(Ir)religiosity

This blog still exists! Writing here has dropped on my list of priorities lately. Between all the stuff going on in my life — finishing up a degree program, writing a thesis, waiting to hear about doctoral programs — and the temptations of bite-sized social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook I just haven’t made the time. That is too bad but that’s how it goes.

Lately, given my research interests I’ve been pondering how I might define theology for myself as a discursive practice. Of course the traditional way is to say that it is critical reflection of the teaching of the Christian tradition — and I accept that as a sort of lowest common denominator definition. But that really doesn’t say much and it casts the net very, very wide.

I still struggle to put language to this but I am inclined to say that theology functions as a form of cultural criticism. I am not completely comfortable with identifying theology with “cultural criticism” as such because it has its own — generic — connotations but I do think that those types of (progressive?) theology which move well beyond the traditional, even confessional, modes of explicating a conventional type of dogmatics or answering solely to “the church” assume a different type of critical and reflective posture. I don’t believe theology should simply remove itself from the tradition(s) to which is it indebted but neither should it cleave to them solely. So what is the basis for interaction?

The next set of questions, then, have to do with the “uniqueness” of theology, i.e., what makes it distinctive as a discipline. For example, if it is closely related to cultural criticism how does it distinguish itself as its own discourse? How is it different from critical theory, philosophy of religion, or even religious studies? The larger question for me is what are the limits of theological discourse? What are its boundaries and how do we demarcate them?

Embedded in all this is a whole host of other problems like the relationship of theology to culture, the method or starting place for theology, the sources it uses, and the authority to which it appeals. In a certain sense it (re)opens the age-old question of what Athens has to do with Jerusalem. I tend to blur the boundaries between the two quite a bit in my own work, but I am uneasy with a reductionist conflation of the two. At the same time I am deeply dissatisfied with the idea that theology must only answer to the church and must stay within the bounds of a singular Orthodoxy (as if such a thing existed in the first place). Another, more pointed way of putting it would be to ask the following: after the death of the death of God how does theology remain theology rather than becoming subsumed within another discourse?

So I find myself beginning again at the beginning. What is theology, anyway? What are its limits? Does it even have limits?

I wrote this for one of my classes.  It is (very) loosely inspired by the last several verses of Genesis 32.   I felt that my relationship to hope right now was such that I couldn’t write it an any other way.  I haven’t written something like this in a long, long time.  It was cathartic.  Maybe I should do it more often.

Like Jacob and his nameless adversary,
in the veiled shadows at the edge of chaos;
Together we wrestle with the world, with ourselves,
with an abyss so enveloping it must be divine.

As the darkness grows darker still,
The specters of the nameless forgotten surround us,
Bodies:
Crushed.
Broken.
Burned.
Lacerated.
From everywhere and nowhere I hear their cry of dereliction,
Of resistance against our omnipotent projections.
It penetrates my very marrow:
“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
It echoes into eternity and beyond.

As the disquieting night wears on
The tears come; tears and tears.
Tears on our anguished faces,
Tears within the fabric of this world we claim as home.

Yet, in an instant, in an evanescent moment of maddening surprise,
I feel it begin to rise up inside me;
It comes from I know not where,
Calling me outside myself,
And like an ellipsis,
That mark of (un)punctuation,
Meaning and the answers I crave like a palliative narcotic are suspended.
Belief is eclipsed.

I feel myself begin to whisper,
“I don’t believe in hope.”
Yet, somehow, hope happens anyway.

I lift my tired eyes toward the abyss,
To see that hope, if there is such a thing,
Is located here:
In the darkness, in our wrestling;
In the tension and the antagonism;
In the ellipsis,
Suspending expectation,
Forfeiting certainty and confidence.

As the darkness breaks into dawn,
We limp forward together, scarred by the past be/com/ing future.
The nameless, elliptical angel remains, awaiting our return.
I know of no other name to call her than that of hope.
That wounding, agonizing, haunting “thing.”
I do not know that it exists,
Only that it sometimes occurs,
Mostly in the infinitesimally mundane:
The face of a friend,
The eyes of a perfect stranger.
I know not why, nor how, nor when;
Only that despite my despair,
Despite abjection and lamentation,
Despite the weight of the world;
Something (sometimes) happens;
Something I unceasingly pray will irrupt in every instant.

Outside there is a sidewalk.
One day even the permanence of its concrete sedimentation,
Will be displaced by the enduring soil underneath.

An instance of ellipsis?
Of interruption?
Of hope?
Perhaps. . .

I couldn’t help but recall Bonhoeffer’s notion of “cheap grace” when I read Gladwell’s latest piece in the New Yorker on the ambivalent role of social media and social networking in activism.

