The ultimate circumstances in which the conditions for law to maintain peace are suspended are known as the state of exception (see Giorgio Agamben’s book of that title).
The cross in Jesus’ day stood for those circumstances on an individual level. It was both the symbol and the consequence of the exception. Crucifixion was the condition and the price of peace through empire. By making the cross the daily motif for Christian lifestyle, as we have seen in the previous post, Jesus unequivocally positioned his followers in opposition to the Roman way of peace. Today, in our supposedly free society, it takes more than spoken opposition for the state of exception to be applied. Within Western nation states it generally requires actual or perceived threat to property, the law, the military and the institutions of state and its symbols before personal freedom is removed or individual life threatened by kettling, imprisonment, water hose, tear gas or bullets from a gun.

To take up our cross daily in non-violent counterpolitical living Jesus-style is to be ready for kettling, prison, violence and even death when it comes.
However, if we are to understand the more normative circumstances for the exception in our contemporary West we need to step outside the orbit of our mainly white dominated nation states of Europe, North America and Australasia. We need to look at those places where perceived or real threats to their ongoing exercise of sovereignty are met by our Western governments with bullets, drones, bombs, imprisonment without trial, water-boarding and the like.

So to grasp the full implications of the cross as a symbol of discipleship we need to include bullets, drones, bombs, imprisonment without trial, water-boarding and death as the fulness of the motif of discipleship that Jesus calls us to take up each day.
The plight of our enemies who receive these instruments of the exception is to be embraced as our own.

So how does this work to bring genuine peace? I suggest three ways in particular.

(1) To use the biblical imagery of John the Baptist and Daniel’s apocalyptic, every thought, word and act of selfless unconditional love is an axe cut to the root of the empire tree, and a crushing blow to the deep structural feet of the edifice of sovereign power through human history. After Jesus’ resurrection the oppressive local partnership of Israel and Rome came down for almost two millennia. The same kind of love will ultimately bring down the vastly more universal partnership of church and empire and its aftermath to the mutual good of Palestinian, Jew and the general multitude of the peoples of the earth.

(2) If the incarnation happened as set out in the testimony of Jesus, then there has been a transhistorical moment in time when God as a human being has demonstrated the life-laying-down power of love at a previous apex of empire and willingly encountered its state of exception. All the destructive consequences of the instruments of sovereign power were embraced by God there at the cross to the point of death and resurrection. Death was swallowed up in victory. So it follows that there is a place in God, a reservoir dug out, an inferno ignited, where all the results of sin and death on human life, spirit, soul and body, together with the creation of which he became a part, can be channeled. Such a doctrine of hell is not some ghastly idea of a retributive sovereign God’s exhausted indignation. It is the virus vault within God and now through the Spirit, within his people, where all the hatred, antagonism, rejection, resentment, violence and death can be contained and exhausted. Such is the calling of the peacemaking ecclesia. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Mtt 5:9) and “Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man (Lk 6:22).

(3) It is when we stand with pederasts, murderers, extremists of left and right, of any faith and none, emptying out unconditional love and forgiveness towards them and sucking up all the resistance, rejection and refusal into the heart of God via our own hearts, that there is real hope for peace. This is the kenarchic way for emptying out our Western or any other domination system and for winning the hearts and transforming the future of our enemies if they will receive it.

I am going to dive into the heart of kenarchy and encourage those of you who have little or no idea of what I’m on about to comment accordingly!

So firstly a reminder that kenarchy is the opposite kind of power to the exertion of my own domination, independence and autonomy that constructs empire, whether on a cosmic, local or personal front.
Secondly a reminder that the word kenarchy and the related adjective kenotic derive from the Greek word keno, to empty, that Paul uses in his letter to the Philippians when he says that Jesus, instead of using his divine power to insist on his own way, “emptied himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, being made in the likeness of men … he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:7-8). Here the fulness of love is described in terms of the way Jesus emptied himself of the kind of power that could be used to control and dominate others but instead poured power out as a gift of love to meet the other, which is, as we have been discussing in previous posts, measured by the reach across to one’s enemies. As Luke records it “But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27).

