(Ir)religiosity

We’ve been discussing the nature of the Christian story in my evangelism class over the last few weeks, mainly whether or not Christianity is a metanarrative.

Of course, historically there is no doubt that Christianity unfortunately deserves to be placed alongside some of the more violent and totalizing metanarratives of modernity.  That is true.  I won’t dispute it.  However, I want to speak, more or less, normatively.

If we are to reify the Christian narrative after modernity, so to speak, how do we classify its narrative?

My conviction is that we have to be honest about the universal claims the Christian story makes on humanity and the course history, but unlike the metanarratives of modernity I think we also have to make room for respectful disbelief.  So the story is, I think, universal but not totalizing, invitational but not impositional.

That being said, I’m not sure I am happy or comfortable with calling the Christian story either a metanarrative or a micronarrative  It is universal but not domineering, it is contextual but not simply ad hoc.  I think it is a different story altogether and I find myself groping for another category.  I know, categories are limiting and so on, but I think it is important to have some sort of reference point, however limiting or provisional.

What do you think? Meta, mirco, or something else?

You know that another semester is gearing up when I don’t have time to write up a blog post.  I have been writing though.  One of my tasks this semester in my constructive theology class is to comment upon various theological concepts and to, as much as I am suspicious of the enterprise, develop a systematic of sorts.  So I will be sharing some of my statements periodically in hopes that they will spark some conversation.  I hope you will excuse the more scholarly form and academic tone.  Keep in mind that all this is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc. I have no interest in dogmatism or I wouldn’t be studying theology; I’d be enrolled in a “Bible School.”  Each section begins, in true Barthian form, with a summary sentence of the following discussion.  I look forward to the dialogue.

The locus of Christian authority and the centerpiece of revelation lies in the God who was revealed in the  incarnation of Jesus Christ — Scripture bears witness to this reality; as such the bible is the primary source of revelation and it becomes the contextual word of God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as it is responsibly interpreted and faithfully performed in the community called church.

God is the locus of Christian theological authority, more specifically, the God that was revealed in the historical incarnation of Jesus Christ. But what is the nature of that authority? Often in public theologizing appeals to religious authority are made in order to validate and legitimize specific truth claims to simply settle the issue in hand. In that sense, such authorities are more authoritarian than they are authoritative. This is problematic because theology, as a finite discipline, “is always potentially vulnerable”¹ and therefore can make no completely absolute or objective claims. Authority in the strict sense must therefore be abandoned lest theology be relegated to the sphere of modern, post-Enlightenment science, a move that has become all too popular since Descartes and Kant. Furthermore, since religious and theological authorities always require responsible interpretation, the order and placement of authority in the line of normative argumentation must be reversed so that it is not at the end of theologizing as a validator of certain claims, but rather at the beginning as the starting point from which all theologizing emerges.²

What then, are the sources of theological authority? Scripture is without a doubt the prime source of authority and the primary source of God’s special revelation insofar as it points to the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is not, however, the only source nor does it exist in a vacuum; like any other text, it requires responsible interpretation. In our time the claim that “Scripture interprets Scripture” without any subjective mediation is wholly untenable and makes for a wholly irresponsible hermeneutic. Here the so-called “Wesleyan quadrilateral” is helpful. If Scripture is the primary source of theological authority and the locus of Christian revelation then tradition, reason, and experience — helpful sources of authority and revelation in their own right — constitute a sort of hermeneutical triad by which Scripture is responsibly interpreted in various contexts and performed, that is made incarnate, by various communities.

