From the Introduction

In Flannery O’Connor’s novel, The Violent Bear It Away, the protagonist, young Tarwater, is “saved” from the corrupting influences of the modern technocratic educational system by his great-uncle Mason, who takes him to the wilderness in order to raise him for a prophetic vocation—a calling that Mason identifies with freedom: “I saved you to be free, your own self!” It is a freedom taught in a dramatic alternative form of education: “he was left free for the pursuit of wisdom, the companions of his spirit Abel and Enoch and Noah and Job, Abraham and Moses, King David and Solomon, and all the prophets, from Elijah who escaped death, to John whose severed head struck terror from a dish.”Prophetic education intends to free the self to become a “character,” also known as a “person” (persona is a character mask in the ancient theatre), by situating agency within a complex, cosmic divine-human drama that is simultaneously visible and invisible, material and spiritual, temporal and eternal. Tarwater is easily transported by his great-uncle’s perorations on freedom; he is less enamored of old Mason’s insistence that this prophetic freedom is closely tied to baptism “into the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.” This messianic education of desire is both inspiring and excruciating.

O’Connor can offer us this vision of education because as a novelist she is attuned to the spiritual and artistic implications of the prophetic vocation displayed in the Bible. The writer, she says, must extend his or her gaze beyond surface problems “until it touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets.” Surface visibility points beyond itself to the realm of mystery—mysterion in Greek, sacramentum in Latin—that remains hidden and yet real, becoming visible or “unveiled” (that is, apocalypsed) only in parabolic signs that are traces of both inner and outer movement. For those not freely attuned to the movement above and below the surface of things, these signs remain impenetrable, meaningless, foolish. For O’Connor, “everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is the organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it. It involves judgment.” Nothing requires the cultivation of such judgment and vision more in our own time and place than does the empire of Mammon, and the most central issue it raises is the question of desire as it relates to the very different measure of Messianic economics (oikonomia: oikos/oikia = household, domestic realm, property + nomos = law, Torah).

I was delighted to be asked to give the 2013 J.J. Thiessen lectures at my alma mater, the Canadian Mennonite University. As a young person struggling with the question of vision religiously, culturally, ethically, and politically, it was revealing and freeing for me to find myself in an educational community where questions of Mennonite identity were taken up in conversation with “as much of the world as can be gotten into it,” and in company with the whole biblical drama and its range of interpretation. Of relevance here is a story I told on the occasion of Harry Huebner’s retirement symposium in 2008, my first formal visit to the new campus, where I noted that my photo was not available on the graduation plaques hung in the CMU hallways. This was not a question of the traditional Mennonite suspicion of images. I suspect one reason my photo isn’t there is that I had a hard time graduating, not only because I didn’t finish my music requirement (which was waived after petition) but also because I had to undergo an “orthodoxy” interview. As an advanced undergraduate I was invited (privately, by a friend) to participate in a debate on how to interpret the early chapters of Genesis, which was held at another Christian college in southern Manitoba. I argued the position that the creation accounts ought not to be interpreted as historical or scientific accounts of cosmic origins, but as a dramatic mytho-poetic theological account countering the mytho-poetic creation stories of Israel’s neighbors. That debate turned out to be a much larger public occasion than I had anticipated, and formal letters questioning my orthodoxy were sent to my church denomination and to my college (the Mennonite Brethren Bible College). I vividly remember being invited into the office of the biblical studies faculty member who gently questioned me about my views of Scripture and faith. Ironically, it was the same professor who had taught me to read the Genesis narratives as I did (and still do, in Lecture 1), but whose questions in this meeting revolved around the person of Christ. This was an important formative experience for me as a person; it helped build what Kierkegaard calls “inwardness,” something I’m trying to get at in these lectures by focusing on “desire” and how it informs our particular, but also shared, judgment—about scripture, about life, about orthodoxy/orthopraxis (right praise/right practice).

The original title of these lectures was “Mennonites and Mammon: Economies of Desire in a Post-Christian World.” Looking back, I should have called it an “apocalyptic” rather than “post-Christian” world, in keeping with Ivan Illich’s discerning comment: “I, at least, believe that I do not live in a post-Christian world, I live in an apocalyptic world. I live in the kairos in which the mystical body of Christ, through its own fault, is constantly being crucified, as his physical body was crucified and rose again on Easter day. I am…expecting the resurrection of the Church from the humiliation, for which the Church itself must be blamed, of having gestated and brought forth the world of modernity.” An apocalyptic world is charged with the revelation of the war between Christ (Messiah) and anti-Christ, in which there are no innocent parties or “persons”—and where the question of allegiance is of both ultimate and penultimate significance. So why not employ “apocalyptic” in my revised title? I think it is there, insofar as in New Testament, Christ and antichrist come into being (parousia, 2 Thess. 2) together in an apocalypse that “unveils” both simultaneously. That is to say, the mystery of love and the mystery of evil are agonistically coincident in the human world. Is it any accident that in this same apocalyptic text Paul says: “If any one will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:10)? Of all people, Mennonites should get that apocalyptic joke, quietest as it is. Paul is concerned with idleness and “mere busybodies, not doing any work” (2 Thess. 3:11). This is an economic matter. The point is that we completely receive our lives (the fulfillment of our desire) by grace, and yet are impelled by the example and command of the “Lord Messiah” to “work in quietness” (work like “hesychasts”—a mystical tradition of prayer in the everyday world; cf. 1 Thess. 4:11) in order to bring about the mysterious economy of divine love that can only be received in gratitude as a gift…or not. This remains a critical, apocalyptic wager. In these lectures, my plaintive cry is to bring as much of the world as possible into this apocalyptic field of vision, break down the false (empire, dare I say “empirical” divisions of antichrist in order to allow the ordinary, hidden mystery of the divine economy to “awake, and strengthen what remains” (Apocalypse of John 3:2). In my lectures, I structure this as the coincidence of erotics (our inborn, created desires and loves), kenotics (the messianic movement of self-emptying in order to be reborn, reordered and fulfilled), and liturgics (the “work” as service that gives itself over to this messianic process)