The cross in the Roman Empire of Jesus’ time was a prescribed form of punishment for those deemed to oppose the then accepted means to peace on earth, peace through the sovereign power of the Roman hierarchy. The Roman peace depended on control by hierarchical order, law and the ownership of property. If you opposed it, then you could expect to be crucified. You would be regarded as an exception to the peace, instead of which you would receive violence and death. By calling for disciples of Jesus to take up their cross and die every day, the gospel narratives deliberately position them as those in opposition to the Roman way of peace. “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me” (Luke 9: 23).

It’s important to realise that by identifying himself with the then instrument of retributive justice Jesus was taking the part of common thieves, robbers, insurrectionists and murderers like Barabbas. The Roman way to peace was to identify your enemy as anyone against your power, good or bad, and destroy them. By choosing to risk the cross by positioning himself and his followers against the Roman way every day, he united himself with the enemies of the system, including those who would transpire to be his enemies too, whether Judas Iscariot, Barabbas, the baying crowds or the thief next to him who didn’t repent. This is how come the cross reaches to our enemies.
To be continued…..

The day or two I indicated might elapse before I continued this theme of the crucial reach to our enemies has turned into a week or two. In the time that has elapsed there has been a second Kenarchy Weekend Course. (If you are interested in attending future grassroots Kenarchy Courses please email me at info@2mt.org.uk).

Much of the collaborative discussion that arose as part of the Kenarchy Course two weekends ago has made me even more aware of the centrality of the reach to our enemies that the cross demonstrates.
So what began as a brief meditation has become a serious attempt to articulate the core component of kenarchy, what we might call the exceptional antidote to the all destructive fulness of sovereign power. As a result, this post and others that follow, has now become a place where I share what will be some of the main content of the second chapter of the book Discovering Kenarchy that is to follow on from the soon to be published The Fall of the Church, the outline content of which was developed collaboratively via this blog.

Chapter One of Discovering Kenarchy will provide an overview of the essentials of kenarchy. This will be a development of the issues raised and manifesto formed via this blog over the last couple of years and will soon be completed.

Chapter Two will aim to excavate the full extent of the operation of love that is such an utterly different kind of power to sovereignty.
In so doing it will articulate the way in which the life-laying-down love at the theological core of the incarnation comes to a culmination at the cross in complete counterpoint to the fulness of empire. It will then suggest that this fulness is now available on a day to day basis as a way of life summed up by Jesus’ words: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” (Luke 9: 23) This, I now realise, is vitally important to the practice of kenarchy and requires some serious research and new work.

The book as a whole will be a collection of applied thinking from a whole bunch of us who are already working out what kenarchy means in a variety of life situations.
It will be edited by my good friend and writer, journalist Julie Tomlin, via whose gift and enthusiasm several chapters are already well under way. Martin Scott has already completed his! So my work on chapter two needs to be done this summer with some urgency and will need the collaborative help of subscribers and visitors to this blog. Please! We’re counting on you. I will begin to set out what I see as some of the key components over the next few days (really!).

Making enemies non-persons outside the law in Guantanamo prison in the so-called War on Terror after 9/11 revealed how non-Christian the deep structures of the West really are. 166 Prisoners still languish in Guantanamo without justice. In the first two days of this month of May 2013, nearly twelve years later, 100,000 people called once more on president Obama to fulfil his promise and close it down. I’m sorry to say that I doubt that he will. To petition him go to http://tinyurl.com/cuopek2

How Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect for the Boston bombing is treated will similarly reveal the underlying values of our Western world. What kind of hospitality do we show our perceived enemies? Seriously, what do we do? What about their victims? This is not an easy question, but it is crucial.

As I have just said, this is crucial, cruciform, in other words, what the cross is about!

The first thing to emphasise is that loving one’s enemies is no passive acquiescence in the face of evil.
Forgiveness has first to acknowledge the immensity of pain caused in becoming an enemy. We are not talking of simple prejudice here. So love for one’s enemy always has to be accompanied by some kind of actual or potential restoration for third party victims if they exist. When the forgiver is the victim it is both harder and easier! Harder because a way of absorbing the injustice in oneself has to be found, easier because once that’s done, there is no other victim to dissuade from vengeance.