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.  This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvelous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism. [...]  It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. [...] Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Of course I have to agree with him, even as one who quite rightly passes as a “social media evangelist” at times.  While I am certainly not a luddite when it comes to these sort of things — I think that social media and networking serves a great, innovative, I dare say revolutionary, purpose at its best — I think it would behoove to acknowledge that technology, especially those that tend to encourage, at their worst, a dangerous type of narcissistic solipsism, always cut both ways.  I would much rather name that penchant and be mindful of it such that I can apply a healthy dose of suspicion to it as needed (which is almost constantly for me!) than to let it go completely unmitigated.

So, even though I find myself immersed in all this — very much on purpose — I still think it important to remain brutally self-critical.  And on that point I think we could use a little less cheap activism and a little more honest confrontation of socially entrenched norms and practices, to use Gladwell’s phrase.  And then maybe one day we can actually get at something Gladwell doesn’t much but is no less potent or operative — the power dynamics at work and the differential that remains largely unchallenged even when these technologies are but to good purpose.¹

Sometimes I actually wonder, in quasi-Bonhoefferian fashion, if at times no activism might actually be better than cheap activism.  It would certainly be more honest.

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1. This cuts both ways too.  On the one hand, social media seems radically democratic, allowing almost anyone the opportunity to be heard in ways that traditional mediums did not.  But on the other hand, while it may create space for the free exchange of opinions and debate, it rarely, if ever, creates the impetus for the liberative reconfiguration of power relations.  It only creates a space for that possibility to maybe be talked about.  Important, to be sure, but not enough in itself. [↩]

I ran across an interesting post yesterday over at Shuck and Jive raising the question of death and the prospect of facing death without belief in some sort of afterlife. The comments on the thread are really interesting even if the conversation devolves substantially toward the end.

At the same time I ran across the post I was reading Catherine Keller‘s process/poststructuralist review of Jürgen Moltmann‘s The Coming of God. At the risk of making too many tangential references and creating needless meta-connections, I want quote from the review at length as I think it speaks to not only the question of resurrection and afterlife but the larger issue of how we are to situate eschatology and human history.

Keller has her finger on the main problem (there are many).  Despite the ontotheological traces with which such a supernaturalist view is replete, it decidedly posits an ahistorical, nontemporal reality which supersedes, I would even say subsumes, the present.  Not to mention it provides a neat, terminally optimistic answer to the tragicomic nature of the human condition where the past is conveniently erased.  The problem, as Keller points out elsewhere in the essay, then becomes one of either rigid individualism in relation to the purpose of an afterlife or ontological essentialism in relation to human nature.  Rather than trying to write an equation where we can escape death itself Keller argues that we should, like Paul, strive to overcome the sting of death.  Here is the quote. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to a new post at The Image of Fish and Tripp Fuller’s suggestion of throwing in some Eberhard Jüngel with my Deleuze, I have been thinking more about the possibility of a theology of inexistence — or better a theopoetics of the hyperreal — and the relationship of the ‘new’ with the ‘old.’ Doing some unrelated work, I ran across a quote from one of the most important passages of Paul Ricoeur‘s The Symbolism of Evil that I think speaks to the importance of beginning at the level of the theological imaginary. Read the rest of this entry »

I posted a comment yesterday on Callid Keefe-Perry’s latest vlog over at The Image of Fish that I think bears further reflection.  It relates to some of my latest thinking on some of the reading I’ve been doing in preparation for my thesis next year.  It’s a nascent idea and not at all developed, but I thought I would float it and see what sort of feedback it might get.

Callid is commenting in large part on some of the responses to Jason Derr’s excellent piece over at HuffPo Religion on the role of poetry in the religious imagination.  The aim of Derr’s article is to argue that theology ought not be couched primarily as a scientific enterprise (in the modern sense) mainly interested in cold hard facts and what can clearly be empirically observed in the world.  Instead, theology after modernity might look more like a mythopoetic enterprise, a discourse more akin to work of the poet in her exploration of the contours of human experience — our passions and desires — than the misguided quest for objectivity of epistemological certainty.  As Derr writes, “Poetry and metaphor are important as ways of doing theology. In a world so divided by absolute claims, using metaphor and poetry allows us to have room for flex.”  He even picks up on a metaphor I used in my last post in describing theology as a type of seeing-as which is not so much concerned about complete descriptions of reality as it is communicating reality through imagery and symbol, of exploring what is going on in reality phenomenologically.  For Derr (and others) this is the work of theopoetics.

Like I mentioned, Callid’s post is primarily a thoughtful response to some of the more negative, one might even say uncharitable, feedback Derr’s piece has received.  This seems to be part of a larger trend I’ve notice on some more popular sites like HuffPo that now have an active religion section.  I don’t have the time or the desire to wade through all the comments that posts like this illicit (frankly, most of them aren’t worth it), but I do try to gauge the overall response from time to time.  And usually the response tends to sway in favor of a sort of antagonistic, positivistic outlook toward religion, the likes of which the so-called “new” atheists are now infamous for advancing.

