(Ir)religiosity

I’m taking an online class this semester called “The Way of Emergent Church and Ministry,” taught by the one and only Tony Jones.  This week we read John Caputo’s book/essay Philosophy and Theology.  It’s a great, short, and thought provoking read.  I imagine I’ll be rereading it and using it for reference often.  In less than 100 pages, Captuo provides a concise history of continental philosophy whilst suggesting the theology and philosophy need not be completely divorced as modernity has insisted.  On page 14 Caputo writes:

“Religion needs theology and theologians need philosophy if they are going to anything more than tell us that God told them so when pressed about their faith.”

Several pages prior he states the same thing in a different way:

“If we think of philosophical thinking and thoelogical thinking as two different acts or modes of thinking, as two different dimensions of a whole human life, then we can imagine the two acts cohabiting happily in the same head, yielding a person who would be a thinking believer, or a believing thinker, a person of learning and faith.”

The overall thrust of Caputo’s thesis is that orientation and turn toward the postmodern is opening up many new — or not so new if you look back prior to the Enlightenment, which he does – possibilities for the playful interaction between philosophy and theology.  The two are usually pitted against one another, a mistake Caputo credits to the overall modernization and fragmentation of disciplines.  But for him, the two overlap more than not.

What do you think of this idea?  How are philsophy and theology related?  And, for you, which one comes first?  That is, to which act or mode is your thinking fundamentally rooted?

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I recieved some more Transforming Theology material the other day.  Three pamphlets:  two on the bible and one on process theology by John Cobb, entitled “Process Theology:  An Introductory Introduction,” which, because of the subtitle, immediately caught my eye.

As I understand it, the aim of  Transforming Theology project is bring the church and the academy back into dialogue with one another in order to participate in individual and collective transformation.  If that is true, then this process theology booklet makes a good contribution.

It is very short.  A mere 30 pages containing the manuscript of a lecture Dr. Cobb gave at Claremont School of Theology back in 2004.  The subtitle is spot on; it is about as introductory as introductory can be, but that is its strength.  Because of its philosophical nature (Whitehead, Hartshorne, etc.), process theology is often dismiss by many non-academicians who lack such a background.  However, process thought is in a unique position to provide a lasting contribution to practical theology in my opinion because of its answer to theodicy and its suggestions as to the nature of God.

Because process theology’s answer to both those questions (why evil? and who is God?) tends to diverge from the traditional views many Christians hold (at least in my experience) an account of process theology that relies on scripture more than philosophy is needed in order to adequately bring it into dialogue with the average person in the pew.

Cobb does exactly that in this short essay.  I found it to be surprisingly accessible and I almost wished it were longer.  That may be another strength.  It just enough to whet the appetite of one who has no prior exposure to process theology or a background in philosophy.  Just enough to spark a conversation.

The pamphlets are published by the Center for Process Studies.  I think they would make excellent brochecure box stuffers!

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I heard Shane Claiborne speak at an event put on by the Boston Faith & Justice Network last Saturday.  It was a good event.  Shane gave a variation of his standard stump talk with some updated anedcotes that I don’t remember hearing the last time I saw him.

There was one quote, however, that is worth retelling.

At one point, Shane was talking about how Christians, and the church in general, tend to approach word and deed from a position of inflated self-righteousness.  To drive his point home he jokingly compared the church to the donkey that carried Jesus into Jerusalem during his last week.  He made a few funny points about how the donkey was probably feeling pretty good about himself — watching the crowds and listening to them cheering — and pointed out that such an attitude is not unlike that of many Christians and many churches.  We like to take the credit for something we have no business boasting about.

All this culminated when Shane drove his point home by saying:

“We’re just the asses that get to bring Jesus!”

I love it!  And it’s so true.  We’re all just asses trying to do the best we can to be a humble conduit for the gospel.  Let us never forget that.

That is the all important question that Augustine occupies himself with in his Confessions.  Augustine is never really satisfied with any of his answers because those answers, for him, amount to nothing more the a visual image of an invisible God and ultimately fail to grasp God as God.

