(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?

This is part four 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.

Human beings are first and foremost created in the image of God and bear the divine mark upon their being; the most basic definition of sin, then, is the disintegration of the Imago dei and the disruption of the relational quality that binds humanity together.  Original sin, in this view, is not biological but sociological comprising the destructive and repressive structures in which all human beings participate yet still allow to exist.

What is the human condition?  The nature of the human person?  Is she inherently good or intrinsically tainted and driven to evil?  For centuries the Christian tradition has struggled to make sense of the reality that human beings are simultaneously capable of wonderful goodness and horrific monstrosity.  Since Augustine, Christian theology has been especially preoccupied with the notion of original sin, which, in its more extreme forms, suggests that human beings post-Eden are completely and wholly depraved lacking any inherent ability whatsoever to do good without divine intervention.  Issues of sexuality notwithstanding,¹  such a hard view of original sin is quite problematic, suffering from a shallow and otherwise underdeveloped doctrine of creation.  Whatever else is to be said about human beings, no discussion of theological anthropology can properly begin without acknowledging that humanity bears the mark of the Imago dei (Gen. 1:26-27) and is part of a creation that God originally called good, indeed, very good.  A doctrine of human nature that begins with humanity’s fallenness and so-called total depravity without considering that each human being is created in the image of God and is an integral part of God’s original, good creation is doomed for failure before it even starts.  To be sure, the Imago dei does not preclude any person from being subject to the finite situation that comprises the basic character of limited humanity nor should it be interpreted to mean that human beings are God (in fact, the latter is not a bad working definition of sin).  Even in the face of overwhelming beauty, human life is short, fragile, and unbelievably painful.  As Cornel West describes it with a certain rhythm and cadence:

[W]e’re beings toward death.  We’re featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.  That’s us; we’re beings toward death.²

Being created in the image of God does not free us from finitude; it enables us to appreciate finitude. The Imago dei is simply a statement indicating that within each person, however evil or good they may seem, is a spark of the divine and the possibly of redemption and reintegration into the participation of the divine life, of the event of God.  There is always the possibility of renewed response to divine grace. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Augustine, of course, held that original sin was passed on biologically through sexual intercourse which has resulted in almost 2000 years worth of sexual “hang-ups” in the Christian tradition.   More recently, however, theologians are reclaiming the goodness sex and the diversities of sexuality.  See, for example, Lisa Fullman, “Sex in 3-D: A Telos for a Virtue Ethics of Sexuality,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 27, 2 (2007): 151-170 and Sarah Coakley, “Living in the Mystery of the Holy Trinity: Trinity, Prayer, and Sexuality,” Anglican Theological Review, 80, 2 (Spr. 1998): 223-32. [↩]
2. Astra Taylor, ed. Examined Life:  Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers (New York, New York:  The New Press, 2009), 5. Or, as Achilles puts it somewhat romantically in the film Troy (2004) “I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” [↩]

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. [↩]

We’ve been discussing the nature of the Christian story in my evangelism class over the last few weeks, mainly whether or not Christianity is a metanarrative.

Of course, historically there is no doubt that Christianity unfortunately deserves to be placed alongside some of the more violent and totalizing metanarratives of modernity.  That is true.  I won’t dispute it.  However, I want to speak, more or less, normatively.

If we are to reify the Christian narrative after modernity, so to speak, how do we classify its narrative?

My conviction is that we have to be honest about the universal claims the Christian story makes on humanity and the course history, but unlike the metanarratives of modernity I think we also have to make room for respectful disbelief.  So the story is, I think, universal but not totalizing, invitational but not impositional.

That being said, I’m not sure I am happy or comfortable with calling the Christian story either a metanarrative or a micronarrative  It is universal but not domineering, it is contextual but not simply ad hoc.  I think it is a different story altogether and I find myself groping for another category.  I know, categories are limiting and so on, but I think it is important to have some sort of reference point, however limiting or provisional.

What do you think? Meta, mirco, or something else?