The second thing to recognise is that to underrate the effect of evil is no real bridge of love to one’s enemy.
As I understand it, the cross is the place where the Father, Son and Spirit measured the full extent of evil and completely drew it into themselves and in so doing resolved it. The extraordinary theologian Simone Weil describes this measure as “the infinite thickness of time and space,” because the essence of evil is the rejection of that love for which time and space exist. It is a distance that God has to cross first, because he is both the source of love and the ultimate victim of everything against it. Weil calls this stretch across the gap of human acts of evil, penal suffering, not in the sense that God is beating up Jesus to extort a payment for sin from him on our behalf, but because the punishing effects of sin on another being have to go somewhere. On the cross it is going into God. One’s enemy’s sin is in this way measured by the one who forgives it. I don’t much like the use of the word penal in this context because of its association with the idea that God himself requires appeasement by another before he will forgive, but I understand the importance of finding a difficult word that encompasses the extent of reach involved in forgiving one’s enemy.

There is much more to be said about the extent of this reach, and I will continue with this subject over the next day or two.

One particular prophecy that has gripped my attention over the years is From Isaiah 25:7: “The LORD of hosts will prepare a lavish banquet for all peoples on this mountain; a banquet of aged wine, choice pieces with marrow, and refined, aged wine. And on this mountain he will swallow up the covering which is over all peoples, even the veil which is stretched over all nations.”

It has been on my mind again this last week, with the unconscionable pomp and circumstance of the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. How to get people out from under the veil of these outrageous power structures and symbols that protect the rich at the expense of the poor? How to get people to see that love and compassion are subjugated to money and power and that our Western representative democracies are built on an already existing domination system that takes that for granted? How to help them realise that it needs to be challenged?

A generation ago I did some research into Youth and Values on behalf of Frontier Youth Trust, funded by the then government Department of Education and Science, which suggested that anomy is a key. Anomy, the noun, and anomic the adjective, refer to events in life that undeniably call into question meaning and purpose at a profound level. As a result the accepted social or ethical standards of an individual or group are seriously undermined. These are happenings that can sometimes lead to mental health issues in later life, such as the death of a parent or sibling, but also include the ‘normal’ transitions, such as changing school, puberty, funerals, weddings, moving home, leaving school, going to university, starting a new job and the like. The suggestion was that these were times when young people were the most open to questioning their values, and changing them. Of course while this applies to young people in particular, whose values are not strongly formed, it applies to adults too. Such times are vital opportunities to help people think beneath the surface of ‘normal’ life.

Events like these can be occasions of great vulnerability, times when people are susceptible to new thought patterns and mindsets for harm as well as for good. These experiences are heightened greatly when anomic sociopolitical and economic events such as war, famine, displacement, persecution and unfair trade agreements are impacting the class, nation, race or social grouping to which somebody experiencing personal anomy belongs. According to the prophet an egalitarian banquet for everybody is the answer! As the exciting new book, Carnival Kingdom, that I am currently reviewing, suggests, this is no trivial symbol, but a banquet like a carnival is a social metaphor for an alternative reality that challenges the deep structure of the status quo. It speaks of bold and radical movement of hospitality to strangers and immigrants and those of other faiths and cultures. We so need this right now!

If the young Chechen men suspected of the Boston bombings are in fact guilty, then they may well fit in this category of people whose personal and corporate anomy combined together into an immense vulnerability. It doesn’t excuse their actions, but it should help us understand what it may have been like to be them. The death-throws of the communist domination system and its impact on their nation may have led them to hope that the West was not another such system. But it is of course. It is not so overtly oppressive because the power is usually more distributed and hidden. The deep nature of this power will be seen in how we treat perceived enemies like these young men, those perhaps behind them, and the others like them. At its deepest core the testimony of Jesus is love for our enemies. This he said summed up the law to the last ‘dot’ and ‘tittle.’ Making enemies non-persons outside the law in Guantanamo prison in the so-called War on Terror after 9/11 revealed how non-Christian the deep structures of the West really are. How we treat Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will do the same. So do we show him hospitality? Seriously, what do we do? What about the victims? This is not easy, but it is crucial. Comments please.

More in a day or two….

Yesterday I was giving a public seminar “Towards an inclusive gospel politics of love” at Regent College in the University of British Columbia. After it an enthusiastic participant came up and shared some significant insights with me.

