April 12, 2004
a toast to the depths of opaquacity
i like dan hughes. he is so opaque that he must be deep. he draws the very best of opaqueness out of me. he liked my email. i liked his response.
for the record, our mutual email love session goes like this,
>>the opaque dan: ...theologies and ecclesiologies that have come to dominate the memory of the man Jesus. We envision a direct, participatory spirituality
>
>the opaque steve: All theologies start with the dream of direct, participatory spirituality.
the opaque dan: Maybe. "All" is a broad term and we might disagree with what "starting with" means in any given case. I do not believe, for example, that the major fourth century creedal conferences and the bureaucracies that calcified around their work-products had a dream of direct, participatory spirituality. Much of what we look back on with a bit of wistful and rosy retrospect, I would suggest, had a more nuanced history of political positioning and ideological power-mongering that we would do well not to forget.
>the opaque steve: What will prevent your's from calcifying?
the opaque dan: Mine will. Just as I will calcify, decay and die. So be it. Functionally, though, I am not setting out to build anything for anyone that could be christened, "mine." What I do and say is an outflow of my life as life. I only do theology and ecclesiology as it is locally relevant to my history, experience, communities and interests. I am, as far as I know how to, directly participating in the life I've been given without the ambition of creating a definitive anything save the definitive life that Daniel Hughes was given to live with and for others.
>the opaque steve: could not these theologies and ecclesiologies in their domination still contain inherent subversions, which if deconstructed, would reveal the subversive Christ.
>
the opaque dan: Oh, yes. Hegemony is self-subversive, indeed.
A toast to opaquacity. Now is the world any different?
Yay opaque theology geekery. ;)
You know, reading this exchange it strikes me why I love the 'emerging church' weblog scene right now.
It reminds me of some of the other weird garage hacker scenes that are evolving on the Net: the open source programmers, the grassroots human rights advocates, the fanfic writers, the indie musicians, the people building strange electrical buzzing and flying contraptions...
... lots of obsessed people who love tinkering with stuff, pulling ideas apart, putting them together in strange configurations, giving it a go and sharing information about what seems to work and what doesn't, and having a virtual beer afterwards.
Sure there's probably plenty of more useful things we ought to be doing, but... well, we *might* just discover the next theological E=MC^2 or HTML... at the very least we'll get some blurry snaps of Bigfoot.
Bigfoot Jesus would make a great band name.
