(Ir)religiosity

I ran across this quote from Jürgen Moltmann last night while doing some research for my last written statement in constructive theology for the semester.

Christian eschatology must separate itself from the messianism of the modern world, and out of this world’s ruins must rescue the categories of redemption.              God for a Secular Society, 220.

It seems to me that one of the biggest theological challenges facing us today is speaking of eschatology in light of postmodernism.  If Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives is correct it would seem to spell the end of eschatology broadly conceived.  For Moltmann, however, eschatology could not be more important as it is the very medium and content of all theological discourse.

So the question then becomes the following one:  what is the ultimate Christian hope in the face of the failed and indeed violent narratives of the modern world, how can the Christian narrative be freed from those totalizing narratives, and how does it, at its core, differ from them?  What is its good news?  I think Moltmann is on to something here.  Yet I wonder how or if it is even possible to distinguish the Christian narrative from these other stories ontologically.  That is, how to speak of the Christian narrative without totalization.  In many ways this gets back to the question I asked a few months ago about whether Christianity is intrinsically a metanarrative.  Or does it spell freedom from the metanarrative?

I’m still working out where I come down on this, but it seems to me that eschatology is where the rubber meets the road as far as the interface between theology and postmodernism is concerned.

Thoughts?

If I had to pick one point where Jürgen Moltmann has made the most significant impact on my own theology it would be his social doctrine of the Trinity.¹  In fact, it wasn’t until I read The Trinity and the Kingdom of God that I was actually excited about being Trinitarian!  Moltmann is not interested in the old heresies and old debates surrounding substance, or essence, or autonomous personhood.  Instead he is interested debunking monarchical monotheism, which inscribes domination and hierarchy into the very nature of God (not to mention humanity!) where God the Father — and here nobody would have a problem with the masculine, phallocentric language — sits at the top of the order, below him sits the Son, and last (and more often than not least!) sits the Spirit — because by this logic it only makes sense that the more feminine of the persons be at the bottom of the hierarchy!  Moltmann claims that all Trinitarian formulations at least since Augustine and surely since the insertion of the filioque into the Nicene Creed by the West are captive to this type of monarchical monotheism.

Obviously this creates all sorts of problems, especially if you believe that the human order should, more or less, mirror the divine order.  Then you have domination and subjugation writ large.  Enter Moltmann who, as we can already see, is more interested in the social and political implications — in other words, what all this means for the Imago dei — of the Trinity than modalism, Arianism, or any other ancient -ism that really has no bearing on contemporary theology.

Over against the hierarchical models, Moltmann imagines² a more egalitarian approach (I don’t know that he uses that word himself and I don’t know if he would take issue with it; I certainly don’t) which emphasizes the “community of God” that is comprised of the three persons and the perichoresis, the mutual indwelling, that binds them together as one.  For Moltmann, kenosis is not limited to the second person and the incarnation alone, indeed it is such kenotic love that holds the Trinity together, each person giving and emptying itself for the sake of the other.  In this relationship the identity of each person is inextricably linked to each of the other persons and through that bond each person sees the other as part of the Other and in the process sees itself as (an)other.³

In Moltmann’s larger theology this has deep political and social implications.  If the divine hierarchy is deconstructed then the human hierarchy must be too, and a radically new community — an order steeped with kenotic love and perichoretic unity that jettisons any form of domination — replaces it.  To be created in the image of God is to be a relational being, a mirror image of members of the the divine community.

You probably already see where this is going.  My question is what might happen if we not only took Moltmann’s social doctrine of the Trinity seriously but let it infiltrate our eccelsiology as well. What would happen if our ecclesial structures and our relationships with one another in the community we call the church were guided not by hierarchy and power but self-emptying, kenotic love and perchoretic egalitarianism?  What if we reversed the polarities of the order of power in the church and not only upheld our responsibility to the other but saw ourselves as (an)other too and deeply dependent upon the embodied connection between our subjectivity and the other’s subjectivity?  Is that not what Moltmann was getting at in his book title — “The Trinity and the Kingdom” — where the church doesn’t mirror the power structures and regimes of domination that rule this world but the very community of God in which persons are persons only in self-emptying relationship with other persons?  Is it just me or is it hard, if not impossible, to do that when the church is beholden to uneven power dynamics?

