(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 »

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 »

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! [↩]

Doxis or praxis?

Hint:  this may be a trick question.

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• We Cannot Speak of What We Believe (blakehuggins.com)

I opened my Facebook this morning to find this:

It is conceited I know.  But it’s not every day one of your intellectual hero/ines is perusing your reading list.  So I’ll indulge myself.

But seriously, his latest post on the nature of belief is well worth your read.  It is interesting to observe how quickly a conversation, especially a theological conversation, concerning belief and the nature of one’s beliefs capitulates to what one can know with certainty — beyond the shadow of a doubt as it were — and the empirical factoids that one can observe in an ‘objective’ manner about the world.  Belief is hopelessly reduced only to what one can sensibly see rather than pointing toward the incoming of a reality that, in Peter’s words, “does not yet exist,” the incoming of something wholly beyond mere fact, something wholly beyond epistemological certainty, and something wholly Other that inaugurates the very real possibility of the im/possible.

Peter draws particular attention to the absurdity of our relegating to the realm of absurdity any belief that might appear to be counter-factual.  It is an important observation and one I hope we do not ignore.