One of the points Callid takes up in the video is the age-old modern criticism that, in the final instance, religion isn’t really about reality it all, that ultimately the existence of a deity cannot be proved, that when you get right down to it “there is nothing there there.” One commenter on Derr’s piece cites a Thomas Paine quote which I think serves as a good, succint summation of this sort of criticism.  See the quote after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the unfortunate side effects of so-called “new” atheism (besides general intransigent arrogance and a lack of intellectual honesty) has been further (false) dichotomization of science and religion and rigid entrenchment into the reductionistic foxholes of scientism and religious fundamentalism.  Positivistic intellectuals like ‘Ditchkins’ and your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety Christianists like, say, Ken Ham or Carl Wieland are ready to hedge their bets on the misguided and myopic supposition that the discourses of science and religion fundamentally and foundationally incompatible.  The irony in all this is that both camps are both partially correct yet completely wrong in asserting complete epistemological superiority.  The similarities of the new atheists and religious fundamentalists has been well documented.  I don’t want to rehash that position except to take note of the core assertion:  that when it comes to matters of exclusivity, intolerance, and arrogance new atheism and religious fundamentalism more similar than they are different, functioning as mirror images of the core logic, shadow-boxers or ships passing in the night, one might say.  Which is why the vitriolic arguments are, at times, just as entertaining as they are tiresome.

This brings me to Jon Stewart’s great interview with Marilynne Robinson last night on The Daily Show promoting her new book Absence of Mind. See the video below after the jump: Read the rest of this entry »

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! [↩]

I’m planning to spend a good chunk of the summer researching the critique advanced by both Fredric Jameson and David Harvey of whether postmodernism, in the final instance, simply serves as the “cultural logic” of late capitalism.  In other words, is the preservation of difference and the celebration of alterity implicitly acquiescent to the ambivalent force of the global market?

Hardt and Negri, in Empire, put it this way:

We suspect that postmodernist and postcolonialist theories may end up in a dead end because they fail to recognize adequately the contemporary object of critique, that is, they mistake today’s real enemy. What if the modern form of power these critics (and we ourselves) have taken such pains to describe and contest no longer holds sway in our society? What if these theorists are so intent on combating the remnants of a past form of domination that they fail to recognize the new form that is looming over them in the present? [...] In this case, modern forms of sovereignty would no longer be at issue, and the postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule! When we begin to consider the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodernist and postcolonialist theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference. These theorists thus find themselves pushing against an open door. (137-38)

And again, even more boldly:

The affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries, however, is liberatory only in a context where power poses hierarchy exclusively though essential identities, binary divisions, and stable oppositions. The structures and logics of power in the contemporary world are entirely immune to the ‘‘liberatory’’ weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference. In fact, Empire too is bent on doing away with those modern forms of sovereignty and on setting differences to play across boundaries. Despite the best intentions, then, the postmodernist politics of difference not only is ineffective against but can even coincide with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule. The danger is that postmodernist theories focus their attention so resolutely on the old forms of power they are running from, with their heads turned backwards, that they tumble unwittingly into the welcoming  arms of the new power. From this perspective the celebratory affirmations of postmodernists can easily appear naive, when not purely mystificatory. (142-43)

I think this critique, perhaps more than others, deserves to be taken seriously.  However, I am reticent to agree with Hardt and Negri (and their forebears, Jameson and Harvey) that returning to some form of (neo/post)marxism is the best answer.  I hear their worry about new forms of domination and sovereignty but I think they ultimately concede to the same type of essentialism they claim to be beyond in arguing that our situation of (postmodern) Empire is wholly pure — history, as they say, never comes with clean edges.  In other words, I do not believe that postmodern and postcolonial discourses are dead in their tracks.  These binaries and “old” versions of domination are still at work as technologies of production, it seems to me, even within more invisible forms of imperialism.

The question I have — which has led me to pursue the research — is whether there are any substantial responses to this criticism in defense of postmodern/postcolonial discourses.

Anyone know?

