(Ir)religiosity

It’s been a while since my last post.  After probably the most grueling semester I’ve had in seminary I decided to take some time for some much needed rest.  I intend to do quite a bit of reading and writing over the summer, but I’m not sure at this point how much of that will be blogging.  We’ll see.

The more serious a student of theology I become, the more I find myself returning to a pretty basic but important question:  what is the theological task?  What is the aim of the theologian?  My answer to this question changes and evolves almost as fast as I ask it.  To be brief, for me the work of theology, at least in part, involves the critical, de/constructive examination of the ways in which our religious symbols and language — which are at times tacit and embedded — function as living discourse and practice.  To use Paul Ricouer‘s terms, theology involves a movement of suspicion (deconstructive) and a movement of retrieval (constructive).¹ The theologian, speaking on behalf of a particular community, raises new questions, re-situates or restates old questions, and critically examines those answers which are said to be normative.  As a discourse, theology is always an ad hoc and contextual enterprise, an unfinished, provisional dialogue addressed to particular problems, situations, persons, and communities.  Theology is the work of naming and examining the ways in which the religious functions in our daily lives.

Now, there are many ways of going at this.  I recently ran across one of the better attempts I have read in this post at Jesse Turri’s blog. The following is a quote from Catherine Keller‘s book On the Mystery (a book which sits on my desk as I write but I have yet to really read).

Anselm classically defined theology as fides quaerens intellectum–”faith seeking understanding.” Not faith that already understands and so no longer needs to seek. That would by definition no longer be theology. Theology itself is not the faith but its quest. If we stop seeking we are no longer on the way. Faith seeking understanding has then turned into “belief that understands.” It then closes down the very root of quaerens from which come both question and quest. Speaking divine wisdom in a mystery, theology remains a work of human speech. Theology is not the same as faith or belief, but a disciplined and relational reflection upon them. God calls, but we are responsible for what we call “God.” And God may be calling us to that very responsibility!

There you have it.  Much ink (and blood) has been wasted spilled in effort to equate theology with belief rather than a disciplined and sustained reflection upon belief and conviction.  The task of the theologian here involves holding the community accountable for what it is they call God.  Better yet, said task involves naming that which functions, however tacit or implicit, as God within religious and cultural discourse, for good or ill.  That is why I will always insist that theology is neither constructive or deconstructive but de/constructive, situated within a communal hermeneutical spiral.  The real work, then, may involve renouncing a certain (toxic)  understanding of God, the religious, etc. and taking up one which is more liberative.  I would argue that it is within this context that which should understand Nietzche’s famous dictum that God is dead — not as the vulgar, uncritical denial of the existence of God wholesale but the acknowledgment that certain understandings of that which we call God are no longer necessary and may in fact be destructive.²  Thus the task of the theologian is to unabashedly and unapologetically deliver the all important paradoxical and double-edged pronouncement:  God is dead, long live God.

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1. And I should add that I have learned from Derrida that these two are not as opposite as they may seem. [↩]
2. The paradox here is that one such understanding may be the traditional notion of God as the ultimate guarantor of metaphysics, as a transcendent Being and the foundation of the onto-theologic. For many, such an understanding is predicative of God’s existence in the first place! [↩]

I’m beginning preliminary research for an upcoming project exploring a poststructuralist pneumatology. Surprisingly, I have not found much out there dealing with the two. I’m hoping that someone might know of few articles or books dealing with that nexus.

I’d be especially keen on works that deal with the Spirit and Derrida’s notion of différance. Thanks in advance.

If God in Christ dies for real on the cross then what is the meaning of the resurrection?

My contention would be that Good Friday is not superseded by Easter Sunday, that the resurrection does not supplant the crucifixion.

The problem, I think, is that we are too quick to separate Pentecost from the Resurrection.  Pentecost marks the entrance of the Holy Spirit into the faith collective, the arrival of a new signifier which, after Christ’s death on the cross, is immanent to the collective itself.

The collective, then, is one that is deprived of its support from the Big other, as Zizek would put it.  Christ is raised in the community of believers through the liberative power of the Holy Spirit.  The entrance of the Spirit as the life of the collective spells the end of God as transcendental signified and the beginning of God as emancipatory event.