He referred to Jesus weeping over Jerusalem and his statement “If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace!”(Lk 19:42). He then pointed out that in Luke’s account this incident came between the so-called triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds worshiped him as a king in contemporary imperial Roman terms, and his demonstration against the ruling powers in the temple.

The triumphant Roman general or Caesar would enter a city not on a donkey, but on a war horse. The crowds assumed that king David’s son would behave in the same way. But they failed to grasp the significance of the donkey and Zechariah’s prophecy and to realise that Jesus was reversing the way of empire. As a result their behaviour simply affirmed the deep structure of imperial hierarchy (Matt 21:5; Zech 9:9-10). Peace comes to the nations among the people, not over them in hierarchical celebrity. The need was not to imitate imperial rule but to expose and challenge it, just as Jesus did in the temple after his tearful statement.

The things that make for peace are those that recognize, receive and enact egalitarian grace. The behaviour of the crowds on Palm Sunday was possibly as much the behaviour that rejected Jesus’ kenarchic way of peace as their later cries of “Away with Him, away with Him, crucify Him!” This has much to say about our treatment of leaders in church and society today. Our honouring of leadership as celebrity in church or society legitimates oppressive structure and affirms the things that make for injustice, inequality and war.

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; he is just and endowed with salvation, humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey. I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; and the bow of war will be cut off. And he will speak peace to the nations; and his dominion will be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zech 9:9-10).

I have been promising a number of pithy statements about kenarchy in these weeks leading up to the Kenarchy Course while I am busy chasing the publisher’s deadline for the coming book The Fall of the Church

So another pithy statement about Kenarchy is:
Kenarchy restores civil disobedience to its crucial place in the practice of justice and equality.

Three accounts of Jesus’ actions in the temple bare this out. It’s important to remember that the temple in the gospel narratives does not mean simply the religious centre of first century Jewish life. The high priestly family of Annas & Caiaphas were the puppet representatives of Roman power in the south of Israel, just as Herod was in the north. So what happened in the temple implicated not just the Jewish authorities but the power of Rome behind them. Jesus’ first responsible act was to question the authorities in the temple, in the context of disobedience to his parents (Lk 2:42-52). Then John’s account of Jesus’ demonstration in the temple at the beginning of his public ministry specifically records his attack on the already strong alignment of the sacrifice system with monetary exchange (Jn 2:13-16). Finally, the synoptic account of the second demonstration in the temple at the end of Jesus’ ministry, compares Israel’s original covenant of blessing for the nations with the violent economics of empire described by Jesus as robbery (Mk 11:15-18).

Jesus public life was framed by acts of civil disobedience
At both the beginning and the end of this sequence the public challenge to the status quo was followed by a period of what can be called radical submission. Radical, because it proceeded in the aftershock of Jesus’ clear positioning of himself counter to the established authorities; submission, because rather than establishing himself in an alternative sovereignty he responds to their reactions in a loving spirit. This political rhythm of radical subversion and radical submission resounds throughout the Jesus’ story and is basic to kenarchy.

Once the church had become aligned with empire anything the Spirit of Jesus taught that was contrary to this was bound to be very difficult to receive.
So the teachings of Jesus or the apostles that seemed to vouchsafe the status quo were strongly emphasized. Hence Jesus’ advice to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” and Peter and Paul’s similar encouragements to submit to “the powers that be,” (Mk 12:17; 1 Pet 2:13-15; Rom 13:1-5) were applied without taking into account the radical acts of subversion that preceded them (Mk 11:15-17; Acts 4: 18-20, 23:1-5).

Without an understanding of the necessity of civil disobedience a genuinely egalitarian and just politics is outside the scope of the imaginable, let alone the possible.

From my standpoint, I see kenarchy as a new spiritual movement.
From the beginning there has been a collaborative crew caught up in the momentum and helping to carry it forward. I have been around long enough to see the risks of new movements getting owned by the folk caught up in them. Before long they have leaders, rules, memberships and all the familiar institutional characteristics of the partnership of church and empire that has given us the contemporary West. It is precisely because kenarchy is a move to reshape the way the kingdom of God is lived, understood and positioned in our society that it cannot and will not develop in that way.

