(Ir)religiosity

This is part two in an ongoing series on systematic constructive theology. See part one for a longer introduction and please keep in mind that the following is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc.  In other words, it is truly theology not a dogmatics. I look forward to the dialogue.

Contra traditional metaphysics and onto-theology, God, in our postmodern matrix, is not a Supreme, omnipotent Being or even Being itself; rather, the God revealed in the crucified body of Jesus Christ is a God otherwise than being, an event of eschatological possibility harbored by the name of theology which breathes life and dynamism to all things — God is dead, long live God.

In book ten of his Confessions Augustine asks, “What do I love when I love my God?”  a question he never fully answers for himself except to say that which we call God utterly transcends any categorization or conceptualization.  Negative and apophatic theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart are right to suggest that we cannot speak of what God is, only what God is not.  Indeed, to definitively claim what God is would be to create a conceptual idol. God is beyond naming and knowing, beyond nomination and that which cannot be captured or tamed within the confines of mere language.  But still we must speak.  We must develop some sort of logos concerning this enigma, yet this enigma lies beyond our logos. Therein lies the paradox, the tension.  God is that which is unknown, whose name cannot be uttered, but God is also that of which we are always speaking and thinking, thus “we must speak and yet we must maintain our silence”¹ in the excess of meaning and presence that is the un/known God.  We thus begin our venture into the doctrine of God with the humble admission that our language can only hope to point us toward the enigma to which we ascribe the name God but simply cannot do it justice.  Our theology of God will always be unfinished, incomplete, and provisional.  Those interested in nailing it all down will serve themselves well to not be theologians.  Theology is not an exacting enterprise nor is it interested in definitive explanations.  It is an ongoing, open-ended project that is more interested in approaching questions from a new vantage point and wrestling with the tension inherent in the questions than with providing easy answers.  Easy answers are hopelessly banal and trite, but the questions, the questions themselves are pregnant with meaning and possibility.  Thus theology approaches the question of God, the question of who or what God is, not in hopes of providing a clear-cut air tight answer, but, as Bertrand Russell says, “for the sake of the question itself.”²

Bracketing for a moment the ontological questions of to which we shall turn momentarily, let us first briefly comment upon Christianity’s unique, remarkable, and enigmatic concept of the Trinity, a notion that as profound ecclesiological implications.  Here the work of Jürgen Moltmann and Catherine LaCugna is particularly important.  Both emphasize the economic Trinity and hold that indeed the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa.  In other words, they ways in which the persons of the Godhead relates with one another — Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer³ — are inscribed to the very nature of God Godself.  Moltmann, for instance, in his The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, appropriates the Trinity in a manner that rejects what he calls “monarchical monotheism,” in which the second and third persons are subordinated to the third thereby constructing a hierarchical ordering.  Alongside Easter Orthodoxy and over against the subordinationism of the West, Moltmann and Lacugna emphasize the perichoresis and the mutual indwelling inherent in the Godhead in such a way that the identity of each person of is inextricably bound up and linked with the other, is indeed part of the other.  As such, the Trinity is a radically egalitarian community in which no one person dominates over another.  Further, for Moltmann, divine kenosis is not limited to the incarnation alone, rather it characterizes the relations inside the Trinity itself as each person empties itself into and for the sake of the other in loving communion.⁴ As such, this social notion of the Trinity establishes that “entering into divine life…is impossible unless we also enter into a life of love and communion with others.”⁵ Thus, the Trinity is not only a practical doctrine with radical consequences for Christian living it literally “revolutionizes how we think about God and about ourselves, and also how we think about the form of life, the politics, of God’s economy.”⁶ The practical significance of the Trinity for the community called church will be of the utmost importance in our discussion of ecclesiology and theological anthropology in later sections.