Through responsible, communal interpretation, Scripture becomes the Word of God and is thus authoritative for Christian thought and practice. As Karl Barth writes, “The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His [sic] Word, to the extent that He [sic] speaks through it.”³  Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit the text becomes the word of God as it is read, interpreted, and performed by the church. This does not mean, however, that the text (each passage, chapter, or verse) as a single, fixed, objective, and determined meaning for all places and in all times. Such an illusion is unsustainable for at least three main reasons.⁴  First, as finite persons each of us is socially, historically, and culturally situated in a such a way that is hardly impartial, disinterested, or purely objective. Each person, whether they are completely conscious of it or not possesses what Heidegger calls a “hermeneutic pre-understanding,” which is inextricably woven into the fabric of that person’s subjectivity and serves as a sort of “implicit fore-structure [guiding] all interpretation in advance, upon which all interpretation draws, [and] by which every inquiry which is anything more than an ‘unphenomenological construction’ is nourished.”⁵   Even if there is such a thing as “objectivity” no human being would be able interpret it purely and without bias or prejudice. In other words, we are human, all too human. A white, American male from the rural south will read the bible very differently than a woman in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is whether Christians are making room in their theology for the bible to become the word of God for both persons, perhaps with different meanings, purposes, and ramifications. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Robert C. Neville, A Theology Primer (New York, New York:  State University of New York Press, 1991), 13. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, edited and translated by Thomas Forsyth Torrance and Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York, New York:  T&T Clark, 2004). [↩]
4. There are many more reasons which draw upon the insight of 20^th century continental thought, but this is not the place to explore them in depth. [↩]
5. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God:  A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2006), 113. [↩]

If I had to pick one point where Jürgen Moltmann has made the most significant impact on my own theology it would be his social doctrine of the Trinity.¹  In fact, it wasn’t until I read The Trinity and the Kingdom of God that I was actually excited about being Trinitarian!  Moltmann is not interested in the old heresies and old debates surrounding substance, or essence, or autonomous personhood.  Instead he is interested debunking monarchical monotheism, which inscribes domination and hierarchy into the very nature of God (not to mention humanity!) where God the Father — and here nobody would have a problem with the masculine, phallocentric language — sits at the top of the order, below him sits the Son, and last (and more often than not least!) sits the Spirit — because by this logic it only makes sense that the more feminine of the persons be at the bottom of the hierarchy!  Moltmann claims that all Trinitarian formulations at least since Augustine and surely since the insertion of the filioque into the Nicene Creed by the West are captive to this type of monarchical monotheism.

Obviously this creates all sorts of problems, especially if you believe that the human order should, more or less, mirror the divine order.  Then you have domination and subjugation writ large.  Enter Moltmann who, as we can already see, is more interested in the social and political implications — in other words, what all this means for the Imago dei — of the Trinity than modalism, Arianism, or any other ancient -ism that really has no bearing on contemporary theology.

Over against the hierarchical models, Moltmann imagines² a more egalitarian approach (I don’t know that he uses that word himself and I don’t know if he would take issue with it; I certainly don’t) which emphasizes the “community of God” that is comprised of the three persons and the perichoresis, the mutual indwelling, that binds them together as one.  For Moltmann, kenosis is not limited to the second person and the incarnation alone, indeed it is such kenotic love that holds the Trinity together, each person giving and emptying itself for the sake of the other.  In this relationship the identity of each person is inextricably linked to each of the other persons and through that bond each person sees the other as part of the Other and in the process sees itself as (an)other.³

In Moltmann’s larger theology this has deep political and social implications.  If the divine hierarchy is deconstructed then the human hierarchy must be too, and a radically new community — an order steeped with kenotic love and perichoretic unity that jettisons any form of domination — replaces it.  To be created in the image of God is to be a relational being, a mirror image of members of the the divine community.

You probably already see where this is going.  My question is what might happen if we not only took Moltmann’s social doctrine of the Trinity seriously but let it infiltrate our eccelsiology as well. What would happen if our ecclesial structures and our relationships with one another in the community we call the church were guided not by hierarchy and power but self-emptying, kenotic love and perchoretic egalitarianism?  What if we reversed the polarities of the order of power in the church and not only upheld our responsibility to the other but saw ourselves as (an)other too and deeply dependent upon the embodied connection between our subjectivity and the other’s subjectivity?  Is that not what Moltmann was getting at in his book title — “The Trinity and the Kingdom” — where the church doesn’t mirror the power structures and regimes of domination that rule this world but the very community of God in which persons are persons only in self-emptying relationship with other persons?  Is it just me or is it hard, if not impossible, to do that when the church is beholden to uneven power dynamics?