Conclusion: Critical Repetition

What, then, is the criterion for critical, liberative theo-political praxis today in the face of global neoliberal Empire? It is quite obvious that such an eschatology, reliant on the logic of downturn, involves incarnate bodies but what is its phenomenological structure? In his enigmatic work Repetition, Søren Kierkeegard provides, I claim, a solid heuristic through which an incarnational eschatology can generate critical theo-political praxis by modeling the gesture of the incarnation itself.  For Kierkegaard, repetition is not the simple reproduction of the past as if events could be simple carbon-copies of one another, but rather a means of recollection into the future.  He writes, “repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite direction, for what is recollected as been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward.”¹ For Kierkegaard a true, non-identical repetition, by virtue of the absurd (or the impossible as Derrida would have it), is still open to the singularity of events themselves, yet still rooted in memory, in a recollection of the past.  Repetition is therefore a way of interacting with memory, of remembering, of re-membering, with an eye for the future.  As Slavoj Žižek puts it, this process involves a “repetitive movement of repeating the beginning again and again”² through a process of future-oriented recollection that is fundamentally rooted in the galvanizing memory of past history which becomes intrinsic to the present.  It is in this way that Johann Baptist Metz, following the lead of Walter Benjamin, can speak of the “dangerous memory” of the church, insofar as it serves as a catalyst for critical theo-political praxis, as “the public witness and bearer of the tradition of a dangerous memory of freedom in the ‘systems’ [Empire] of our emancipative society.”³  These memories are dangerous to Empire precisely because they inspire non-identical repetition into the future. In terms of incarnational eschatology this means that, in the face of Empire, one must enact a non-identical repetition of the incarnation.  In other words, this logic of downturn at the heart of an incarnational eschatology involves returning to the beginning once again, not to merely reproduce the past, but to repeat the incarnational gesture down and out toward the margins, toward the victims and the collateral damage of Empire and, in so doing, to the coming reign of God.

The task of the faith collective, then, is to, like Christ, be fully present and incarnate in the world such that the reign of God is being realized in the very presence of the violence of Empire, to be the eschatological sign of the impossible, of that which is “to-come” in the face of totalization and in the very bowels of illegitimate power.  In this way, Žižek provocatively speaks of the incarnation not as an act of sterile emptying of the divine, but an act in which God “identified himself with his own shit”⁴ and through genuine kenotic love for the Other — that is humanity — became fully present in the suffering and anguish of the world — and did so on the fringes of Empire.  In other words, God rolled up God’s sleeves and entered into the muck, the mire, and the messiness of the finite world as the ultimate expression of divine love and the initial inauguration of the reign of God. An incarnational eschatology enacts a critical repetition of this gesture; here persons are not reliant on the ahistorical other-worldly ideals of Empire but are fully present in the evil and violence of the world, bearing faithful witness to the incoming of the impossible and the advent of divine transcendence which pierces and violates the immanent normalcy of the status quo.  Indeed, rather than an eschatology, one might speak of an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology that is so invested in the material world that is it committed to identifying with its own shit, the shit of Empire, of being incarnate amidst the messiness and ordure of the world as the sign of another possible reality that is within yet not fully realized, absent in its very presence, a reality that is always already here yet always already “to-come” in the future, a future which transforms the present and ruptures the mundane.

In the final pages of their sequel to Empire, Hardt and Negri note the difference between linear chronos time and its unexpected fissure with the arrival of káiros, the moment in which an emancipatory politics is initiated through the ambivalances and antagonisms of Empire.

Káiros is the moment when the arrow is shot by the bowstring, the moment when a decision of action is made.  Revolutionary politics must grasp, in the movement of the multitudes and through the accumulation of common and cooperative decisions, the moment of rupture or clinamen that can create a new world.  […] The bowstring shoots the arrow of a new temporality, inaugurating a new future. […] We can already recognize that today times is split between a present that is already dead and a future that is already living—and the yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous.  In time, an event will thrust us like an arrow into that living future.   This will be the real political act of love.⁵

It is hard to overlook the theological tone permeating Hardt and Negri’s prose here.  Indeed, their description of the revolutionary future is not at all unlike the hope of an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology.  There is, however, a crucial difference — and this is why Kierkegaard notion of repetition is so vitally important.  For theology, the event that Hardt and Negri believe will propel us into the living future as already happened, indeed it was the Christ Event!  We are living and participating in the future of which they speak.  By repeating the gesture of the incarnation, by following the logic of downturn, the theo-political subject lives in the liminal space between what Hardt and Negri call the “dead present” and the “living future,” what Paul calls the already and the not yet, even in the bowels of Empire.  It is in this way that an incarnational (e)sc(h)atology, perhaps more effectively than Hardt and Negri’s multitude, summons the rupture of the present chronos with káiros, of the violation of Empire’s socio-political fabric with the liberative incoming of the reign of God through intentional and tangible movement toward the fringes, toward those the Empire itself has violated…“for such a time as this” (Es. 4:14).

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1. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: Kierkegaard’s Writings Vol. VI, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131. Emphasis mine. [↩]
2. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 87. [↩]
3. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. David Smith (New York, New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 89-90. [↩]
4. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 187.  This phrase need not be read as complicit with a negative, essentialist theological anthropology.  Rather it involves reliance on the logic of downturn, a gesture toward the margins where one finds herself wholly present in the world amidst the pain and the mundane, the suffering and the profane.  This does not mean that God created shit to begin with, rather it asserts that wherever shit is there is God siding with those who have no way out.  An incarnational eschatology enacts a critical repetition of this gesture. [↩]
5. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 357-58. [↩]