Matthew Rock, Author at ��Ƶ of Theology & Psychology

Integrative Project Spotlight: Matthew Rock

Matthew Rock — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 15:00:21 +0000

Later this month, our graduating and students will present their , the culmination of their work here at ��Ƶ. Until then, we’ll be spotlighting a handful of the presenting students as they reflect on their work. Here, Matthew Rock writes about his project, Know Your Enemy: American Incarceration & the Social Imagination of the Deep State.

If I had to point to one moment where my Integrative Project began to plant itself in my brain, I would go back to a single quote from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. It was the little seed in the soil of my theology and ecclesiology that eventually grew into an idea and then a conviction that consumed the better part of my final year here at school. She writes: “Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate.” I remember instantly feeling a punch to my gut—first asking myself, “How can I reconcile this statement—this truth—with the call of Jesus to love friends, neighbors, strangers, enemies…everybody?” And then, “Who is giving me this permission, and why the hell am I allowing them to be the moral, ethical, and social authority in my life instead of Jesus, the crucified God?”

As people hear about my project, they have naturally asked why I’m interested in this. Good question! In the spirit of full disclosure, I have no personal connection to the US criminal justice system. I’ve never been to prison, I have no family or friends in prison, and I am a white man who has little to no chance of being sentenced to prison (or just shot) simply for my skin color or social location. The only answer I can offer is weirdly reminiscent of a bad exorcism: the power of Christ compels me! There is nothing in my life that directly ties me to the prison industrial complex; but if I am to call myself a Christian, if I am to claim to be a disciple of Jesus, then I cannot in good conscience hide myself from the injustice and suffering of the millions under the control of the American punishment regime. And further, I believe my pastoral vocation demands that I think well not only about the current oppressive system but also what a Christian response should be.

I read a lot for this project…and yet there is so much more reading an adequate response really needs—probably a hundred-fold more. But some key works were The New Jim Crow (of course), Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution, Daniel Berrigan’s The Kings and their Gods, René Girard’s work on scapegoats, James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, Mike Lofgren’s article “Anatomy of the Deep State,” and most importantly William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ.

Oh and I listened to a whole bunch of Rage Against The Machine.

��油�Ի��’s The New Jim Crow is only the most well-known of a growing body of work denouncing the U.S. criminal justice system and its structural racism. There are many writers doing this, and they expose the dehumanizing injustice at the heart of this system, yet in my opinion lasting change remains a slim chance. And so I had to ask… Why? Here is where the big turn in my thinking came, where I really found some energy and hope in what the discipleship of Christ can offer. It has to do with what we can call “the social imagination.”

The social imagination is a society’s sense of what is and is not real, including the memory of how the society got where it is as well as hopes for the future. It is, ultimately, the reality we perceive ourselves living in and the options we believe we have. This project of mine argues that the American Deep State—what Lofgren defines as “a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process”—has manufactured an imagination in which we depend utterly on the State for what it has deemed our primary need: security. One significant node of this security apparatus is the prison industrial complex. The Deep State, I believe, has weaponized the criminal justice system in order to achieve its goal of immortality; as Berrigan writes, “As the pharaoh and other despots are aware, there are three ways of gaining admission to the sun boat and its voyage to immortality: wars won, territory expanded, and grand edifices erected.” Immortality is the primary goal of State power. It is a theological term that I believe helps us understand that we cannot simply conceive of political structures in civic or material terms. The political realm—particularly the State—is fundamentally a part of our social imagination, and in the language of Cavanaugh, theology is not just words about God but also “the mobilization of the human social imagination.”

Thus, incarceration functions as a means of the state achieving divinization because it supports the larger imaginative project of national security. State regimes, in order to justify their existence and legitimize their violence, create the very enemies from which they then protect their citizens. Using James Alison’s understanding of René Girard’s mimetic theory, I argue that the State punishes scapegoats by driving them into penitentiaries where they are stripped of their identities and scripted as enemies in the performance of the state imagination. Upon their return to society, they are dehumanized and renamed Felons, and the cycle continues.

Because the power of the Deep State lies in the power of its imagination, only another imagination can bring about real transformation. Without a transformed or redeemed imagination, all attempts at reform (legislative or otherwise) will fall flat. For the Church, this alternative is the Eucharist, which is itself a recontextualization of the Exodus memory. The Exodus is a paradigmatic narrative upon which a great deal of Jewish and Christian meaning is based, and it offers us a way to imagine our world and power structures that counters Deep State hegemony and immortality. The final section of this project contends that by bearing witness to Exodus and the cross, we live within a Christian imagination formidable enough to disrupt the carceral imagination. It is an imagination, however, that is cruciform; that is, it takes the form of and imitates Jesus’ obedience to God—an obedience which the powers could not abide. “The cross,” Brueggemann notes, “is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.”

