Liminal Christianity

 As is their wont, conservatives are throwing philosophers' names around as criticisms without checking what they actually thought. For instance,  Dr. Kristin Du Mez recently got accused of being Foucauldian . This got at least me wondering what an actual Foucauldian might say about gender and sexuality in the Bible and White Evangelical society. First of all, though: I don't really have any credentials to bring to this. I've read Discipline and Punish, and I've picked some stuff up through osmosis, mostly skimming stuff by Dr. Cressida Heyes  and reading the SEP entry for Foucault . So: grain of salt required, but let's see where this goes, shall we? The first thing a Foucauldian might note is that our ways of being gendered and practicing our sexuality are structured by discourses which establish what counts as "normal" gender/sexuality. So, in each culture there are these discourses. One might go one of two ways here: on the one hand, one might see the ...

There are few song lyrics that bug me as much as the below: Turn your eyes upon Jesus, Look full in His wonderful face, And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, In the light of His glory and grace. The issue begins with the idea that "the things of earth will grow strangely dim." If all it means is that we lose interest in "things of the flesh," to use Pauline language, then all is well. If, however, "things of earth" is understood to include things like, say the Russian invasion of Ukraine, systemic racism, or troubles in one's relationships, then we must object. The glory of Jesus and his grace are revealed in history by his bearing our burdens and suffering with us. At the end of history, he returns to set all things--all of history--right. So if we see Jesus's glory and grace as they have been revealed, then in them we see revealed how far short of the eternal Sabbath rest we are. See Christ and what he died to gain us should cause us t...

Deconstruction is complicated because it is a transition from a comfortable acceptance of one way of seeing things to another. One knows not where the journey will take one, only that one must make the journey. Thus, some mourning is involved: we who deconstruct have lost something that was a huge part of our lives: often not merely a theology and a hermeneutic lens but also a community. In a sense, we lose our Bibles: we lose our ability to confidently interpret the Bible. Reading deconstructively allows us to see some of how the faith cultures which raised us prepared us to deconstruct. This will look different for different people because some of us learned more or less and different things from those cultures. Some may have learned almost nothing good but "God is love," and even that may have been learned in a twisted fashion. I learned several things from people I no longer trust. In fact, in many cases, I don't trust those people because of  what I learned from them...

  Order.—Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally, we must prove it is true. --Blaise Pascal, Pensees 187 This I read as an outline for Pascal's apologetic endeavor.    "I confess it, I admit it. But, still, is there no means of seeing the faces of the cards?" Yes, Scripture and the rest, etc. "Yes, but I have my hands tied and my mouth closed; I am forced to wager, and am not free. I am not released, and am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?" True. But at least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings you to this, and yet you cannot believe. Endeavour, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way;...

This post will partly be a case of "how did I stay in those circles for so long?!" since my views on DCT have remained mostly stable since my first encounter with it at an academic level back in 2011. To begin with, then: Divine Command Theory is the view that what is good is good because God says so (rather than, say, God saying that they are good because he looks and sees that they are). Usually this gets tweaked a bit, to say that it is because a loving  God says so. The worry is that, if we grant DCT, then God could have decreed anything--child sacrifice could have been good, if God had decreed it. That is why the tweak to a loving  God. That shift does a lot, though. Once we have said that things are good because a loving God says so, there are worldly facts involved in the goodness of things. Depending on how we understand God's love, in fact, we will have managed to essentially say that things are all-but good because a loving being would command (or endorse) them,...