If you don’t read Religion Dispatches you really should.  A great “progressive” (for lack of a better, more unambiguous term) religion blog that consistently posts good content.  Case in point: yesterday’s post on interfaith dialogue in a — thanks to social media and other forms of new technology — increasingly globalized world.

What if we thought of religion (and even science and philosophy) as a type of language or dialect?

If the “Nones” are a rapidly growing category (as the surveys suggest), then “religion” will need to change in order to remain relevant and viable in the complex world we’re heading into. To begin with, the idea that only one religion is true, while all the others are not, will have to be abandoned. Perhaps one way of hastening this process is to think of religion as being like language. Languages are not true or false. Rather, each different language seeks to express the shared history and life experiences of those people who speak it. In a rapidly globalizing world, people will increasingly need to be fluent in more than one language. [...] Likewise, it will become necessary to speak more than one religious language; not just for the sake of communication, but in service of human spiritual growth and enrichment.

Since my first real and meaningful encounter with the presence of other religious ideas besides evangelical Christianity in “Introduction to World Religions” fall semester of my freshman year in college — the first of many experiences which radically altered my view of interfaith dialogue and religious pluralism — I’ve thought it best to think of religion(s) as a type of language or linguistic structure.  A language or dialect isn’t completely wrong, but it’s not absolutely right either.  It conveys meaning to a particular community, a characteristic that makes it true, but no single language enjoys a monopoly on meaning or truth.  And any claims to complete hegemony are essentially illegitimate and equivalent to, for example, an American demanding that all the world immediately begin using English as a means for global communication.  It just wouldn’t work.  Communication couldn’t happen and some pieces of truth and meaning would die along with the lost languages.

Language, by its very nature, is limiting.  As a native speaker I can’t escape English.  No matter how many languages I learn in my lifetime (it won’t be many, it’s not my strong suit!) I will never be able to liberate myself from thinking in English.  It is my mother tongue.  Likewise as a Christian, I am, in some sense, limited in my religious thinking.  True, Christianity offers its own unique and helpful insights into the penetrating questions of meaning and truth, but like every other religion, it does so at the expense of others.  Understanding the double-nature of that reality — its benefit and its limitation — will go a long way in understanding and making room for other religious tongues in the future.

The bilingual and multilingual person is more of an asset than the one who is not.  Christianity will always be my mother tongue, but understanding and becoming fluent and conversant in the other prominent languages of the religious landscape will be vital and of the utmost importance in the future if we are to have meaningful interfaith dialogue.  Not only that, but becoming comfortable with and using more religious languages instead of merely “knowing about them” and assuming the superiority of one’s own — a modern symptom if there ever was one — will be the hallmark of mutual understanding and respect as religious “emergence” really begins to take root in the future.  To be sure, I don’t think that dilutes my Christianity at all, contrary to the usual accusations of syncretism — in fact I think it enriches it.  Not to mention it helps me become a more well-rounded human being.

We must acknowledge that we live within an inescapable language that is no better or worse than the others — it simply is.  We must become familiar and fluent in other languages so we can become conversant.  And, most of all, we must welcome and become comfortable with the presence, importance, and enriching value of other languages — not merely tolerate their existence.  The first two come fairly easy, it is the last one that is tough.  Yet I think the success and efficacy of future dialogue and evolution depends upon it more than anything.

In my mind, language is the best way to think about this.  It helps me understand it better.  What do you think?  Does it help to think of religion as a language?

Reading through Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition yesterday I was immediately struck by this quote.

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities the produce and consume — that is, the form of value.  Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production:  in both cases, the goal is exchange.  Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value.” (p. 4-5)

This is exactly the temptation of social media, I think.  If used with restraint and discretion social media outlets can be very useful tools to share knowledge and information.  But we must recognize the danger of changing the nature of knowledge by commodifying into something to be consumed rather than something to be internalized or reflected upon.  Then the act of consuming itself becomes the goal and not the use of knowledge or the information.

