(Ir)religiosity

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. [↩]

You know that another semester is gearing up when I don’t have time to write up a blog post.  I have been writing though.  One of my tasks this semester in my constructive theology class is to comment upon various theological concepts and to, as much as I am suspicious of the enterprise, develop a systematic of sorts.  So I will be sharing some of my statements periodically in hopes that they will spark some conversation.  I hope you will excuse the more scholarly form and academic tone.  Keep in mind that all this is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc. I have no interest in dogmatism or I wouldn’t be studying theology; I’d be enrolled in a “Bible School.”  Each section begins, in true Barthian form, with a summary sentence of the following discussion.  I look forward to the dialogue.

The locus of Christian authority and the centerpiece of revelation lies in the God who was revealed in the  incarnation of Jesus Christ — Scripture bears witness to this reality; as such the bible is the primary source of revelation and it becomes the contextual word of God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as it is responsibly interpreted and faithfully performed in the community called church.

God is the locus of Christian theological authority, more specifically, the God that was revealed in the historical incarnation of Jesus Christ. But what is the nature of that authority? Often in public theologizing appeals to religious authority are made in order to validate and legitimize specific truth claims to simply settle the issue in hand. In that sense, such authorities are more authoritarian than they are authoritative. This is problematic because theology, as a finite discipline, “is always potentially vulnerable”¹ and therefore can make no completely absolute or objective claims. Authority in the strict sense must therefore be abandoned lest theology be relegated to the sphere of modern, post-Enlightenment science, a move that has become all too popular since Descartes and Kant. Furthermore, since religious and theological authorities always require responsible interpretation, the order and placement of authority in the line of normative argumentation must be reversed so that it is not at the end of theologizing as a validator of certain claims, but rather at the beginning as the starting point from which all theologizing emerges.²

What then, are the sources of theological authority? Scripture is without a doubt the prime source of authority and the primary source of God’s special revelation insofar as it points to the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is not, however, the only source nor does it exist in a vacuum; like any other text, it requires responsible interpretation. In our time the claim that “Scripture interprets Scripture” without any subjective mediation is wholly untenable and makes for a wholly irresponsible hermeneutic. Here the so-called “Wesleyan quadrilateral” is helpful. If Scripture is the primary source of theological authority and the locus of Christian revelation then tradition, reason, and experience — helpful sources of authority and revelation in their own right — constitute a sort of hermeneutical triad by which Scripture is responsibly interpreted in various contexts and performed, that is made incarnate, by various communities.

Through responsible, communal interpretation, Scripture becomes the Word of God and is thus authoritative for Christian thought and practice. As Karl Barth writes, “The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His [sic] Word, to the extent that He [sic] speaks through it.”³  Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit the text becomes the word of God as it is read, interpreted, and performed by the church. This does not mean, however, that the text (each passage, chapter, or verse) as a single, fixed, objective, and determined meaning for all places and in all times. Such an illusion is unsustainable for at least three main reasons.⁴  First, as finite persons each of us is socially, historically, and culturally situated in a such a way that is hardly impartial, disinterested, or purely objective. Each person, whether they are completely conscious of it or not possesses what Heidegger calls a “hermeneutic pre-understanding,” which is inextricably woven into the fabric of that person’s subjectivity and serves as a sort of “implicit fore-structure [guiding] all interpretation in advance, upon which all interpretation draws, [and] by which every inquiry which is anything more than an ‘unphenomenological construction’ is nourished.”⁵   Even if there is such a thing as “objectivity” no human being would be able interpret it purely and without bias or prejudice. In other words, we are human, all too human. A white, American male from the rural south will read the bible very differently than a woman in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is whether Christians are making room in their theology for the bible to become the word of God for both persons, perhaps with different meanings, purposes, and ramifications. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Robert C. Neville, A Theology Primer (New York, New York:  State University of New York Press, 1991), 13. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, edited and translated by Thomas Forsyth Torrance and Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York, New York:  T&T Clark, 2004). [↩]
4. There are many more reasons which draw upon the insight of 20^th century continental thought, but this is not the place to explore them in depth. [↩]
5. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God:  A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2006), 113. [↩]

Marika Rose’s latest post over at Open Table Theology (a fine new community blog you should all subscribe to, by the way) got me to thinking about my love-hate relationship with systematic theology.

It’s not that I reject systematic theology wholesale.  I understand that at its best it is very important for a robust understanding of the Christian tradition and I utilize it myself and often rely on key systematic figures in my own thought.  But still, there’s something about it that doesn’t quite set right with me.

My main objection is that systematic theology is largely a modern enterprise, meaning a couple of things.  First, it is beholden to a rational,  and sometimes positivist, worldview which tends to treat the divine as some sort of scientific object to observed and dissected from a distance rather than a reality to be participated in.  Hence the expression that theology is the “queen of the sciences.”  To suggest that theology is a science at all, let alone the superior one, is already to posit a certain type of form and method that is always chasing objectivity.  Naturally, the need to delineate and taxonomize things into neat little air tight systems comes next.  So theology is fractured into all sorts of sub-genres and compartmentalized into different categories and groupings.  Again, I don’t want to categorically reject the categories.  They aren’t inherently bad.  At their best they help to point us in the right direction, but I think they more often than not tend to serve as conceptual idols, as do our systems.

And I guess that’s my biggest beef.  That systematic theology, as good and as helpful as it may be, is prone to creating conceptual idols and constructing impenetrable systems that resist any contribution from someone not perceived to be an “expert” by an esoteric — and often parochial — community.  And if we agree that all theology is political then I think we will most definitely find that systematic theology is often used to reinforce the status quo at the center rather than identifying with those on the margins; and as Leonard Sweet has said, “a move to the center is a move away from Jesus.”  So at its worst systematic theology serves as a handmaiden to the political status quo.  In that respect I think Walter Brueggmann was really on to something when he wrote that “empires prefer systematic theologians” in the first edition of his The Prophetic Imagination (interestingly, that line was removed in the second edition; I’m in the process of trying to figure out why).  Augustine’s early development of just war theory in the fourth century as the church was beginning to gain rapport with the Roman Empire would be a prime example.

Again, I don’t say any of this to negate the worth and usefulness of systematic theology.  I affirm that.  But I’m still suspicious.  Suspicious that when we create systems and taxonomies we tend to hold them much too tightly as if they themselves are without error.  But all our models are fallible.  Period.  The temptation is to construct an appealing system and then cram God into it.  I think it should be the other way around.  What I see God doing in Jesus is rupturing every human system and every finite construction with an un-tamable type of dynamism and vitality.  Those systems are, I think, only useful insofar as they point us toward the divine, but too often we mistake the systems themselves for the divine.  When it’s all said and done we have to be able to say along with Thomas Aquinas (who was the first systematic theologian and wrote perhaps the most epic systematic theology ever) that our systems, constructions, and taxonomies are “all straw” in comparison to the great mystery and paradox that is this ultimate reality in which we all share.

So I wonder, if systematic theology in its current state is in fact hopelessly beholden to a modern worldview as I suspect it is, what might a postmodern systematic theology look like?  Or is that even possible?  What think you?