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• The relational Image of God: embracing the other (blakehuggins.com)

1. His argument in The Crucified God apropos to God’s suffering is a very close second, but I’m not sure Moltmann goes far enough.  The suffering, abandoned God in Christ on the Cross would be much more salient and radical if Moltmann let go of omnipotence, but he wants to hold on to it.  I think we have to let go of that idea.  Not to mention the residual theodicy issues that are still very much at work under the surface.  I may take this up later at some point. [↩]
2. This is really is nothing new.  Eastern Orthodoxy has always held this view and it dates back to at least the Cappadocian Fathers.  I think it is fair to say, though, that Moltmann certainly popularized it, especially in the Western tradition, and extrapolated its political and social effects a bit further. [↩]
3. Ok, Moltmann doesn’t exactly use this sort of postmodern accent, but I can’t help it.  I hear when I read him — especially on the Trinity. [↩]

I think the best way for me to reflect on the Moltmann Conversation will be in a series of posts on a few key thoughts that were brought up over the course of the conference and have stuck with me.  Before going I figured I would just post my notes but I can’t do that because, well, I don’t really have any “normal” notes.  I wasn’t really able to take notes like I normally do because the conference was, more or less, a sound byte conference, which would be interesting to talk about in itself.  Free wifi was provided so just about everyone was either tweeting or liveblogging.  A screen was up behind the stage displaying some of the #moltmann tweets.  Then there wast the twub.  So the whole time I was trying to listen to the questions, listen to Moltmann’s answers (many of which were gems and very tweet-able), watch the Twub, watch the screen and tweet.  So in a sense my tweets ended up being my notes.  Weird, I know.  But that’s how it worked out.

During the first session Moltmann spoke to his own life experience (something he develops on a large scale in his autobiography, a book you should really read if you get a chance) and I was immediately struck by the notion of theology as biography.  His personal experiences as a POW and instances of deep tragedy and suffering led him to questions similar to those of Christ on cross:  where is God in the face of death and suffering?  In many ways, these experiences send Moltmann on theological trajectories that determine the bulk of his life’s work.  A Theology of Hope and The Crucified God are two of the most prominent examples.  The former views the whole of theology from an eschatological perpsective in which the church looks with hope to the future while standing firmly in the confidence of the resurrection and eagerly anticipating the incoming of God’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth; the latter is, of course, the other side of this hope: the cross of Christ through which God enters into the suffering of the world and identifies with the victim not as the stoic deity of Greek philosophy who is disaffected by the cries of the oppressed, but the God of the Hebrew scriptures, the God of pathos who is capable of deep suffering and likewise capable of deep love.  It is in this way that Moltmann re-frames the theodicy question, not as something to be answered — because as he stated at the conference “no answer will satisfy us” — but something to be wrestled with; indeed as something to be wrestled with together with God.¹

The theological particulars of each of these are interesting in their own right, but for me, after hearing Moltmann tell his story, the fact that both emerged from his personal experiences and his desire to develop a theology “after Auschwitz” cannot be overstated.  His is a perfect example of theology as biography and biography as the working out of theology.  Of course this happens both individually and collectively.  In that vein I appreciated Tripp Fuller (who I was finally able to meet in person!) raising the question in the panel of how 9/11 has effected the biography of younger (and even older) Americans in the same way WWII did for Moltmann’s.  At this point I think it may be too early to tell exactly how theology in the 21st century will take shape in the aftermath of that event.  But I think Moltmann provides us with a good model. I think we will be and are presently asking some of the same questions he did in response to suffering and tragedy.  And I think the way in which he poses those questions and attempts to re-frame them may be helpful too.

But the larger point for me is still theology as biography and biography as the incarnational outworking of theology.  And the more I think about the more I realize that is always our “background music” whether we realize it or not.  Perhaps our becoming conscious of it will make us better theologians.

1. Here I will resist the temptation to put Moltmann in conversation with John Caputo’s “weak God.” [↩]

You may or may not be aware that my site was down most of the day yesterday.  Steve Knight first gave me the heads up and I made some quick changes on the way out the door to the grocery store that I thought would solve the problem.  And they did — temporarily.