For example, I find myself following more people on Twitter or subscribing to more blogs not because I believe they are useful and enriching but because I need “more.”  The goal is not quality, but quantity.  More followers, more RSS feeds, more Facebook friends, etc.  I even catch myself doing it the bookstore, it’s not the book itself that I need or want but the act of buying and consuming more.  It is as if there is some sort of jouissance to be found in the act of consuming information and the abstraction of mere quantity.

So I think social media can be a useful and important tool in transmitting and sharing knowledge, but its potential won’t matter much if we allow the very nature of knowledge and information to be destroyed so we can consume more and actually “know” less.

Thoughts?

It would be easy for me to rattle off a list of people who have influenced my hermeneutics from the worlds of theology and religious studies.  So I thought I would make it a bit more interesting and list several thinkers from outside the religious world (more or less) who influence my interpretation of not only the bible but literature in general.  Of course any “list” is always incomplete and unfinished.  There are many people who have indirectly influence my interpretive approach; I’m limiting this list to those that are more direct and most recent in time.  So here is my “hand” of 7 (in no particular order).

• Jacques Derrida - for deconstruction and différance
• Paul Ricoeur - for symbolism/myth and a hermeneutics of suspicion
• Judith Butler - for gender/sexuality identity and social construction
• Stanley Fish - for the importance of  interpretive communities and the downfall of foundationalism
• Emmanuel Levinas – for “ethics as philosophy” and the presence of the Other
• Michel Foucault – for the importance of history and power relations
• Cornel West - for “prophetic pragmatism” and the Socratic imperative

That’s my blend at the moment.

Who are a few of your non-religious and non-theological influences?

I’ll put all my cards on the table:  I think Kierkegaard is unfortunately habitually misread today.  The common reading as dictated by the philosophical and theological canon and undoubtedly displayed in undergraduate intro. courses couches (and caricatures) Kierkegaard as a prime example of religious fidelity gone awry.  His “teleological suspension of the ethical” represents all that is wrong and dangerous with religion after the Enlightenment and such a position is decidedly irrational, lacking the proper grounding in ethical reasoning.  That is one reading.  To be sure, it is important and one that should be not ignored, but it is, however, not the only one nor is it, in my view, the best one.

I was re-reading some articles and interviews by John Caputo in preparation for Emergent Outliers’ first book club meeting tonight (you should join us!) when I ran across an interesting reading of Kierkegaard that avoids that usual, banal approach and obliquely offers a critique of modern ethics.  Commenting on Derrida’s reading of Fear and Trembling, Caputo writes that:¹

“Responsibility is the issue of the singularity of the situation of the responing subject (for which “Abraham” is a place-holder) standing alone before the “wholly other” (for which “God” is a place-holder) while the demands of the “other others” (for which Isaac is a place-holder) press in upon and interrupt the intimacy of this exclusive tête-à-tête ["head-to-head"].  Thus, to decide responsibly is always a matter of sacrificing “Isaac,” the ones who hold the Isaac position, by which he [Derrida] means, of sensitizing oneself to my responsibility to all the other others who also lay claim to my responsibility, even as I respond to the other one before me.  Unlike de Silentio, Derrida’s analysis does not turn a suspension of my ethical duty in the face of the religious call that overrides it, but on the conflict of ethical duties that structures every ethical choice, which makes the paradox of the akedah [the binding of Isaac] the paradigm of everyday ethical decisions right on down to the smallest detail….”

Interesting.  So instead of fixating on Abraham’s suspension of ethics perhaps it is helpful to read the narrative in a different manner, one that recognizes the sacrifice and conflict that is inherent in every ethical decision.  One must always, in every situation (even the most mundane and seemingly insignificant), chose between opposing responsibilities as there always other others.  That is the paradox of ethics and a paradox that most popular approaches to ethics (the deontological, utilitarianism, etc.) seem to avoid precisely because they are impermeable systems conceived in the abstract, demanding fidelity to a certain set of presupposed to premises which may or may not relate to the situation at hand.  I suspect that this is what Caputo is getting at in his book Against Ethics (though I have not read it in it entirety) and I believe that this is what the usual readings of Kierkegaard miss:  that modern ethical systems, while helpful as guidelines, will always be deconstructible insofar as they posit a set of disembodied propositions that must be applied to situation that always already has other cards that have been played ahead of time.