Turning now to the aforementioned ontological questions, perhaps one of the greatest missteps of historical Christianity is its appropriation of Greek metaphysics (or, depending on how one views the matter, its bequeathing of Scripture to Greek metaphysics).  For by doing so the God of the Scriptures, especially of the Hebrew Scriptures, was replaced by a stoic, uninvolved deity and the God of pathos replaced with deus ex machina who controls the universe from afar and is wholly uninterested in the plights of human beings.  Christian appropriations of Aristotelian thought assigned attributes to God such as omniscience, omnipotence, and impassibility, attributes alien to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.  Since then, Christian theology has been preoccupied with a singular question, a question any theology which is beholden to these attributes must answer — that of theodicy.  However, since at least the time of Søren Kierkegaard — who John Caputo interestingly calls a “prime progenitor”⁷ of postmodernism — and Friedrich Nietzsche a line of thought which came to fruition, more or less, in the work of Martin Heidegger,⁸ has provided the grounding necessary in order to speak of God after the end of traditional metaphysics and the demise of various onto-theologies.  Nietzsche was correct to proclaim that “God is dead,” insofar as God had come to be indentified with a metaphysics of presence in which God is conceived as the supreme Being above all other beings, indeed a Being that suspiciously looks a lot like human projection (Feuerbach) or the subconscious superego (Freud).  What postmodern thought offers, then, at its best, is not slippery relativism (which we dealt with above) but a way to think of God in the wake of the death of the death of God, a way to theologize after the death of God.⁹  Such will be our aim in this section:  to utilize postmodern thought in such a way that theologizing becomes possible again.

From the outset, we must be clear that any such theology will necessarily involve a wholesale rejection of the traditional metaphysical attributes of God, namely impassibility, omnipotence, and omniscience.  For as Moltmann points out apropos to Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover,” a God who is impassible and “incapable of suffering…would also be incapable of love”¹⁰ insofar as love involves loving others and not merely oneself alone, not to mention a God that is wholly incompatible with the revelation in Jesus Christ.  Many modern theologies seem determined to hold on to omnipotence for whatever reason, but despite the endless qualifications and bracketing of questions such as “why?” theodicy still rears its ugly head and any attempt to “explain” evil while retaining God’s so-called omnipotence within an onto-theological framework necessarily implicates God causally by virtue of that framework’s metaphysics.  As many theologians have noted, Auschwitz “spelled the end of theodicy.”¹¹ The problem, however, is that theology has not caught up.  The same holds true for omniscience and in this regard process theologians have done a remarkable job of rethinking God as that which does not know the future, indeed as that which is creating the future alongside humanity as a “becoming” rather than a static being.  The problem with process thought, however, is that does not go far enough. It still conceives of God theistically within a traditional, metaphysical framework.  What might God look like beyond that framework?

With our postmodern, post-foundationalist optic we find ourselves returning to Augustine’s question:  what is it that I love when I love my God?  Is God the best name we have for love, or is love that best name we have for God?  What is love anyway?  What can we do, then, but stand alongside the later Jacques Derrida and “make [Augustine’s] question [our] own?”¹²  It would seem, then, that reconceptualizing God outside the confines of a traditional metaphysics and onto-theology might involve treating Augustine’s question qua question, indeed as an open question and a query to which all theology must answer whilst admitting it can only develop answers and never an Answer.  The death of the modern God spells the end for any theology to capitalize its name.  In this respect, the work of postmodern philosopher/theologians John Caputo and Richard Kearney is especially helpful.  For Caputo, God is not a Being among others, or Being-Itself, or even the ground of Being as Paul Tillich might think.  Rather, God is beyond being or otherwise than being as Emmanuel Levinas likes to put it.¹³  Indeed, the very word “God” is a deconstructible name which harbors an impossible and undeconstrucible event.  As Caputo writes, “the name of God occurs, not on the plane of being, but of the event; it is the name of a signification or an interpretation, not a substance.”¹⁴  God is therefore beyond being and that “weak force,” another of Caputo’s expressions, that gives being its life, creativity, and dynamism.  Similar to the panentheistic God, in this framework everything is in God and pregnant with God’s possibility.¹⁵ Likewise, Richard Kearney speaks not of a God who is or is not but of a God-Who-May-Be¹⁶ in the tangible realization of eschatological possibility. Here God’s very existence is contingent upon our participation in the event and our willingness to allow Augustine’s question to remain an open question and one that we must continually pose and translate as we resist the temptation to relegate questions of God to traditional metaphysics.  The question then is not so much whether God exists, as onto-theology loves to continually ask, but whether the church is participating in God by allowing the event to lay claim to them. Here the meaning of the name of God “never comes down to a decision made in the order of being or knowledge, to deciding whether or not God exists; its meaning is shifted out of the circle of knowing and non-knowing, concealment and non-concealment, being and non-being,”¹⁷ to the realm of the hyper-real beyond that which is real or unreal.    It is in this way that we can begin to see what Derrida and Caputo mean when they speak of a “religion without religion,”¹⁸ or the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer of a “religionless Christianity.”¹⁹ Indeed, it is in this vein — contra metaphysics and onto-theology — that we might read Bonhoeffer when he writes,

