“..So the honour is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence.”..” 1Pt2v7-8
🗿 🥌⛰🧱 Stoners gonna stone, we are rocks 1Pt2v5, built on the Rock Mt16v18, built on the Rock of Ages Is26v4 - a veritable cairn of faith.
We are rocks - contra flimsy faith: a skimming stone, a pebble dash, synthetic and weightless, without depth or density.
We are rocks - contra religione: a blockheaded immutable stonecold masonic edifice, a lumpen dead weight, a millstone too heavy to lift and too big to fail Mt23v4 Mk9v42
💎 Don’t mind all the Rocks that I’ve got:
“v11! Architectural life-verses! Sermons in Stone! By comparison to Lk19v40's stones which worship, these stones here offer a dialogical lament. Awesome. The very components of the building speak their unjust means of production, exploitatively extracted elements. Combined with v6's 'heaping up...' What is a 'heap' and what is 'not your own' in this world? The glass on glass of plundered gains and the conspicuous disparity of wealth heaped up on SE1's skyline?” Hk2
“If we are buildings, whitewashing our scars hides our healing.. Whitewashing our structure is worse, even, by obscuring your foundation stones you claim by omission to be self-founded, a self-made obviation of a creator..” Ez13-14
“Taken away from you, once-Christian England. There were stones our house was built on, England, there were patterns, predicates, principles, and ultimately the good news of a person who saves. How did those becomes offensive? How did a gospel become so distasteful to a people who had so known its fruit? Because it is an affront to our self-reliance.” Mt21v43-44
“Jesus verbal prowess pours forth from his own innate wordness, all former words anticipate him Jn5v39, and he himself is a word, the word Jn1v1, a greek alphabet soup Rv1v8, he's a typographic punch in the face, a jot-and-tittle, muscle-and-bone, transcendental signifier. Out of a semiotic quarry, we fashion the building blocks of grammatical constructions, but he is the cornerstone and the bedrock, the source code and the punch line. Every truth ever scribed is but footnotes to Jesus.” Mk13v31-32
“Jesus dies suddenly and is buried hastily, he is whisked off the table so quickly, that for a slow motion moment the tower of cards hovers in midair. .. Salome, Mary, Mary a fluster flock of lucid panic rising on instinct, shopping on impulse, scrabbling for contact in this new unmoored delirium, a fantasy in which there-is-no-stone to roll away any more than there is anything concrete to lean on in a world devoided of Christ.” Mk16v1-2
““not leave one stone upon another” The disciples elsewhere comment Mk13v1 “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones..” painting a picture of Jerusalem as conspicuously adorned. .. Jesus' comment just prior that the Lk19v40 “the stones would cry out..” cannot have been unaware that the last stones to cry out were Habakkuk's, who did so as a cry for help under the crushing strain of injustice.” Lk19v43-44
“When is a stone a stumbling stone? What is stumbliness as a quality? Christ is a stumbling block, but by contrast with what? By contrast with the smooth space of a well-oiled platonic universe, a parametric paraboloid in CGI, a total environment of lickably slick seamless surfaces. We desperately want God to be impersonal, codifiable, predictable, generic. But. We stumble into the quiddity of Christ, the very this-ness, the strange haecceity that says, Christ is this and not that, here and not there, a person not a program. Christ is the monstrous carbuncle on the face of the law's abstraction, an obnoxious protrusion of artefactual specificity. So, the gospel is a tear in the veil, it disrupts, it is a trip switch, a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.” Rm9v33
““Stones would cry out” is there any way to read this that doesn't fall into empty hyperbole or weird literalism? The Bible has plenty of proto-animism, Rm8v22's creation groaning in eager expectation and Is55v12's hills breaking forth in song, trees of the field clapping their hands, and perhaps the most interesting Hk2v11's stone's crying out from the wall and the beam from the woodwork responding.
Maybe the rocks won't literally cry out. But. It behoves anyone who allegorises these verses and relegates the language to mere hyperbole to justify that as a faith decision measured by the fruit it bears. Allegorisers must gird up their metaphorical loins and live more like a symbol. If they believe that a literalistic reading is inaccurate, their claim would be most fully demonstrated by showing that derivative literalist praxis is unattractive and unprofitable, by comparison to the joy of a more conservative reading.
Maybe the rocks won't literally cry out. But. If that is the case, it should still be possible for a casual observer of the church to be made to wonder if it could be a live possibility given the earth-shaking effulgence of radical and unfetterable worship going on.
Maybe the rocks will literally cry out. It seems a simple thing for those who come-as-children to suspend their disbelief on this matter.
I was put in mind of a childhood game Zoombinis which features many talking rocks.
I was put in mind of Noel Moules' Q&A here last year on Christian Animism, fashioning "Rocks are persons" as a provocation.
I was put in mind of Levi Bryant's Flat Ontology at the spooky deep end of speculative realism - there is undeniably a need to re-enchant the version of nature which modernity as so totalised.
But, Animism is problematic. Even Panentheism is unboundaried. They have no self-limiting principle and they obscure the responsible moral distinction between the human and non-human - taken seriously it is either sentimental or terrifying, as a privileged metropolitan thought experiment - which I tried to express in my response to Peter Buchanan’s Big Rethink
What's the worst that can happen in seeking to push the inanimate to within an inch of its metaphor - surely better church architecture at least? Rm8v19's groaning of nature is it waiting for the sons of God to be revealed, that is us taking our right place in the natural world, as servant participant gardeners, cooperating with nature in right reverence.” Lk19v39-40