Kenarchy is developing through the combined gifts of people in loving, egalitarian, partnership with one another and the Spirit of Jesus, moving along in and through the spheres of human life, in education, health care, commerce, the arts and the like. The idea behind the Kenarchy Course is to encourage and accelerate this process. It is aiming to do two things, to bring together those of us who have been collaborating together in the reshaping work, to share and develop where we have got to so far, and to bring into the process those who are attracted by the idea but feel the need to get a better grip on its content and application.

There is already an exciting bunch of folk checking in to the two venues, Ashburnham Place, East Sussex (April 5th-14th 2013) and Silverdale, Lancashire (May 10th-12th 2013), but there is room and need for many more partners in this move. Please join us if you possibly can, and encourage others to do so! For more details use the comments facility or email us at info@2mt.org.uk

During my preparation for the Introduction to Christianity lectures I am currently giving as part of the World Religions course in the Lancaster University Politics, Philosophy and Religion Department (PPR), I made an interesting discovery. The shift in the distribution of Christians worldwide over the last century, as you probably know, has moved significantly from north to south. The northern hemisphere and the western world is no longer the the centre of Christianity, the south is, and Africa in particular. That much I already knew.

However, the New Atlas of Global Christianity reveals that if you plot the epicentre of the distribution of Christianity, you arrive in northern Mali. This is not to say that this is where the most Christians are, but that working from the current distribution of Christians worldwide and plotting the approximate centre of global distribution, this is the centre.
http://tinyurl.com/aapzuac [scroll down to map on p.33]

This has got me thinking on two fronts.
Firstly, the epicentre is on the fault line between North African Islam and African Christianity and is the current focus of the French government’s military action against Muslim extremists, with the British government’s help.

Secondly, given that this is the statistical epicentre of contemporary Christianity, it is surely the place where the core Christian distinctive of outpoured love, espoused by this blog, needs to be demonstrated and supported.

My thinking is that the desire and responsibility for this belongs to those who recognise the centrality of unconditional love within the Christian faith and those within other faiths or none, who identify with it. Activating this is a matter of urgency. Here is an opportunity for love in action to respond in ways counter to the meeting of violence with violence of the now all too familiar Western war on terror approach. Northern Mali does not need to be a place where Western governments come in with the big guns to sort out those regarded as terrorists. They may or may not be. They could be criminals, they could be warring tribes whose mutual antagonism has been increased by the impact of past colonial policy. They could be those whose understanding of the track record of western powers in Africa causes them to use violence to prevent it continuing. In any case it needs to be the place where the kenotic power of love is made evident for all to see.

This is not going to be easy. Some serious strategic thinking is needed. But it calls for some of us some of us to connect with and support those who are already engaged with positive initiatives for peace in the area. Although I have personal connections in various parts of Africa, with Africans who are working at issues of reconciliation and transformation, I don’t have any in Mali. Do you? If so can you please comment and/or get in touch via roger@2mt.org.uk.

Perhaps the most common adjective for describing God among Christians has been the word ‘sovereign.’ This has been exacerbated over recent years by what was, in my view, the catastrophic decision by the translators of the New International Version of the Bible (NIV), to use the phrase ‘sovereign Lord’ to translate the Hebrew for ‘Lord God’ (ādônây y’hôvih). The word ‘ādônây’ is the plural for the word ‘adon’ deriving from a Ugaritic word meaning “lord” or “father,” and emphasises the fulness of Godiness, but tells us little about how God uses his fulness. That, from the Christian perspective, waits for the incarnation to reveal. The word ‘sovereign’ on the other hand, now carries all the hidden baggage of the dominating power of empire, law and hierarchy.

It may be possible to de-toxify the word, but so deep is its baptism in the domination systems of this world that unless that problem is clearly pointed out, then it leaves the understanding of God wide open to being confused with characteristics that belong, according to the incarnational testimony of Jesus, to the devil. As Matthew and Luke describe, it is the devil who uses power to dominate the multitude. Their temptation narratives cearly contrast the demonic power and authority of the kingdoms of the world with the way of “the Lord your God” (Luke 4:8). Jesus resists the devil’s sovereign way of power and reveals God’s attitude and behaviour.

So this brings us to a further couple of pithy statements about kenarchy:
“kenarchy conveys an understanding of God’s power that is opposite to that carried by sovereignty” and
“kenarchy gives away power whereas sovereignty holds onto it.”