(Ir)religiosity

Recently I tweeted a truncated version of one of my biggest frustrations about the use of the word “deconstruction” in the emergent church. I got some responses suggesting that I clarify and elaborate. So here we go.

First, blame shouldn’t fall solely on emergent church folk. Philosophers and cultural theorists (who should know better!) have  also misused the word since it gained popularity in discourse. The fact that Jacques Derrida‘s (in)famous hermeneutic (if i can call it that) translates to a very common word in the English language doesn’t help much either. The word is already operative in our common vocabulary and it carries with it certain connotations that run completely counter to its theoretical function. So the inertia is against us before we get to the emergent church. I think Jack Caputo’s Deconstruction in Nutshell should be mandatory reading for anyone who uses or hopes to use the word deconstruction as a key concept (in the emergent church or otherwise).

Popular use notwithstanding, I do think that emergent church folk are particularly and especially culpable for their use and misuse of the word theoretically and theologically in large part because of their affinity toward postmodern philosophy and their use of key thinkers like Derrida. This makes things complicated and, if dissected closely, I think it shows that the emergent church — or at least some subgroup(s) within it — aren’t all that different from mainstream Christianity and certainly not as subversive as some had initially hoped.

My frustration stems from the tweets, Facebook statuses, and blog posts (and books) that I see from time to time where someone will in effect suggest that having a “deconstructive stage” was important for a while but now its time to “get serious” and start reconstructing things (faith, theology, etc.) toward some sort of “new” end. In essence, deconstruction is given a negative and overly critical connotation and is understood to be the initial step in a larger process. Doubt was good and cool for a time, criticizing and rejecting conventional religiosity was fun while it lasted, but the real work starts when you decided to start affirming and arguing core theological tenets anchored by a foundation. When I read and hear things like this I realize how unfortunate it is that the mystics and the via negativa don’t get more play in emergent church circles. Read the rest of this entry »

This is part three in an ongoing series on systematic (de)constructive theology. See part one for a longer introduction and please keep in mind that the following is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc. In other words, it is truly theology not a dogmatics. I look forward to the dialogue.

In the beginning God began creating not out of nothing but out of something, ordering the already present chaos, and sparking a process of creativity that continues to the present and into the future, a process in which all of creation is participating. God’s providence, far from being tainted with power and intervention is a statement about present reality, a statement that rings from the powerless cry of Jesus on the cross into the future against suffering, injustice and oppression.

In keeping with our quasi-panentheistic notion of God with a certain postmodern flavoring, it should come as no surprise that creation and providence will be treated and reified in stark contrast to more modern and traditional theologies.  To being with, we should note that any concept of God which makes its home outside of Western metaphysics, understanding God as that signification, that event which is wholly otherwise than being will surely be incompatible with the long-standing doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.  In this first place, one can argue, quite convincingly in fact, that the doctrine is itself unbiblical.  As John Caputo¹ and Catherine Keller² have observed Genesis does not state that God created the cosmos from nothing, it simply states that “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:1).³ To but it bluntly, ‘in the beginning’ “things had already begun,” in some sense, and God simply brought things to life, indeed “[brought] being to life.”⁴ According to this creation narrative, God’s action is more like ordering some already existing chaos than it is creating matter from nothing.  On this reading “creation is not a movement from non-being to being…but from being to beyond being”⁵ in which God, Elohim in the Hebrew text, far from an arrogant display of power and omnipotence simply brings order to that which was already there, bringing life to the being that is already present.  Odds are the Hebrew writers who penned this beautiful mythopoetic narrative had no problems with this messy, risky view of creation.  The problem, as Caputo points out, is when Greek metaphysics re-appropriated the story:

Metaphysical theology has turned this Hebrew narrative into the tale of a pure, simple, clean act of power carried out on high by a timeless and supersensible being, a very Hellenic story that also goes along with a top-down social structure of imperial power flowing down from on high.  There is order and majesty here no doubt, but the story is, upon closer reading, “must messier,” as Keller says, more complicated—not creatio ex nihilo but “creatio ex profundis,” not a single clean power acting ex nihilo, but a concert of forces, one active and formative and the other more open-ended, free-floating, fluid, and unformed.  A poetics of creation from primal, untamed, unwieldy, water elements, as wily as the wind and as slippery as water, elements that tend to resist fixed order.⁶ Read the rest of this entry »