Such a critique virtually renders moot the tiring discussions we’ve all had over which ethical system is the best because all systems are in agreement that the most proper approach should be conceived in the abstract, relying on the so-called impartiality of Reason and  constructed outside palpable relations with the wholly Other and other others.  But the  true ethical dilemma is the one that catches us by surprise as we realize the impossible choice we must make between two responsibilities, two others who have already laid claim to us.  Such an event, not at all unlike the one faced by Abraham, simply cannot be solved by a intangible system alone.

That is, I believe, an unsung lesson of Kierkegaard and one that Caputo and Derrida can both return to after the desert of modern criticism:  that there is always already conflict inherent in every ethical situation, conflict that cannot be fully resolved and conflict that demands a choice between rival responsibilities and irreconcilable others.

1. The quotation is taken from an article Caputo wrote in the 2002 Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook titled, “Looking the Impossible in the Eye: Kierkegaard, Derrida, and the Repetition of Religion, pg. 8-9.  Caputo writes on the same subject at length in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:  Religion without Religion, but the article provides the most concise and lucid description of his larger, more complex argument. [↩]

Reposted from Open Table Theology:

For quite some time my approach to prayer was nothing more than a glorified exercise in narcissism laced with all the right buzzwords and religious jargon.  I treated God like some sort of cosmic gumball machine.  Through my prayers I inserted the proper coinage, twisted the handle, and hoped what came out of the tube was a flavor of gum I liked.  My prayers consisted of elaborate wish lists containing all sorts of petitions and requests.  To be sure, I would throw in something every once in while about starving kids in a third world country to feel less guilty and hopefully pad my persuasive capital with God — as if God were taking orders from me, or flipping some sort of epic prayer coin to decided whether or not my request should be granted.   God, for me, was a better version of a Genie in a Bottle: except there was no bottle because God was always there to listen (I always wondered how God could be there to listen to everyone, but I never let it bother me too much) and I had an unlimited number of “wishes.”  The only catch was I would never know if my wishes would actually be granted.  Some would, others wouldn’t.  Sometimes the minor ones were granted while other more important ones were not.  I just assumed God arbitrarily picked which ones to honor and which ones to table.  So it went.

I have long since rejected that very trivial theology of prayer, but as I reflect on its implications I realize how important our understanding of prayer actually is.  It seems to me that prayer is often sidelined as a second or even third tier “issue” subservient to more important and pressing theological questions like the nature of God or theodicy or soteriology and so on.  For example, if you go to a local book store book on prayer (the quality of such books notwithstanding) are almost always placed in the “Christian Inspiration” section rather than the “Theology” section.  However, if theology is primarily about developing a sound and coherent word (logos) about God (theos) — however limiting and finite it may be — what could be more important than prayer?  If I am feebly and delicately trying to develop ideas about God, about the divine, about that which is beyond me and that which consumes me — which is what I have devoted the remainder of my life to doing — what could be more weighty and significant than my ideas about addressing the divine, than my approach to communicating with God, than the way in which I, to borrow from Brother Lawrence, practice the presence of God?

This is what I am trying to get at: prayer says more about our theology and our ideas of God than we realize; indeed, I would go so far as to claim that how we view prayer in some sense determines what we believe about the nature of God and vice versa.  If God is a deus ex machina, a mechanistic deity, a Big Daddy in the Sky who pulls strings for good people and cuts strings for bad people, then we will pray in a certain way.  And, like my example above, how we pray will reveal an understood theology whether we overtly claim it or not.  If we really want to “do theology” well and uncover all those areas in which the residue of our tacit assumptions about God still remain, then we had better take prayer seriously. Read the rest of this entry »