Here is Paul Robeson singing a Hasidic Jewish chant that speaks very much to the concerns of Black Liberation Theology. Dare I say it is Black Liberation Theology, which can, of course, only be sung.

One should understand that in saying that Christianity has not been thought right through Patočka intends that such a task be undertaken; not only by means of a more through thematization but also by means of a political and historical setting-in-train, by means of political and historical action; and he advocates that according to the logic of a messianic eschatology that is nevertheless indissociable from phenomenology. Something has not yet arrived, nether at Christianity nor by means of Christianity. What has not yet arrived at or happened to Christianity is Christianity. Christianity has not yet come to Christianity.

- Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 28.

Israel’s Yahweh religion arises in the liberation process of an oppressed outsider group of Egyptian society; its world of religious symbols is therefore directly related to the process of historical and political liberation. From the start that gives it a historical and political orientation and a clear leaning towards the social, which was to remain a characteristic of the religion of Israel. In contrast to the state religions of the ancient Near East, which derive themselves from earliest mythical times, Yahweh religion has a historical foundation and did not from the beginning have the function of legitimating rule and stabilizing the existing social order.   Rather, as the symbolic world of a social outsider group fighting for its right to life, it serves to provide internal solidarity for this group and to detach it from a integration which makes possible a freer and more equitable social life. This starting point explains the bias against domination, transcending present social circumstances, which was to become established time and again in the history of Israelite religion.

- Rainer Albertz, A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period: Volume I: From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy (Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 47.

I am here, of course, trying to undercut the enterprise of modern apologetics. While I admit to having a  tremendous love for almost all aspects of the Christian tradition (hence my church posts), even in all its many myriad foibles and despicable moral failings, the central factor of Christianity remains for me the liberating potentially of Jesus Christ as proclaimed in the gospel for the poor and oppressed, and not how philosophically convincing it is in explaining how the universe came to be. Ultimately, then, my Christianity does not hinge on whether Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity or any other equivalent theological minutia. Theodicies are a particularly disgusting example of this, and they should be recognized as standing firmly outside the Christian tradition.  The Christian response to evil and injustice is not to philosophically downplay its existence and excuse God from any culpability in its reality, but to look to Jesus Christ and fight to overcome it.

I am not trying to insulate Christianity’s claims from empirical investigation or corroboration. Heaven forefend, I think all theologoumena – the doctrine of creation, for example – should be subject to the most rigorous investigation possible. While I may be a disingenuous Christian, I am not a self-deluding one. I certainly want to know whether it is true or not, but its truthfulness is not a condition for me being a Christian. If Christianity is recognized as being un-true, the only truly Christian response to that is to loudly and forthrightly admit it.

Even then, though, I will still with the church confess Christ as κύριος.

“I maintain that God is just as  busy annihilating as creating. . . . I  marvel that man hasn’t long since defecated the whole world full, up to the sky.”

-  Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Volume 54: Table Talk (Luther’s Works. (Fortress Press, 1967), 130.

Whoever studies theology does so because to study it is (quite apart from any personal aims of the student) necessary, good, and beautiful in relationship to the service to which he has been called. Theology must possess him so completely that he can be concerned with it only in the manner of a studiosus.

—Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), p. 172.

I. Except for perhaps the church, is there any institution as continuous and long lasting as the library? Plato, presciently, fretted about the invention of the written word, predicting it would “introduce forgetfulness to the souls of those who learn” (Phaedrus, 275a). In a real sense, of course, Plato was right. We no longer have to remember our own stories because the writing does it for us. Libraries are not then merely repositories of books; they are our collective memory, our connective tissue with the past.

II. Libraries are like cemeteries, and books are the gravestones of the mind. Visit a cemetery and you can see the stones that mark remains of bodies; come to a library and see the books that mark the remains of thoughts, indeed filed between shelves “row on row” (McCrae). One should therefore be solemn in a library for the same reason one is sombre in a cemetery. “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet. For the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5).

III. To work in a library is therefore an act in faithfulness to the past, and also the reason why defacing a book is almost as serious and injurious to one’s soul as defacing a headstone. If books are the tombs of thought, library workers are their guardians, for “When they are carried to the grave, a watch is kept over their tomb” (Job. 21:32).

IV. Libraries, unlike cemeteries, are not doleful places because they anticipate the eschaton a la Origen. If we want to see the sanctorum communio (“communion of saints”), we have but to visit a library, where in the shelves Nietzsche is present with Paul, and even the devil shall be saved.

V. Luther said that his wife, the feisty Katherina von Bora, was his Galatians. Perhaps the library should be our Galatians. The library is a very Pauline inspired institution after all; everything is given freely. The library is as such an odd sojourner in capitalism. The great invisible hand that (the other) Adam Smith wrote of does not know what do with an institution that seeks not its own benefit, that is unselfish.  The library is a stranger in a strange land. Still, the only place you can find Adam Smith is in the library. It protects even him.

VI. The library is chronically underfunded. Libraries may even disappear. This would be bad. It hardly needs to be argued that ignorance is not a desirous condition, though “it is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance” (St. Jerome). Did I mention that St. Jerome is the patron saint of librarians?

VII. In his great work Of Grammatology, Derrida famously said that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“there is nothing outside the text”). Derrida was, no doubt, correct in his inference. If this is so, however, syllogistic necessity would allow us to take this even further: If all texts are in libraries, then I pronounce that Il n’ya rien en dehors de la bibliothèque  (“there is nothing outside the library”).

VIII. With Dante, I say that in hell there are many levels. Unlike Dante, I say that there are not merely nine levels but ten. The lowest level – the one Dante neglected – is for those who show impiety towards books or their keepers. “He that is given his book in his right hand shall have a lenient reckoning, and shall go back rejoicing to his people. But he that is given his book behind his back shall call down destruction on himself and burn in the fire of Hell” (Qur’an, 84:7-12).

IX. Libraries, with my earlier point, are not merely anticipations of heaven; they are remnants of Eden, of before the fall. Like Eden, a library is filled with many delicious fruit. And also like Eden, there are certain fruits which one may not eat (e.g., the reference collection). But, in spite of this fragmentary reminder of the garden, a library is still firmly infralapsarian.  There stands at the entrance (or exit) of every library the equivalent of the “flaming sword which turned every way” (Gen. 4:24). Consequently, I have found it is nearly impossible to sneak past a circulation worker with book that is not signed out. Don’t even try. “Who expects to be able to go out a house except by the door?” (Confucius, Analects, VI, 15).

X. If a library is Edenic, then leaving it is not unlike being cast from the garden. Like our first parents, those that leave only do so with reluctance and melancholy:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and providence their guide:

They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

(Milton, Paradise Lost, Book XII, 645-49)

Standing before Christ in glory, in agony, or resurrected, it is always words (and thus concepts) that we lack in order to say what we see, in short to see that with which intuition floods our eyes … we do not offer concepts capable of handling a gift without measure and overwhelmed, dazzled, and submerged in his glory, we no longer see anything.

- Jean-Luc Marion, quoted in Jane Barter Moulaison, Lord, Giver of Life: Toward a Pnematological Complement to George Lindbeck’s Theory of Doctrine (Toronto: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2007)