is certainly written with hope. It is written toward thanksgiving. And I hope that there will be moments when reading it will in fact have been a prayer of delightful abandon. Still, this book is work. Laboring through it has entailed for me and will likely entail for you, if you take it up, both determination and pain. Life is delightful and it is hard. My task in writing this book has been to be true to life and to those who live it.
This is a book for a wide spectrum of audiences, all of whom I imagine (however naïvely) as ready for good work. I have thought as I have written, actually, of my past and present and future students, among whom are undergraduate students, graduate students in professional programs, graduate students in more strictly academic programs, pastors, laborers, university and seminary professors, social workers, artists, drug traffickers, corporate professionals, military professionals, NGO professionals, psychologists, writers, community organizers, musicians, small business owners and employees, pre- and elementary and middle and junior high and senior high school teachers, chaplains, blue-collar workers, medical doctors and nurses and technicians, politicians, farmers, corporation executives, as well as, of course, those unmarked by formal titles; gentle, violent, kind, cruel, forgiving, exacting, faithful, and treacherous people; victims and perpetrators of child abuse, victims and perpetrators of spousal abuse; people with plans, property, and prestige; people adrift, jobless, homeless; people who say “God!” in such a variety of ways that were they to sing that word at once in the same big room, if only for a minute or two, the cacophony might, like a first viewing of Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, “make some people lose their faith.”5 I have written for them, the same way that I have taught them: by refusing to acknowledge the obvious objection that such a wide spectrum of readers will never be well served by the same demanding, complicated text. I have written imagining a future in which both new, raw, untamed, hungry theologians and decades-long, battle-hardened seasoned professional theologians may come gently vis-à-vis this text, whether because of it or in spite of it, to have been swayed to set sail to the other side, to embark upon a kind of thinking and praying as new, raw, untamed, and hungry as I pray they and I to the end will one day all be remembered as having been.
I have been struck for some time by how we, nurtured as we are by modern Western Civilization,6 imagine the locus of thought. Despite the insights of brain research, we still habitually imagine that each of us thinks with her brain, in her head, that elongated sphere suspended on a thin neck between the brilliant, ethereal blue sky far above to which it is drawn, and the thick, heavy torso with its stabilizing limbs held by the force of gravity to the green, brown earth below. The people of ancient Israel imagined otherwise. We think, they believed, with our hearts, that organ in the middle of the chest, in the middle of the body, embraced by lungs alternately filled with sweet, rich air and emptied of it when expended in anticipation of the new breath that may yet come, the heart that pounds out the life-beat of the time that we are given to live together. It seems to me that the Israelites were right. We think from the midst of our bodies, with our bodies, with those social phenomena that are what they are only as they are interrupted and engaged by what they are not. I have written, i.e., for thinking bodies. I have written imagining the sound of words spoken and heard. I have imagined the reading of this book as a moment in which in some unpretentious word-of-mouth underground venue the deep, powerful, resonant percussions of subwoofers roll heavily as a carnal wave across the chest and throat before they become the bass line in a conscious musical thought. I have written for the ears, the chest, the throat, i.e., for a thinking body. I suspect that there are sentences in this book that will be better understood if they are read aloud.
Of course, an academic treatment of any subject is not all song and dance. There are lyrics, too, declarative ones. If a text is not at least in principle vulnerable to a grand or petty professional inquisition as to what is said, it is not strictly theological. And as it turns out there is no shortage of what in this text, even if the writing has gone through considerable pains to make sure that what does not overpower how. I have spent an enormous amount of time agonizing over word choices. Writing at once for so many audiences, for so many personal historic trajectories, has called for that. That this is a book awash with puns may be noticed right away. The frequent citation of the etymologies of words signals the extent to which words seldom speak with only one voice here. However, I more often than not let the awkwardness of certain phrases gesture in the direction of the text’s multiple concurrent personalities. One of the most important tasks of theological writing, it seems to me, is to write words off themselves. Everything we might say, this declaration as well, is entangled in an overtly or covertly memorial past and a wonderfully or fearfully anticipated future. This book has set out to attend to them, this past and this future, without selling them my soul or yours. Of course, neither have I wished to sell our souls to the curiously durable present upon which I have been trained to presume that even now we rest our weight. Thus the words to come are to be read as moving without nostalgia or expressive spontaneity or the calculative drive of purpose or ataraxic mindfulness. They are to be read as expenditures with neither deep pockets nor favorable investment prospects. They are to be read as invocations and supplications toward an event in which the fruit of the knowledge of good and bad will have been unhanded.
This is a book in six chapters, plus a prelude, a postlude, and a series of interludes. Each of the six chapters is concerned with a different subject matter. The pre-, post-, and interludes that precede, follow, and otherwise interrupt the flow of chapters serve those chapters, in certain unruly ways.
The first chapter claims to be introductory. It in a particular way concerns me, as a theologian. It is in that sense “personal.” However, I would contend that it is not autobiography. Whatever “self” might even now be thought to have written of and been written into this (theological) life story and the large book in which it is set is, it seems to me, a legendary beast, a kind of abominable snowman, a portent not long to the warm days of an early springtime thaw. This chapter nonetheless tells the reader something of the history from which this discourse is set to task. It makes clear that somebody wrote this book, even if he wrote it by no means as its chief protagonist and author.
The second chapter is on theological method. Unlike many other treatments of the subject, this one is written on the run. It sets out to say what it says and simultaneously to do what it says, and to do what it says as a kind of outgoing after what this book professes as the way of the cross. It is the task of this chapter to say something of what (and how) “after crucifixion” entails.
The third chapter is an account of work. Its most prominent pun is “liturgy.” Of course, I do very much have formal liturgical worship in mind as I write. However, I also write remembering that the work of the people is by no means confined to a formal worship service, but that in fact most of it is performed far outside a certain large designated room in some mappable location with a property value. Adam and Eve work and work hard on our side of the Garden. Punishment or not, their work and ours is to be an expenditure of thanksgiving, every day of every week.
The fourth chapter is an account of bodies. It is also an eschatological venture. It concerns the resurrection of the flesh. The chapter speaks to the question of the finality of death and damnation and it confesses a future in which the whole damned world will have been emptied, the way a large cage might be emptied of a captured pelican, say, were its barred walls, floor, and ceiling suddenly unhinged at their right angles of intersection and cast away.
The fifth chapter concerns martyrdom. More specifically it concerns what a martyr-church might signify. It is chiefly an examination of the hard command of Jesus in Mark 8, his command to “the crowd with his disciples”: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (8:34). The question of this chapter is not “Should Christians be willing to become martyrs?” or “Should Christian discipleship always include training in the art of martyrdom?” The question is rather, “How would a local church proceed, if it lived every day with the in-its-bones conviction that it does not have to survive?” That question is thought theologically,
