(Ir)religiosity

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It’s been a while since my last post.  After probably the most grueling semester I’ve had in seminary I decided to take some time for some much needed rest.  I intend to do quite a bit of reading and writing over the summer, but I’m not sure at this point how much of that will be blogging.  We’ll see.

The more serious a student of theology I become, the more I find myself returning to a pretty basic but important question:  what is the theological task?  What is the aim of the theologian?  My answer to this question changes and evolves almost as fast as I ask it.  To be brief, for me the work of theology, at least in part, involves the critical, de/constructive examination of the ways in which our religious symbols and language — which are at times tacit and embedded — function as living discourse and practice.  To use Paul Ricouer‘s terms, theology involves a movement of suspicion (deconstructive) and a movement of retrieval (constructive).¹ The theologian, speaking on behalf of a particular community, raises new questions, re-situates or restates old questions, and critically examines those answers which are said to be normative.  As a discourse, theology is always an ad hoc and contextual enterprise, an unfinished, provisional dialogue addressed to particular problems, situations, persons, and communities.  Theology is the work of naming and examining the ways in which the religious functions in our daily lives.

Now, there are many ways of going at this.  I recently ran across one of the better attempts I have read in this post at Jesse Turri’s blog. The following is a quote from Catherine Keller‘s book On the Mystery (a book which sits on my desk as I write but I have yet to really read).

Anselm classically defined theology as fides quaerens intellectum–”faith seeking understanding.” Not faith that already understands and so no longer needs to seek. That would by definition no longer be theology. Theology itself is not the faith but its quest. If we stop seeking we are no longer on the way. Faith seeking understanding has then turned into “belief that understands.” It then closes down the very root of quaerens from which come both question and quest. Speaking divine wisdom in a mystery, theology remains a work of human speech. Theology is not the same as faith or belief, but a disciplined and relational reflection upon them. God calls, but we are responsible for what we call “God.” And God may be calling us to that very responsibility!

There you have it.  Much ink (and blood) has been wasted spilled in effort to equate theology with belief rather than a disciplined and sustained reflection upon belief and conviction.  The task of the theologian here involves holding the community accountable for what it is they call God.  Better yet, said task involves naming that which functions, however tacit or implicit, as God within religious and cultural discourse, for good or ill.  That is why I will always insist that theology is neither constructive or deconstructive but de/constructive, situated within a communal hermeneutical spiral.  The real work, then, may involve renouncing a certain (toxic)  understanding of God, the religious, etc. and taking up one which is more liberative.  I would argue that it is within this context that which should understand Nietzche’s famous dictum that God is dead — not as the vulgar, uncritical denial of the existence of God wholesale but the acknowledgment that certain understandings of that which we call God are no longer necessary and may in fact be destructive.²  Thus the task of the theologian is to unabashedly and unapologetically deliver the all important paradoxical and double-edged pronouncement:  God is dead, long live God.

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1. And I should add that I have learned from Derrida that these two are not as opposite as they may seem. [↩]
2. The paradox here is that one such understanding may be the traditional notion of God as the ultimate guarantor of metaphysics, as a transcendent Being and the foundation of the onto-theologic. For many, such an understanding is predicative of God’s existence in the first place! [↩]