1. Caputo, The Weakness of God, passim. [↩]
2. Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep:  A Theology of Becoming (New York, New York:  Routledge, 2003), passim. [↩]
3. All biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted. [↩]
4. Caputo, 58. [↩]
5. Ibid., 58-59. [↩]
6. Ibid., 59. [↩]

This is part two in an ongoing series on systematic constructive theology. See part one for a longer introduction and please keep in mind that the following is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc.  In other words, it is truly theology not a dogmatics. I look forward to the dialogue.

Contra traditional metaphysics and onto-theology, God, in our postmodern matrix, is not a Supreme, omnipotent Being or even Being itself; rather, the God revealed in the crucified body of Jesus Christ is a God otherwise than being, an event of eschatological possibility harbored by the name of theology which breathes life and dynamism to all things — God is dead, long live God.

In book ten of his Confessions Augustine asks, “What do I love when I love my God?”  a question he never fully answers for himself except to say that which we call God utterly transcends any categorization or conceptualization.  Negative and apophatic theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart are right to suggest that we cannot speak of what God is, only what God is not.  Indeed, to definitively claim what God is would be to create a conceptual idol. God is beyond naming and knowing, beyond nomination and that which cannot be captured or tamed within the confines of mere language.  But still we must speak.  We must develop some sort of logos concerning this enigma, yet this enigma lies beyond our logos. Therein lies the paradox, the tension.  God is that which is unknown, whose name cannot be uttered, but God is also that of which we are always speaking and thinking, thus “we must speak and yet we must maintain our silence”¹ in the excess of meaning and presence that is the un/known God.  We thus begin our venture into the doctrine of God with the humble admission that our language can only hope to point us toward the enigma to which we ascribe the name God but simply cannot do it justice.  Our theology of God will always be unfinished, incomplete, and provisional.  Those interested in nailing it all down will serve themselves well to not be theologians.  Theology is not an exacting enterprise nor is it interested in definitive explanations.  It is an ongoing, open-ended project that is more interested in approaching questions from a new vantage point and wrestling with the tension inherent in the questions than with providing easy answers.  Easy answers are hopelessly banal and trite, but the questions, the questions themselves are pregnant with meaning and possibility.  Thus theology approaches the question of God, the question of who or what God is, not in hopes of providing a clear-cut air tight answer, but, as Bertrand Russell says, “for the sake of the question itself.”² Read the rest of this entry »

1. Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), 30. [↩]
2. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Radford, Virginia:  Wilder Publications, 2008) 101.  Russell was not, to be sure, speaking of the doctrine of God or even of theology but of the aim of philosophy.  Theology and philosophy have always had an odd relationship.  Here, though, it is not incorrect to equate their aims. [↩]

I’ve been doing a lot of Moltmann reading in preparation for the Moltmann Conversation in Chicago next month.  Today I read Religion, Revolution, and the Future, an early collection essays and lectures.  I ran across a passage in the last article, “Hope and History,” that is very poignant given John Piper’s latest snafu.

The cosmological proofs for the existence of God, in which the divinity of God and his presence were brought into an analogical relationship to the experience of the world accessible to everyone, have lost their persuasive power, since modern man no longer understands himself as a part of the cosmos, but has placed the world as material of his scientific and technical possibilities over against himself. He no longer lives in the house of ordered being but in the open history of a technical transformation of the world. The old cosmological-theistic world view which spoke of God in relationship to the cosmos of the natural world is antiquated and is experienced as mythical by man who has become the master of his environment. But it is naive pathos of the enlightenment to discard the fundamental question which was to be answered by the old world view. Behind the cosmological-theistic world views lies the real misery of man which expressed itself in the manifold forms of the theodicy question: Si deus, unde malum? (If God exists, whence evil?). The old world view answered this fundamental question in the vision of the orderly and wisely steered cosmos and used the image of the divine cosmos in order to do battle against chaos threatening everywhere. Even though this answer no longer persuades today, since we experience reality as history and no longer as cosmos, the fundamental theodicy question is still with us and is more pressing than before.