I think Augustine’s question has to become our question, a question that must always be lived out within our experience as the all important linchpin of all our theological discourse and reflection.  It is the question of religion.

What would your answer be?  What is it that you love when you love your God?

I could answer with many of virtues that we find so important in theology.  But each one seems to fall short.  What is that I love when I love my God?  Is it love itself?  Justice?  Hope?  Wisdom?  All these are legitimate answers, but each one seems to, when I name it, place restraints and limits on God as God.  Perhaps the best response is all these answers and more.  The more I contemplate possible answers the more I realize that I am wholly inadequate to formulate an answer.

Any answer to this question is provisional, and always arises ad hoc in wake of the event of God.  So my answer today will likely differ from my answer tomorrow just as it differs from my answer yesterday.  And the true paradox is that none of those answers — past, present, or future — is necessarily wrong, as it were.

So again, what do I love when I love my God? I will answer for today.

I am becoming more and more convinced that God is not an object to be contemplated or an external idea to be reflected upon but a reality to be participated in and a life in which we all share.

If that is true then perhaps the best way I can answer this all important question is to say that when I love my God I love you — yes, you.  Whoever you are, however you are, whenever you are and whatever you are doing…I. Love. You.  If you are reading this, if you are a human being and participate in the sharing of this life, then I…love…you.  That is what I love when I love my God.

How would you answer?  What is it that you love when you love your God?

Hmmmm. Not so much.

The Germans versus the Greeks.  Brilliant!

The following is a parable a wrote some time ago.  I am re-posting it here in its original form without revision.

There was once a very poor man, an addict in fact, who made his home on the streets of a very large affluent city.  Indeed, he lived off the leftovers of the rich.  All his life this man had never darkened the doors of a church, nor heard the message of the gospel, though many monolithic churches abounded in the city.

As it happens on a particular Sunday, for no particular reason, this man decided to attend a church service.  He chose a very ordinary looking church, one with red brick, a full parking lot, and a tall, white steeple rising high into the air, almost as if to reach the heavens.

The man arrived as the sermon was already in progress, he seated himself in a near empty pew in the back of the sanctuary and began to listen. He was quite surprised, indeed startled to hear the preacher angrily delivering a message of judgment and condemnation.  He sat petrified in disgust and even fear as the preacher began to bellow louder and louder about the in inherent wickedness of humanity and the impending damnation that awaited all persons in eternal torment.  The man began to wonder why he was put on this earth in the first place.

As the message of sin and death wore on and became more explicit, the poor addiction ridden man, who no doubt came to seek comfort and alleviation from his pain among these Christians, grew even more distraught and disenfranchised than before.  Having heard quite enough of this “good news,” the man stood up while the preacher was still pontificating and exited the church.

He walked away from the building and toward the outskirts of the city.  He approached a bridge spanning a massive river below.  He walked to the middle of the bridge and climbed outside the guardrail to the very edge.  He looked over the edge at the water below, waited a moment, and then stepped off falling to his death.

Are we brokering a gospel of restoration or one of death?

“A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.  As opposed to a curious person who explores first and then considers whether or not he wants to accept the ramifications.  A curious person embraces the tension between his religion and something new, wrestles with it and through i, and then decides whether to embrace the new idea or reject it. Curious is the key word.  [It has] nothing to do with organized religion.  It has to do with a desire to understand, a desire to try, a desire to push whatever envelope is interesting. [...] What we’re seeing is that fundamentalism really has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with an outlook regardless what your religion is.”                                                                                                                                       — Seth Godin in Tribes, pg. 63-64

Really, really interesting.  Thoughts?

Dr. Philip Clayton thinks we have:

“It’s not that hard. If you go [to scripture] with new eyes, it’s a living and vibrant text about a living and vibrant God. [...] We have fallen into the heresy of orthodoxy.”

His larger point is of course that we have allowed our tacit theological assumptions determine how we approach the text and how we think about God. I don’t think we can ever completely free ourselves from our interpretive biases, try as we might. But we can free ourselves from the old, tired theologies of the past (which were really important and revolutionary in their time) and allow the text to marinate in our culture and our context. Then we can better understand what it might mean to be Christian here and now.