The page limitations of this project, as well as the fact that this was a one-year master’s project and not a multi-year doctoral dissertation, meant that I was unable to spend much time thinking well on how this alternative imagination is lived out in practical, concrete ways. Cavanaugh offers multiple real examples, but they take place in a radically different context. I feel I have merely opened the door; the journey that follows is arguably much more difficult. But… opening the door is a start.

If you’re intrigued by what you read, we invite you to join us for this year’s presentations, and .

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A Grace You Did Not Know You Knew: Multidenominational Practice at ��Ƶ

Matthew Rock — Thu, 09 Oct 2014 20:30:48 +0000

When I try to speak about this last year, my third in ��Ƶ’s MDiv program, it starts out like a joke: “A Lutheran, an Episcopalian, a Presbyterian, a Quaker, a Mennonite, a Church of Christ…er, a Reformed Protestant, a Baptist, a Disciple of Christ, and a Free Churcher walk into a bar.” Except there’s no punchline; that’s just a normal outing for me and my friends in our MDiv cohort.

One of the most interesting—and I think most overlooked—aspects of getting a Master of Divinity degree from ��Ƶ is that we are a multidenominational institution that attracts students who are from (and who are seeking ordination with) a whole host of denominations. I, for one, came into this program as a “nondenom;” now I would say I’m a Mennonite/Anabaptist with Episcopalian sympathies and a deep love for Eastern Orthodox theology. (I’m not sure what that makes me—other than excited for what’s next.) We are future pastors headed into a wide swath of the religious geography of the U.S., and thus we are constantly running headlong into each other. Sometimes it’s a hug, and sometimes it hurts; it’s usually great, often frustrating, and always beneficial. Much of this is due to the nature of our education at ��Ƶ and the many voices to which we are exposed—both in the writings of published theologians and in the dialogue we have with one another.

The third year of the program is the most practical and hands-on. We are in internships, we participate in communion together, and we meet weekly for MDiv Practicum (“a practical section of a course of study; from late Latin, neuter of practicus, ‘practical.’”). The year is a chance to explore and practice how we pastor, given the particularity of our own stories and the different church traditions we find ourselves located. For my cohort that often meant figuring out how to navigate our differences on such sacred ground as the Eucharist—or “the Lord’s Supper”, or “the Breaking of Bread,” or “Mass,” or “Blessed Sacrament,” or “Divine Liturgy,” or “Holy Communion,” or simply “communion.” What do we even call it?! In fact, one week I and two classmates, also dear friends, spent hours—like, multiple hours—wrestling about how we would preside over the Eucharist together. Honestly, I think if the conversations had been in person rather than mostly online, there would have been more than just figurative wrestling going on. Yet we found a way to come together, hold our differences, and lead our fellow students.

And now, beginning my fourth and final year, I find myself immensely grateful for that third year and the ecclesiological diversity I experienced. When you sit next to a Lutheran, for instance, or receive the Bread and Cup from an Episcopalian, you cannot simply discount some abstracted theological view. You are confronted with flesh and bone: a face, a friend, a very smart and critical-thinking pastor with whom you may differ—and sometimes more strongly than you ever realized. When you stand across from a Friend (in the “Friends Church” sense) or practice pastoral counseling with a Disciple (in the “of Christ” sorta way), you discover a grace you did not know you knew, to use poet Christian Wiman’s phrase, as we discover the river from which we came, all of us, despite our various streams.

At the beginning of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church, he appeals “that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose.” He then goes on to say that they are quarreling and saying ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ etc. and to stop it. I agree with the general sentiment and idea of the Apostle, but if I were to write the epistle for my cohort, I would update his words slightly:

Now I affirm to you all, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that we will never be in full agreement and that there will always be divisions among us, but that we still through grace are united in the same mind and the same purpose. For I have seen and experienced the quarrels among us, my brothers and sisters, and so too the beauty and goodness we’ve found in our differences. What I mean is that each of us says, “I belong to the Anabaptists,” or “I belong to the PCUSA,” or “I belong to a Free Church.” And I thank God for that! As at Pentecost, we are given particular languages with which to express the same grace and love of God through Jesus, because a diverse world requires that particularity of expression. Bless our disagreements and praise God for our divisions, for it is in the diversity of our practices that we together climb to the heights of God’s surprising goodness, and in the struggle and the dissonance that we enter further into the depths of God’s mercy.

May it ever be so.

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Matthew Rock, Author at ������Ƶ of Theology & Psychology

Integrative Project Spotlight: Matthew Rock

A Grace You Did Not Know You Knew: Multidenominational Practice at ������Ƶ

Matthew Rock, Author at ��Ƶ of Theology & Psychology

A Grace You Did Not Know You Knew: Multidenominational Practice at ��Ƶ