When I got home all I got was the white screen of death.  No pages.  No posts.  No WordPress dashboard.  Nothing.  So I did what I usually do.  I started stripping things away.  Themes, plugins, etc.  That didn’t work either.  I did some Googling around.  Some people had the same problem and were able to fix it pretty easily by tweaking some memory limits.  That didn’t work.  I tweeted about it and go some good suggestions (thanks Gideon) and some not so good.  None of them really worked.

I wiped WordPress off my server I don’t know how many times and uploaded fresh installs.  Nothing.  I started to panic.  And for most of the night (and some of this morning) I thought I might lose all my posts and comments.

It turns out my sql database was somehow corrupted.  So corrupted that I couldn’t use my main backup and had to export and import reach table manually.  I’m still not done.  A lot of meta-data still needs to be dealt with and I know that some links are dead.

But the good news is I didn’t lose anything.  If you stopped by here yesterday and got nothing but a white screen I apologize.  Hopefully over the next few days I can get thinks back up to normal.

So much for starting off the week with a Moltmann post.  Those will come soon.  I promise.

This time tomorrow I’ll be in Chicago for the much anticipated Moltmann Conversation.  I’m pretty stoked.  Not only will I get to see one of the world’s foremost living theologians, I’ll also get to finally meet some really cool people I’ve been following online for a while now (wow, that sounded really stalkerish).

I doubt that I will liveblog much, unless I change my mind.  Tweeting should be much easier and I’d rather contribute to the larger conversation that will be going on the Twub, rather than make up my own.  That being said, if you follow me on Facebook it will be easier to keep up with everything if you follow me on Twitter.  I’m not going to feed all my tweets into Facebook because I don’t want to spam a bunch of people.  I’ll double up on some things but not all.  If you follow me on Twitter and aren’t interested in any of this, well, I apologize.

To make things super easy, I’ve embedded the Twub below so you can keep up with everything that is going on from here if you like.

Hopefully sometime over the weekend, or maybe early one next week, I’ll post my final thoughts on the whole experience.

If you don’t read Religion Dispatches you really should.  A great “progressive” (for lack of a better, more unambiguous term) religion blog that consistently posts good content.  Case in point: yesterday’s post on interfaith dialogue in a — thanks to social media and other forms of new technology — increasingly globalized world.

What if we thought of religion (and even science and philosophy) as a type of language or dialect?

If the “Nones” are a rapidly growing category (as the surveys suggest), then “religion” will need to change in order to remain relevant and viable in the complex world we’re heading into. To begin with, the idea that only one religion is true, while all the others are not, will have to be abandoned. Perhaps one way of hastening this process is to think of religion as being like language. Languages are not true or false. Rather, each different language seeks to express the shared history and life experiences of those people who speak it. In a rapidly globalizing world, people will increasingly need to be fluent in more than one language. [...] Likewise, it will become necessary to speak more than one religious language; not just for the sake of communication, but in service of human spiritual growth and enrichment.

Since my first real and meaningful encounter with the presence of other religious ideas besides evangelical Christianity in “Introduction to World Religions” fall semester of my freshman year in college — the first of many experiences which radically altered my view of interfaith dialogue and religious pluralism — I’ve thought it best to think of religion(s) as a type of language or linguistic structure.  A language or dialect isn’t completely wrong, but it’s not absolutely right either.  It conveys meaning to a particular community, a characteristic that makes it true, but no single language enjoys a monopoly on meaning or truth.  And any claims to complete hegemony are essentially illegitimate and equivalent to, for example, an American demanding that all the world immediately begin using English as a means for global communication.  It just wouldn’t work.  Communication couldn’t happen and some pieces of truth and meaning would die along with the lost languages.

Language, by its very nature, is limiting.  As a native speaker I can’t escape English.  No matter how many languages I learn in my lifetime (it won’t be many, it’s not my strong suit!) I will never be able to liberate myself from thinking in English.  It is my mother tongue.  Likewise as a Christian, I am, in some sense, limited in my religious thinking.  True, Christianity offers its own unique and helpful insights into the penetrating questions of meaning and truth, but like every other religion, it does so at the expense of others.  Understanding the double-nature of that reality — its benefit and its limitation — will go a long way in understanding and making room for other religious tongues in the future.