I think he may be on to something.

Thoughts?

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So I’m participating in the new Transforming Theology Project as member of the blogger consortium.  Dr. Philip Clayton explains what the project is all about in a short video here.  Next month, theologians and church leaders will be meeting to discuss how theology can be transformed, or better yet,  freed, from the ivory towers of the academy and placed back in the trenches of the church where it belongs.

Part of the project, since it is aimed at tranforming theology for the people, is to involve bloggers, who will read and critically engage books from various theologians and church leaders, hopefully coming up with some pressing questions that will stimulate the larger conversation.

First up is John Cobb’s Reclaiming the Church sent to me last week by Tripp Fuller, of Homebrewed Christianity fame.

The book itself is really short, only 110 pages.  I almost wish it were longer.  I say that because Cobb spends a lot of time diagnosing the problem, which is good and he does so well.  But I think want is really needed are tangible, practical ways in which this gap between the academy and the church can be bridged.    We need people to cast a vision and offer a plan of action.

Part of this may have to do with when the book was published — it is now 12 years old.  Not that old, but when you consider what has taken place in the church over that period time it makes sense.  Let me explain.

As Cobb sees it, the problem in part — though he nuances it a bit more — rests on what he calls the “professionalization of theology.”  He argues that just over the last 50 years or so theology has been moved outside of the church and isolated in the university.  He states in the preface:

The church has come to identify theology with what professionals do. Since what professionals do has been increasingly determined by the norms of the university rather than by the needs of the church, the church has lost interest in what it understands to be “theology.” Too often the result has been that the church has ceased to think about its own life in terms of its faith, a faith that has itself become vague and unconvincing.

The abandonment and failure to have a more holistic faith with an informed and critically thought out theology has lead to two things in Cobb’s estimation:  a loss of passion and subsequent lukewarmness.  The church has simply ceased to be relevant because it has ceased to engage its culture, its context and its world by continually developing and re-developing a practical theology.

Cobb argues that this “professionalization” was brought on by Enlightenment rationalism and modernity in general.  The American church borrowed theological method and pedagogy from the German school and as theology became professionalized it also became a detached, scientific enterprise that offered little, if anything, to the church itself.  Disciplines themselves were fractured as theology was needless parsed into various sub-categories: ethics, systematic theology, church history and so on.

In the meantime the cultural and philosophical ground upon which the church stood literally shifted underneath its feet.  Cobb ends the book suggesting that if theology is to be reclaimed by the church, both the church and the academy as instiutions must appropriately accommodate and respond to the new emerging, postmodern worldview.  He argues that the shift from modernity to postmodernity opens up new possibilities for a transformative theology.

I would argue that much of what Emergent has done in the last ten or so years has greatly helped in making sense of the cultural and philosophical shifts that are occurring.  Many emergent/ing churches are now taking theological education very seriously and many pastors are in conversation with academicians and vice versa.  For some, the differences between the tradition roles of each office are becoming less clear. I wonder how Cobb might write the book differently today in light of that.

To be sure, I am not suggesting that any of this is enough.  Our seminaries and schools of theology are still very much entrenched in a very modern, Enlightenment-based pedagogy.  From that we need to be freed.  Furthermore, many churches still frown upon “theology” as a collective, ecclesial enterprise.  Many pastors and lay persons still don’t consider themselves theologians because there is a certain stigma surrounding the term.  This has to change.

We need some serious, creative pastors and academicians who are willing to step up and dialogue with one another about theological education.  Somewhere between the lectern in the classroom and the pulpit in the church theology is getting lost.  We need to find out where.  In the meantime professors need to understand that it’s okay to be pastoral and pastors that it’s not snobbish to be intellectual.  More people need to challenge those traditional roles.

I think the implications of such a conversation might suggest that we need to both rethink our pedagogy in the academy and our preaching/worship in the church.  I have to wonder if both institutions are willing not only to hear that but also modify their approaches in order to allow actual, tangible transformation of theology to take place.

I have hope, but bulky institutions don’t usually take to those things easily.  We shall see.

Thoughts?