As this debate has played out there has been a cacophony of voices wanting to respond. Some of them have in insulting ways and others have through more conciliatory. In this post I want to try and give voice to a few more thoughts that I will neither take responsibility for or defend further. Before I continue let me renounce any claims to true knowledge, I am just playing with a few opinions whose truth value remains unknown.

First upon reading Dave's post below I was struck with something I had never expected of him. I am referring to his refusing to allow those outside the Church (which Church is that again?) any access to the thought of Paul, that venerable Saint. "You can't have him!" is not just Dave's refusal to the recent work being done with the thought of Paul, it is a refusal one is seeing from many theologians. Philosophers are infringing upon their territory in a time when theology has no privileged place either within the academic world or in the church (neither, it seems, cares too much for it at the expense of all three). Their sovereignty over knowledge concerning the organized thought of the church is being threatened and so out come the knives to protect what little it has left.

If this is how it must be, then I want to say, "Fine, you can keep the dirty bastard and the rest of scripture too. If that means I don’t Augustine, fine! But you don’t the Greek philosophers! Oh, and give me back my black t-shirt, you bitch!” Divorce, we know, is always messy. Still, giving up these things doesn’t bother me all that much. Even when I was a dedicated evangelical I found reading the Bible tedious and boring. Though in the past, when I tried to be a theologian and only found myself being a theological abortion, I felt rather guilty for that - that is no longer the case. I know I’m not alone in this, since it is apparent that the "Word of God" either has no bearing on the political lives of people and when it does it is usually negative. When philosophers began to play around with the biblical ideas it added some life to the dead letter, but it is a life that I can do without if I am refused access to those ideas by virtue of my allegiance with immanence. While I think Paul's work (and it is only work, not necessarily truth) is very interesting when attempting to think through the nature of law and how to overcode that law, it is not worth fighting for the right to this resource and using further resources on an issue I don't find to be important (the sovereignty of theology) is wasteful.

I'm not sure what is meant by eschatological transcendence. In all my work on eschatology, which should be noted was all a way of dashing my aborted children upon the rocks, I never thought of it as transcendent. Transcendence it seems to me is always destroyed by any kind of eschaton. Transcendence has historically been a way of causing some controlled effect to come about in the future. Or to state this differently, a way of controlling the present. Transcendence is a way of covering over the immanent structures that guide our thought. At least this is how I've understood it philosophically and politically. If this is the case, something like the eschaton (which means "least important" in the Greek) is a uniquely immanent event. Such is how I've always understood the "Christ-event", that the death of a relatively unimportant and failed revolutionary changed the direction of world-history seems, to me, to have nothing to do with transcendence and everything to do with immanence.

The flip side, of course, is that transcendence can come to stand for the "to-come" or the outside. Spinozisitc ontology does not allow for an outside, because even death happens on the same smooth plane as life. However in Deleuze's work on Leibneiz (on which I deny any knowledge) he speaks always of the folds within this smooth space. When things are folded on top of each other, or when suddenly is in a relationship that was unforeseen and radically alters the course of all other relationships, something like this transcendence happens. This is always a transcendence that gives up any claims to being an outside, to being in control or having possession of some higher truth. This is why I think the work of the immanent philosophers does not slip into a non-eschatological understanding of the world, rather it is truly an eschaton of the world. This is like the eschatological event that Negri works through in his Time For Revolution. Here it is a sense of kairos that can only happen in the immanent world, the real world of hungry workers, dancing couples, creators and not creations. I will agree that they have situated that eschatology in something that may not be understood as Christian, but that eschatology has been an aborted failure.

I say that this has been a failure because the eschatology of modern Christianity (even the radical parts) is an eschatology with an end that is calculable. Though many would want to protest otherwise, ultimately we know what the "reign of God" means and what will happen when it comes. It will be radical, sure, but it will be the kind of radical in-breaking we always thought of when we were virgins just to find out that, yes, it really is like that. It is an eschatology of possession: one that we can refer to in order to quell radical action now, which I understand to be action outside of normal Liberal channels of power (Reformed Christianity), or one that we can refer to stake out a place for the Church (Catholic-in-the-broad-sense Christianity).

I say all of this, some which sounds dismissive (it's not), and yet I still consider myself to be a Christian (I'll accept no guilt for that either). I enjoy going to church, I enjoy when the liturgy is good and when it is bad. I enjoy Christian folks (of the non-Evangelical type) and think that some of what the Church has done for them has been really good and some has been really bad. I don't think the Church holds the ultimate truth, it simply can't offer what it doesn't have. Even if the idea of Church as radical politics is attractive it is only attractive as a model, a thought experiment. One could say of Hauerwas and his school, "Hauerwas would be the most brilliant thinker around if after writing all his books he admitted it was all a thought experiment, but as it is he is only a clown."

I hope that none of these aborted thoughts have offended you, any of you. I just wanted to share these fragments with friends - for edification or derision, but there will be no defense and no admission from me and I expect none from you.