The bilingual and multilingual person is more of an asset than the one who is not.  Christianity will always be my mother tongue, but understanding and becoming fluent and conversant in the other prominent languages of the religious landscape will be vital and of the utmost importance in the future if we are to have meaningful interfaith dialogue.  Not only that, but becoming comfortable with and using more religious languages instead of merely “knowing about them” and assuming the superiority of one’s own — a modern symptom if there ever was one — will be the hallmark of mutual understanding and respect as religious “emergence” really begins to take root in the future.  To be sure, I don’t think that dilutes my Christianity at all, contrary to the usual accusations of syncretism — in fact I think it enriches it.  Not to mention it helps me become a more well-rounded human being.

We must acknowledge that we live within an inescapable language that is no better or worse than the others — it simply is.  We must become familiar and fluent in other languages so we can become conversant.  And, most of all, we must welcome and become comfortable with the presence, importance, and enriching value of other languages — not merely tolerate their existence.  The first two come fairly easy, it is the last one that is tough.  Yet I think the success and efficacy of future dialogue and evolution depends upon it more than anything.

In my mind, language is the best way to think about this.  It helps me understand it better.  What do you think?  Does it help to think of religion as a language?

Not sure what to make of this.

He found me!

Reading through Jean-François Lyotard‘s The Postmodern Condition yesterday I was immediately struck by this quote.

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities the produce and consume — that is, the form of value.  Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production:  in both cases, the goal is exchange.  Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value.” (p. 4-5)

This is exactly the temptation of social media, I think.  If used with restraint and discretion social media outlets can be very useful tools to share knowledge and information.  But we must recognize the danger of changing the nature of knowledge by commodifying into something to be consumed rather than something to be internalized or reflected upon.  Then the act of consuming itself becomes the goal and not the use of knowledge or the information.

For example, I find myself following more people on Twitter or subscribing to more blogs not because I believe they are useful and enriching but because I need “more.”  The goal is not quality, but quantity.  More followers, more RSS feeds, more Facebook friends, etc.  I even catch myself doing it the bookstore, it’s not the book itself that I need or want but the act of buying and consuming more.  It is as if there is some sort of jouissance to be found in the act of consuming information and the abstraction of mere quantity.

So I think social media can be a useful and important tool in transmitting and sharing knowledge, but its potential won’t matter much if we allow the very nature of knowledge and information to be destroyed so we can consume more and actually “know” less.

Thoughts?

I’ll be honest, I was a little disappointed with the book.  That’s not to say it is not without merit, it does several things very well and I’ll get to those in a minute.  But as an avowed Howard Zinn fan I thought the book failed to deliver.  That’s probably the fault of my own expectation combined with the way the book was marketed; however,  Diana Butler Bass points out in the introduction that she hopes to do with Christian history what Zinn did with American history.  Given the size of the book she all but sets herself up for failure.  Again, that is not to say the book itself is not noteworthy.  I just think it might be better served with the Zinn comparisons and with a different title.

But what it is about anyway?

For DBB there are basically two kinds of Christianity:  there is “Big-C Christianity,” which is the story we are all familiar with.  It’s trajectory runs thus: Christ, Constantine, Christendom, Calvin, Christian America.  If you’ve ever taken a church history class, odds are that is the way the story has run.  It’s a story of power, militant coercion and victory.  Counter to that is another type of Christianity, what DBB calls “generative Christianity” or “Great Command Christianity.”  This version of the story is one that is always guided by Jesus’s axiom of loving God and neighbor — contrary to the other story, this is the true essence of Christianity.   While the Big-C story may be dominant and pervasive in church history textbooks, DBB makes the convincing case that the story of generative Christianity has always been around carrying forward the true Christian legacy.  Her intention in the book is to tell that version of the story and eschew the Big-C story. Read the rest of this entry »