Church Planting

Does God want to plant a church in London Bridge? A student told me he’d tried to get permission from the London Baptist Association, as they had a building there. It took too long and he’d left London.

Then some others shared they were thinking about it. One variant was selling the building and buy a shop-front as a café for outreach, and to house three mission agencies – Street Pastors, Urban Expression, and Parish Nursing.

It occurred to me to be facilitator, to see if there was synergy about collaborating. We met last week: Barney from Citygates, Andrew from Kings Cross, Darren from Gants Hill, Jim from Urban Expression, Jose from YWAM.

Darren is exploring whether God’s called him to set up a business chaplaincy to the office. Others wondering about this church plant.

We felt that either possibility with the building could work. But also felt this was the wrong way to begin, with premises rather than people. God’s call is paramount: on a person to lead a plant, and group of people to be the core of a plant. We have a cart but no horse. It’s a lesson in discernment.

Who is God calling to do this?

Deleuze 7: Speculation

Baudrillard is another postmodern stylist. But his later works appear lazy, hastily thrown together collections of aphorisms. Clever, but slapdash.

 Actually, they are carefully crafted. They are, however, the logical outcome of his perceptions of contemporary society, the loss of meaning.

This is all there is: the play of signs, no over-arching system of meaning. Hence the collections of pithy, short statements, allusions, observations, assertions.

One commentator described him, prophetically  lamenting the loss of signification, significance in our sign-saturated society.

No wonder Meillassoux and Laruelle try to rescue realism. They recognise where postmodern relativism leads.

But without foundations, realism is only ‘speculative’. They can only speculate about absolutes, because actually there aren’t any.

Consequently Ray Brassier concludes that underlying their thought there is nothing. He overcomes the threat of nihilism by embracing it.

Modernism’s method of critique cut off the branch on which they were sitting. Postmodernism played with the branches.

After postmodernism, philosophers have lit a fire with the wood, to stave off the night.

Now they’re telling each other stories around the fire, while the wolves circle around in the darkness.

When the embers burn out, they will turn round and see the red eyes of the beast.

Deleuze 6: Chaos

Deleuze’s understanding of philosophy as concept-formation is a powerful provocation towards creativity and invention.

But Deleuze’s subject is forced to create because reality is only chaos. The cosmos is a chaosmos. There is no-sense, non-sense.

We [must] impose order, meaning, on chaos, by selecting those aspects that concern us, we might say existentially. Perception is subtraction from the multiplicity of signs.

We have to make a cut in the flow. Like the keel of a boat cutting through the waves of the sea, this is how subjectivity and how knowledge are constructed, made, not discovered.

This is his tragedy, despite the creativity and brightness of Deleuze’s philosophy, the suggestiveness of his allusions.

His thinking requires fabulations, fictions. These are needed to provoke, to create. Not objective, absolute truth, but prompts to action, the creation of new events.

But when Deleuze encounters views he does not like, it is only a matter of style, personal preference.

To counter those who adopt a conservative path, who support the tyrant, who choose to make the cut elsewhere, he has no rational recourse.

All he can do is hurl insults, and refer to their stupidity. Hardly reasonable discourse. Simply the use of boo words.

Deleuze 5: Critique

This is an immanent critique of Deleuze [and not just of French, but all contemporary, philosophy]. I am not importing foreign concepts; not criticising Deleuze because he is not a Christian, not believing in absolutes, like truth or morality.

On the contrary, the grounds of critique are thoroughly immanent; that is they lie within the terms of his own logic. He himself wants to believe in values, such as justice.

Deleuze’s own system, however, does not provide any grounds for doing so. The critique confronts his philosophy with its own logical contradictions.

Deleuze’s suicide is not a reason for rejecting his philosophy. That would be the worst kind of ad hominem argument. His death was his response to a life of longterm ill-health and physical pain.

His suicide is nevertheless a tragic poetic commentary of a philosophy that provided no way out of the huis clos.

Without a word from outside, there is no standpoint for critique, and no source for the truly new. As Christians we still debate how the word, written and living, applies today. But at least we hear the word addressed to us. And this gives us permission to believe in the possibility of new possibles.

Deleuze 4: Trapped

For Deleuze, however, philosophy must take place on the ‘plane of immanence’, on the horizontal dimension. There is no transcendent, no religious, spiritual, dualistic, dimension.

Fresh concepts must therefore emerge from the actual empirical conditions. It is a transcendental empiricism, striving to go beyond, into these lines of flight, responding to and creating new possibilities.

But in this case, to pursue the image, there can be no line of flight in the sense of ‘flying’, no actual take off, because there is no vertical, transcendent dimension. We remain stuck on the level of what is. Nothing genuinely new can emerge, only developments of existing trends.

We are left with Meillassoux. He criticises Deleuze because he thinks that Deleuze’s relativism has led to a situation where we believe only  in belief. That is, we tolerate fanatical fideism,  religious extremism, because we have no permissable way to outlaw it.

Meillassoux therefore advocates a new speculative realism about values, founded on facticity. For him, we must speak of absolutes, like justice and equality, but without absolutising them; maintaining the  necessity of absolutes without thinking anything is absolutely necessary.

This is the impasse of contemporary philosophy – wanting to have your cake and eat it.

Deleuze 3: Emergence

But Deleuze opposes thinking to ‘stupidity’, which he calls low, base, shameful; supporting tyranny. From where does he derive this binary value judgment?

Deleuze follows Sartre’s distinction between the conceptual and pre-conceptual. So criticisms of existentialism also apply to Deleuze’s work.

Philosphy for Deleuze is dependent on non-philosophical material to do its work. Hence his reliance on literature and science to supply images for his reflections.

Even the poetic madness of the inspired seer-prophet is permissible, not as true, but suggestive, of fresh perspectives and openings.

Deleuze is searching for ways out of Sartre’s huis clos. To overcome the blockage of structures, he creates the image of the nomadic war machine, travelling freely over the steppes, pursuing multiple ‘lines of flight’.

‘Flight’ here does not mean ‘to fly’, but ‘to flee’. It refers to the room for manoeuvre that a barbarian horde possesses against the fixed lines of a static army’s positions. It therefore speaks of creativity, movement, emergence.

For Deleuze, philosophy is about concept creation, understood as a combination of other component ideas. This rethinking of philosophy as constructive is helpful. It encourages us to not just pick new ideas, but to create them, to explain emergent new situations.

Deleuze 2: Values

Deleuze exemplifies the futile attempt to escape from the trap of postmodernist  relativism produced by modernism.

If perception is of what concerns us, then, he admits, everything is a point of view. So there is no way to value one perspective over another. The result is relativism.

The search is on then for ways to avoid this conclusion, since every philosopher also wants to find support for liberal values, and for justice in the world. Where do we get them?

The breakdown of machine is meant to lead to something new emerging, which will be more liberating, creative and unfixed.

Without an outside, if anything is possible, what reason is there to not preferr staying the same, as one possible outcome? If there is an infinity of possibles, then surely that conservative possible, of non-change, is the more radical?

Likewise, building on Heidegger, Deleuze says we do not actually want to think, or philosophize, but that we are forced to do so, by some machinic breakdown. This may be an important insight.

We prefer our idols, our illusions. Changing circumstances threaten our traditional ways of coping. Yet we resist change. Even when it’s God who invites us to come higher.