[W]e cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have live in the world etsi deus non daretur (“as if God did not exist”). And this is just what we do recognize — before God!  God himself compels us to recognize it.  So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God.  God would have us know that we must live as men who manage out lives without him.  The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34).  The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.  Before God and with God we live without God.  God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, which he is with us and helps us.²⁰

After the death of God we still speak of God, not as an omnipotent, omniscience supreme Being above all else, but a crucified God revealed in the broken and tortured body of Christ, a God whose power is realized in his powerlessness.  This God is otherwise than being, a God beyond being, and a God of the event whose name is beyond all names, who is with all and in all; this is the God who may be, who comes to be as the church participates in the liberation of the oppressed and the realization of justice and peace in the world.

1. Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), 30. [↩]
2. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Radford, Virginia:  Wilder Publications, 2008) 101.  Russell was not, to be sure, speaking of the doctrine of God or even of theology but of the aim of philosophy.  Theology and philosophy have always had an odd relationship.  Here, though, it is not incorrect to equate their aims. [↩]
3. The use of personal and gendered language in relation to the Trinity is an important one and should not be overlooked.  For now, however, it will suffice to referred to them as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. [↩]
4. Cf. Moltmann, 118-19. [↩]
5. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us:  The Trinity and Christian Life (New York, New York:  Harper-Collins, 1993), 382. [↩]
6. Ibid., 383. [↩]
7. John D. Caputo, On Religion (New York, New York:  Routledge, 2001), 51. [↩]
8. Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (Chicago Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2003).  See also his Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (New York, New York:  State University of New York Press, 1996), passim. [↩]
9. This phrase is borrowed from a recent book by John Caputo and Gianni Vattimo entitled After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). [↩]
10. Moltmann, 23.  See also his The Crucified God (Minneapolis, Minnesota:  Fortress Press, 1993), passim. [↩]
11. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 181.  Here Caputo is referencing Moltmann (without citation).  Interestingly, Moltmann holds onto omnipotence himself and is thus still enmeshed within this framework we are presently deconstructing. [↩]
12. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Augustine and Postmodernism:  Confessions and Circumfession, (Bloomington Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2001), 3. The very fact that Derrida, who in the same work suggest that he “quite rightly passes for an atheist,” has the grounding to pose such a question suggest that we are already operating on a different plane outside of metaphysics and beyond onto-theology.  Indeed, the sheer fact that Derrida say he passes as an atheist rather than saying he is an atheist tell us that we are dealing with something beyond belief in one being among others. [↩]
13. Emmanuel Levinas, “Essence and Disinterestedness,” Emmanuel Levinas:  Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 1996), 109-27. [↩]
14. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 181. [↩]
15. As Meister Eckhart once stated, “We are all mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.” [↩]
16. Cf. Richard Kearney, “The God Who May Be,” Questioning God,  John D. Caputo et al. eds., (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2001), 153-86 and Kearney, The God Who May Be:  A Hermeneutics of Religion, (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2001), passim. [↩]
17. Caputo, Augustine and Postmodernism, 98. [↩]
18. Cf. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:  Religion Without Religion (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 1997). [↩]
19. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged edition, ed. Eberhard Bethge, (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 278-282.  Admittedly, Bonhoeffer would likely never take his neologism as far as postmodern can and will.  Thus, I am not interested in Bonhoeffer’s holistic theology per se, but rather the possibilities of his “religionless Christianity,” within the context of his letter(s), for postmodern theology. [↩]
20. Ibid., 360. [↩]