(Ir)religiosity

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 »

Jeremy Bouma liveblogged the Poets, Prophets, and Preachers conference that took place in Grand Rapids over the last several days.

I was reading over his coverage of Tuesday’s events was immediately struck by this line from the Pete Rollins session (I don’t know if he is paraphrasing or if it is a direct quote):

The question is not is Christianity true, but what does it mean when it claims to be true.

The traditional assumption, of course, is that Christianity claims to be true in the same way that biology might claim to be true (at least that is what seems to have been discussed at the conference).  This is part of my beef with calling theology a “science.” It reduces meaning to the realm of empiricism and rationalism.  Theology is reduced to a fleeting pursuit of objectivity, which often claims to posses The Univocal Understanding of how the world works.  But what if it’s not so much about the world itself and how it works but rather how one should be in the world and how the community should embody an alternative to the world’s dominant narrative (of violence, domination, etc)?

That’s one way of approaching it.  But of course it’s not the only one.

However we might choose to answer it, I think framing the question in this way gets us a little closer to where we need to be.

How might you answer that question?  What does Christianity, or any religion for that matter, mean when it claims to be true?

I was inspired to revist some of Zizek’s work last week.  I ran across this passage in The Puppet and the Dwarf on epistemology.

The site of truth is not the way “things really are in themselves,” beyond their perspectival distortions, but the very gap, passage, that separates one perspective from another, the gap (in this case social antagonism) that makes the two perspectives radically incommensurable. The “Real as impossible” is the cause of the impossibility of ever attaining the “neutral” nonperspectival view of the object. There is a truth; everything is not relative—but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not the truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective. So when Nietzsche affirms that truth is a perspective, this assertion is to be read together with Lenin’s notion of the partisan/partial character of knowledge (the (in)famous partij’nost): in a class society, “true” objective knowledge is possible only from the “interested” revolutionary standpoint. This means neither an epistemologically “naive” reliance on the “objective knowledge” available when we get rid of our partial prejudices and preconceptions, and adopt a “neutral” view, nor the (complementary) relativist view that there is no ultimate truth, only multiple subjective perspectives. Both terms have to be fully asserted: there is, among the multitude of opinions, a true knowledge, and this knowledge is accessible only from an “interested” partial position.”

I gotta say, that makes a lot of sense to me.  Then we can only talk about better and worse “interested, partial positions” and never The Complete Position.

What would really interest me now is juxtaposing this with Caputo’s notion of truth as a happening or a event, a facere veritatem in his words.  Both positions seem to avoid the sinkholes of both objectivity and complete nihilistic relativism to a place beyond truth as disembodied proposition and toward truth as particular way of being in the world — a way of transformation.

I ran across this quote during some reading the other night.  I think it describes quiet well the shift we are currently experiencing into a new reformation and emergence. It also raises some interesting questions about our willingness to remain open to perpetual change beyond what makes us comfortable.

“I am…suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting all and idolizing none.  We are all, very properly, familiar with the idea the in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe.  But there is a two-way traffic, the Model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind.  We must recognize that what has been called “a taste in universes” is not only pardonable but inevitable.  We can no longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to truth.  No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and no one is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeded in getting in a great many.  But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost a much as it reflect the state of that age’s knowledge.  Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical.”

I love it.  We must always embrace the new Model as it is brought into existence.  Of course that is easy to do that ex post facto, and after the time of real rethinking and revolution has already taken place.  It’s harder and more painful during the extended time of transition, a time that I think we are living in right now, because it involves a resistance against the dominant mode of thinking, and the normal Model of viewing the world.

But it also raises another point and one that I think many of us who embrace the current shift should always remind ourselves of.  Our Model, be it postmodern, or emergent, or whatever, affects us more than we realize.  So here’s the thing — we need to remember that the Model itself is not the Truth, only one messenger of truth among many.  And when another messenger presents itself, we should be open to its proclamation.  I guess what I’m saying — and I feel like this has been coming out in a lot of my writing lately — is that we have to be chastened to a certain extent.  Even in our passion to deconstruct past Models and usher in the new, we have to retain a deep sense of epistemological humility lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.  Even if that means at some point disagreeing with and highlighting a divergence from that Model which we hold so dear.  That Model cannot be allowed to crust over into dogma or used to create stasis in our understanding.  In that sense we must always be emerging.

Because truth and the movement of the Spirit will always be bigger and more robust than our Models, even the most attractive and useful among them.

Back to the quote.  I think what surprised me the most about it was the author, someone who normally doesn’t write things in this vein whose writings I have always thought to be in a different vein, which undoubtedly reveals my own myopia.  Just goes to show that we you try to pigeon-hole someone they will more often than not surprise you.