(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 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.