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• The relational Image of God: embracing the other (blakehuggins.com)

1. His argument in The Crucified God apropos to God’s suffering is a very close second, but I’m not sure Moltmann goes far enough.  The suffering, abandoned God in Christ on the Cross would be much more salient and radical if Moltmann let go of omnipotence, but he wants to hold on to it.  I think we have to let go of that idea.  Not to mention the residual theodicy issues that are still very much at work under the surface.  I may take this up later at some point. [↩]
2. This is really is nothing new.  Eastern Orthodoxy has always held this view and it dates back to at least the Cappadocian Fathers.  I think it is fair to say, though, that Moltmann certainly popularized it, especially in the Western tradition, and extrapolated its political and social effects a bit further. [↩]
3. Ok, Moltmann doesn’t exactly use this sort of postmodern accent, but I can’t help it.  I hear when I read him — especially on the Trinity. [↩]

I think the best way for me to reflect on the Moltmann Conversation will be in a series of posts on a few key thoughts that were brought up over the course of the conference and have stuck with me.  Before going I figured I would just post my notes but I can’t do that because, well, I don’t really have any “normal” notes.  I wasn’t really able to take notes like I normally do because the conference was, more or less, a sound byte conference, which would be interesting to talk about in itself.  Free wifi was provided so just about everyone was either tweeting or liveblogging.  A screen was up behind the stage displaying some of the #moltmann tweets.  Then there wast the twub.  So the whole time I was trying to listen to the questions, listen to Moltmann’s answers (many of which were gems and very tweet-able), watch the Twub, watch the screen and tweet.  So in a sense my tweets ended up being my notes.  Weird, I know.  But that’s how it worked out.

During the first session Moltmann spoke to his own life experience (something he develops on a large scale in his autobiography, a book you should really read if you get a chance) and I was immediately struck by the notion of theology as biography.  His personal experiences as a POW and instances of deep tragedy and suffering led him to questions similar to those of Christ on cross:  where is God in the face of death and suffering?  In many ways, these experiences send Moltmann on theological trajectories that determine the bulk of his life’s work.  A Theology of Hope and The Crucified God are two of the most prominent examples.  The former views the whole of theology from an eschatological perpsective in which the church looks with hope to the future while standing firmly in the confidence of the resurrection and eagerly anticipating the incoming of God’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth; the latter is, of course, the other side of this hope: the cross of Christ through which God enters into the suffering of the world and identifies with the victim not as the stoic deity of Greek philosophy who is disaffected by the cries of the oppressed, but the God of the Hebrew scriptures, the God of pathos who is capable of deep suffering and likewise capable of deep love.  It is in this way that Moltmann re-frames the theodicy question, not as something to be answered — because as he stated at the conference “no answer will satisfy us” — but something to be wrestled with; indeed as something to be wrestled with together with God.¹

The theological particulars of each of these are interesting in their own right, but for me, after hearing Moltmann tell his story, the fact that both emerged from his personal experiences and his desire to develop a theology “after Auschwitz” cannot be overstated.  His is a perfect example of theology as biography and biography as the working out of theology.  Of course this happens both individually and collectively.  In that vein I appreciated Tripp Fuller (who I was finally able to meet in person!) raising the question in the panel of how 9/11 has effected the biography of younger (and even older) Americans in the same way WWII did for Moltmann’s.  At this point I think it may be too early to tell exactly how theology in the 21st century will take shape in the aftermath of that event.  But I think Moltmann provides us with a good model. I think we will be and are presently asking some of the same questions he did in response to suffering and tragedy.  And I think the way in which he poses those questions and attempts to re-frame them may be helpful too.

But the larger point for me is still theology as biography and biography as the incarnational outworking of theology.  And the more I think about the more I realize that is always our “background music” whether we realize it or not.  Perhaps our becoming conscious of it will make us better theologians.

