theology, p. 28, S. B. Boyd

20. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, p. 47, [V. Haufniensis]

21. “The entire question of the relation of God’s omnipotence and God’s goodness to evil can perhaps – instead of making the distinction that God accomplishes the good and merely permits what is evil – be solved quite simply in the following manner. The absolutely greatest thing that can be done for a being, greater than anything one could make it into, is to make it free. It is precisely here that omnipotence is required. This seems odd, as it is precisely omnipotence that has the capacity to make something dependent. But if one reflects on omnipotence, one will indeed see that it must precisely also contain the ability, in an expression of omnipotence, to retreat into itself again in such a way as to allow that which owes its existence to omnipotence to be independent... Only omnipotence can take itself back while it gives away, and this relationship is indeed the independence of the recipient. God’s omnipotence is therefore his goodness.” KJN 4, pp. 56–7

22. “Disciplined by Theology: A Profile of Paul Holmer”, M. Horst, from The Christian Century, October 12, 1988, pp. 891-895

23. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, p. 24, S. Hauerwas and W. H. Willimon

24. Dorothy Day: An Introduction to Her Life and Thought, p. 23, T. C. Wright; “Reforming Christian Social Ethics: Ten Theses”, from The Hauerwas Reader, p. 114-115, S. Hauerwas, ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright

25. JP 1:615

26. James 5:16; Hebrews 3:12-13, 10:24-25; 1 Thessalonians 5:11; Colossians 3:16; Romans 12:15; and Matthew 18:15-18, referenced in The Radical Wesley: The Patterns and Practices of a Movement Maker, p. 200, H. A. Snyder

27. “The Church as God's New Language”, from The Hauerwas Reader, p. 147, S. Hauerwas, ed. J. Berkman and M. Cartwright

28. “Looking the Impossible in the Eye: Kierkegaard, Derrida, and the Repetition of Religion”, from The Collected Philosophical and Theological Papers, Volume 4: 2001-2004, Continental Philosophy of Religion, Kindle location 1526, J. Caputo

29. “Kierkegaard on the Church: Between Rejection and Redemption”, M. D. Kirkpatrick, from Clark T & T Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, p. 73, ed. A. P. Edwards and D. J. Gouwens

30. Christian Anarchy: Jesus' Primacy over the Powers, V. Eller

31. “The Particularity of Jesus and the Time of the Kingdom: Philosophy and Theology in Yoder”, D. Barber, from Modern Theology 23:1, p. 69

32. “Love, Hate, and Kierkegaard's Christian Politics of Indifference”, R. A. Davis, from Religious Anarchism, p. 89, ed. A. Christoyannopoulos; “Christianity is political indifference; engrossed in higher things, it teaches submission to all public authorities.” JP IV 4193, in reference to Romans 13:1

33. Kierkegaard and the Common Man, Kindle location 633, J. K. Bukdahl

34. “The Exposition” in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 168, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

35. Kierkegaard and the New Nationalism: A Contemporary Reinterpretation the Attack upon Christendom, p. 17, T. J. Millay

36. “Frankfurt and Kierkegaard on BS, Wantonness, and Aestheticism: A Phenomenology of Inauthenticity”, J. Davenport, from Love, Reason, and Will: Kierkegaard After Frankfurt, p. 90, ed. A. Rudd and J. Davenport

37. Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship, p. 350, V. Eller

38. “God’s Time: Kierkegaard, Qohelet, and Ellul’s Reading of Ecclesiastes”, J. M. Rollison, from The Ellul Forum, no. 63, p. 12

39. The Passion of Possibility: Studies on Kierkegaard‘s Post-metaphysical Theology, p. v, I. U. Dalferth