The core problem with Piper’s view — aside from the outdated cosmology — is theological determinism.  Such a view makes things very simple to understand:  X happened because God caused it and thought it should happen, there is a moral reason for everything that happens in the cosmos so we shouldn’t worry too much, it will all work out in the end.  It is an easy way to make sense of tragedy but I must effectively excuse myself from wrestling with the moral ambiguities of reality.  Not to mention that must ascribe to a premodern cosmology and assume that God is, at best, amoral.

The point of theology (and philosophy), in my view, is not to offer simple answers — which always posits certainty — but to continually wrestle with the questions and to learn to live with the inherent ambiguities of reality.  Piper, in suggesting that the tornado was a “firm but gentle warning,” not only singles an entire group of people for blame and judgment or supposes a vengeful and angry God beholden to an antiquated cosmology, but also claims to be certain about the nature of reality.  It is an easy answer to a complicated problem and, as I and others have pointed out, it presents disturbing problems of its own.

So, according to Moltmann, Piper’s answer for why the tornado happened is no longer persuasive; however, the core issue is still just as pressing as it ever was.  My question is this: how do we respond?  For those of us who do not ascribe to theological determinism or a premodern cosmology, what is our alternative, our “answer?”  Or, better yet, how do we wrestle with the question?

UPDATE: Drew has published a great post discussing Barth’s answer to this very question.  And at almost the exact same time I published mine!

As I’ve mentioned before — or maybe I haven’t mentioned it before, I can’t remember — I reserve the right to blatantly disagree with myself and change my mind on this blog.  That’s just the nature of things.

A while back I wrote a post in which I attempt to provisionally answer Augustine’s timeless question: What do I love when I love my God?  One commenter pointing out that my answer was very anthropocentric. No doubt he is right.  I’d probably modify my language were I answering it today.

Last night I was reading On Religion by John Caputo and I ran across a quote that made me wonder about the premise of the question.  No that’s not right.  Not the premise of the question per se, but perhaps the way the question has been couched by virtually every commenter since Augustine firs posed it.

The name of God is the name of the ever open question.  Unlike reductionists, who think that the name of God closes every question down, that it supplies  a ready-made answer for every possible questio, the name of God in my post-modern Itinerarium is the name of infinite questionability, of what is endlessly questionable, for no name can cause my head to spin more than the name of what I love and desire.  But what do I love when I love my God?  In loyalty to St. Augustine, whom I also love, I have retained the “what,” but of course, if I dared to correct a Saint, which I would never do, if I were an obscure copyist in an Irish monastery in the tenth century working on the Confessiones, I would in all fear and trembling have furtively amended the what to a how.  How do I love when I love my God? For love is a how, not a what.

Captuo goes on to argue that God is not merely a name to by examined by theologians and metaphysicians, but a deed — or deeds plural, that is more like it — to be carried out, a doing to be done, and action to be enacted, a how to be put into practice.  For it is in doing justice and doing love that God exists, not in the hopelessly modernistic arguments for or against the existence of God as a simple proposition, for God cannot be constraint my reductionist propositions and premises.

Perhaps then both ends of the spectrum, of God as Being-Itself (Paul Tillich) and God as that which is without Being (Jean-Luc Marion), are as equally problematic as is the false dichotomy of theism and atheism.  To ask whether God is or is not is to miss the higher movement at play and to reduce the name of God to pure empirical proposition.  Rather, in this view, God is in facere veritatem ( the doing of truth), to borrow Caputo borrowing Augustine.  Truth is brought into existence in the happening; likewise God is brought into existence in the event.  God is a God-Who-May-Be, to use Richard Kearney’s expression, because God rejects as false both modern reductions of theism and atheism, of possibility and impossibility, real and unreal.  This God is utterly Beyond, a God of a/theism, a God of im/possibility, and a God of the hyper-real, that is the Real beyond real, whose name is brought to bare in the happening of truth, the doing of justice, and the enacting of a possibility otherwise thought to be impossible — that is love.