1. Here I will resist the temptation to put Moltmann in conversation with John Caputo’s “weak God.” [↩]

This time tomorrow I’ll be in Chicago for the much anticipated Moltmann Conversation.  I’m pretty stoked.  Not only will I get to see one of the world’s foremost living theologians, I’ll also get to finally meet some really cool people I’ve been following online for a while now (wow, that sounded really stalkerish).

I doubt that I will liveblog much, unless I change my mind.  Tweeting should be much easier and I’d rather contribute to the larger conversation that will be going on the Twub, rather than make up my own.  That being said, if you follow me on Facebook it will be easier to keep up with everything if you follow me on Twitter.  I’m not going to feed all my tweets into Facebook because I don’t want to spam a bunch of people.  I’ll double up on some things but not all.  If you follow me on Twitter and aren’t interested in any of this, well, I apologize.

To make things super easy, I’ve embedded the Twub below so you can keep up with everything that is going on from here if you like.

Hopefully sometime over the weekend, or maybe early one next week, I’ll post my final thoughts on the whole experience.

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!

I’m really liking Ron Martoia’s new book Transformational Architecture: Reshaping Our Lives as Narrative. Most books of this genre, at least most of the ones I’ve been exposed to, concede that we have essentially gotten the Christian message right from the beginning and simply need to change our method — so it is cooler, more attractive, and most of the time, more enculturated in the American ethos of consumption and individualism –  to “reach” more people. Ron’s book challenges that assumption.  He questions the institutional church’s interpretation of the Christian story suggesting that, “Our problem isn’t just one of method, but of message as well.” I like that.  And I think that part of it means to follow the way of Jesus is the humble willingness to question everything, even our appropriation of the story itself.

One of the sub-sections of our assumed story that I struggle and wrestle with is evangelism.  Without going into too much of a diatribe, it has always bothered me that a lot of what passes as “evangelistic outreach,” when you really look at it, has amounted to nothing more than coercion aimed at creating cookie-cutter Christians.  Of course the fear of hell is usually incited and contrasted with the eternal bliss of heaven, somewhere, someday.  Rarely is actual transformation spoken of and there is usually no follow-up or attempt at discipleship.  The number of “converts” almost always trumps any suggestion of radical lifestyle alteration, because we are all just waiting for Jesus to come back right?

Now, that may be a bit overstated.  But I think there is some truth to it.

I think evangelism is part of the message that we have gotten wrong.  And I think we should reevaluate our approach, our definition, and maybe even our use of the word itself.

In the book’s introduction Ron offers an interesting alternate definition of evangelism that I think bears some reflection.

God’s original architectural plans for human “heart space” designed us with cravings, longings, yearnings, that sit at the intuitive level of our lives.  These primal elements, architected deep in the core of our being, drive our desire for transformation.  In other words, “evangelism” is really about helping people along in a journey for which they have desire already built into them at the center of their hearts.

I like that.  I think it is a good new working definition of evangelism.

Here’s why:

• It’s about finding a personal story, an extended narrative, not just a conversion — and sometimes coercive! — experience that will later lose its luster.
• It’s about finding community, a place where the personal narrative can be sustained and nurtured, not restricted and truncated.
• It’s about God’s ongoing story of redemption, restoration, and renewal, not a one-time event, but a process of holistic transformation.

So instead of dominating others with rigid dogmatism, instead of insisting that persons essentially assume the same script and the same story, freedom of creativity and imagination is allowed as persons are encouraged to find their voice and then within a particular local, and contextual community, live that story out in their own peculiar way within the larger framework of God’s narrative of restoration and renewal.

With this approach tangible transformation and actual response to grace are demanded and expected as individuals and communities continually participate in the life of God and partner in the work of realizing the divine commonwealth.

To me, that looks more like the way of Jesus than what has passed as evangelism in the past.

What do you think of Martoia’s definition?  Do you think this more narrative-centered, conversational approach might be more effective than the modern approach of the past?  And, do you think there might be a better word or phrase besides “evangelism” that could be used, something with less baggage that might better communicate the invitation to participate?

I got a new batch of books and other cool stuff from Mike Morrell and The Ooze over the holiday break. I started this one this evening.

I’m almost halfway through and I’m really liking it. I hope to post about it next week before school gears up.