That is the all important question that Augustine occupies himself with in his Confessions.  Augustine is never really satisfied with any of his answers because those answers, for him, amount to nothing more the a visual image of an invisible God and ultimately fail to grasp God as God.

I think Augustine’s question has to become our question, a question that must always be lived out within our experience as the all important linchpin of all our theological discourse and reflection.  It is the question of religion.

What would your answer be?  What is it that you love when you love your God?

I could answer with many of virtues that we find so important in theology.  But each one seems to fall short.  What is that I love when I love my God?  Is it love itself?  Justice?  Hope?  Wisdom?  All these are legitimate answers, but each one seems to, when I name it, place restraints and limits on God as God.  Perhaps the best response is all these answers and more.  The more I contemplate possible answers the more I realize that I am wholly inadequate to formulate an answer.

Any answer to this question is provisional, and always arises ad hoc in wake of the event of God.  So my answer today will likely differ from my answer tomorrow just as it differs from my answer yesterday.  And the true paradox is that none of those answers — past, present, or future — is necessarily wrong, as it were.

So again, what do I love when I love my God? I will answer for today.

I am becoming more and more convinced that God is not an object to be contemplated or an external idea to be reflected upon but a reality to be participated in and a life in which we all share.

If that is true then perhaps the best way I can answer this all important question is to say that when I love my God I love you — yes, you.  Whoever you are, however you are, whenever you are and whatever you are doing…I. Love. You.  If you are reading this, if you are a human being and participate in the sharing of this life, then I…love…you.  That is what I love when I love my God.

How would you answer?  What is it that you love when you love your God?

I was watching this video of the 2004 Emergent Conversation the other day and I was immediately struck by a quote from Walter Brueggemann about the violence attributed to God in the Hebrew bible.

“God is a recovering practitioner of violence.”

If you watch the video, the quote comes at about 29:00.  For some of the context behind what he is saying and the question he is responding to start at about 25:00.  Or watch the whole thing.  It’s definitely worth it.  There’s also a part two here.

But I want to return to that quote.  The problem of God and violence, be it in the Hebrew Bible or in the atonement, is not new.  And I am by no means have the answer, or an answer at all really.

I have to admit that I was put off by that quote when I first heard.  But I’ve been thinking about it since then and it has grown on me.  This of course questions the traditional view that God is static and completely unchanged.  I know that.  To be honest,  I don’t really have much vested interest in defending that claim that God is wholly static.  But I want to set that and any knee-jerk reactions we might of God being disrespected aside here if we can.

The main rebuttal of any suggestion that God might be participating in violence is that an text that attributes violence to God is simply the projection of human desire onto God.  So, the x group of people wants to kill and dominate y group of people.  So x group imagines that God commands them to kill y group.  That may make sense, but I don’t know that I am satisfied with that answer.  Neither is Brueggemann.  He thinks, and I tend to agree with him, that such an argument is a very slippery slope.  So, at what point do actions/virtues attributed to God in scripture cease to be human projections?  Or, are all attributes to God projected?  That may very well be true.  But we still have to deal with the violent projections.  What makes a projection of love better than a projection of violence?  The answer to that seems obvious, but it must be dealt with.

Things start to get really hairy really quick.

What do you think of Brueggemann’s quote?  Do you think that God might be “a recovering practitioner of violence?”  Is there any truth to that?  If so, what does what are the ramifications?  If not, why not?

That’s the title of one of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s most underrated and least well known speeches.  A speech that he gave in 1967 opposing the war in Vietnam and voicing dissent toward American tolerance of economic injustice.  I hope very much that we will remember, especially as we enter the age of Obama, that the egregious realities of classism and racism still exist today.  Simply electing a black man president is no magic bullet to change the status quo nor does it warrant the convenient dismissal of our dark history.  It is grounds for exuberant rejoicing, yes, but let us continue to remain vigilant in our pursuit justice and truth.

In honor of King’s full dream and legacy, here are a few exerpts of that speech we have sadly forgotten.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. … A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.