The resurrection of Christ does not involve a mere return or reduplication of his prior presence.  Rather, it involves the repetition of that presence with critical difference (i.e., the Spirit).  The logic of resurrection is in fact the logic of repetition.  The absence of God qua Big other, of God qua transcendental signified is overcome (that is, repeated, resurrected) with the presence of the Spirit, with the entrance of a new liberative signifier immanent and intrinsic to the community.

Under this sign, with the power of the Spirit, and the galvanizing memory of God’s crucified body, the community of believers perpetually enacts a non-identical repetition of Christ’s gesture under the conviction that Empire can never repress such a memory absolutely.  Indeed, there will always remain a liberative surplus, an emancipatory kernel, which opens up the space for crucial theo-political praxis and social antagonism.  It is here, in this tear in the ontological fabric of Empire, where God’s event pierces and violates its supposed immanence, that Christ is indeed resurrected.  And it is incumbent on the community, on its participation and repetition.

Shortly before he was martyred, Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote, “If I am killed I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”  Similarly, in an important scene of V for Vendetta, V states that “ideas are bulletproof.”  When Easter is celebrated in anticipation of Pentecost one can properly claim that the most important and liberative idea of all is in fact crucifixion-proof.  While God as transcendental signified may have died on the cross, the idea of God’s kin-dom surely did not.  The instruments of torture and state-sponsored terrorism cannot hold it because Empire can never maintain absolute hegemonic control.  Even as God is dead, even as God is eclipsed, Christ is risen, made present in the community through the power of the Spirit.  And it is through this dangerous, galvanizing memory that the church enacts critical repetition, in (e)sc(h)atological anticipation of the consummation of the (in/re)surrection.

I’d like to preface this — some stuff I reworked from a paper I wrote earlier this semester — by saying that while it ends on a more critical note, Segundo is without a doubt my favorite Latin American liberation theologian.  I think that especially now, with the so-called triumph of capitalism, Segundo’s work offers the best liberative alternative precisely because it is methodological and provides an ideological analysis of the foundations of theology.  My critical analysis revolves around the question of whether theology itself can provide a impetus for liberation or, as Segundo maintains, if a prior ideological or political commitment must be made.  If the latter is true, then I don’t see the need for theology as a liberative, praxis-oriented discourse.  In short, the question is this:  why be a theologian at all?

It seems that Latin American liberation theology suffers from an unintended epistemological problem.  If, in the final instance, praxis is the ultimate criterion of theoretical theology as many first-generation theologians have compelling argued, then what is the norm by which theological hermeneutics are employed?  To put it more bluntly, if praxis is the criterion for theory, then what is the criterion for praxis?  Such are the questions Juan Luis Segundo raises vis-à-vis Latin American liberation theology.  Whereas important founding thinkers like Gustavo Gutiérrez aimed to construct a theology of liberation by reifying classical Christian theological tropes against the backdrop of the socio-political situation in Latin America with the aid of Marxist analysis, Segundo opts for a different approach altogether.  One with the intention of the liberating theology from the cold grip of the ideological status quo, a move he believes is mandatory before theology itself can even begin its own program of liberation. This fundamental difference in approach is revealed in the title of both Gutiérrez’s and Segundo’s books: A Theology of Liberation and The Liberation of Theology, respectively.  Indeed, the latter suggests that what is needed is not so much a task of critical reconstruction, but rather a wholesale reevaluation of the form and foundation of theology as a potentially revolutionary enterprise, that is the conscious separation of theology from the dominant power discourse brokered — and I use the economically charged verb intentionally — by Euro-America.

For Segundo, the liberation of theology begins with the admission that any intellectual discourse — perhaps especially theology — is “intimately bound up with the existing social situation in at least an unconscious way” (8).  It is therefore imperative that the liberation theologian make the crucial connection between the past and the present situation in her critical interpretation of the biblical text.  Indeed, without such a connection Segundo is fearful that liberation theology will end up being a theology which only deals with liberation, lacking any real potency due to its “methodological naïveté” and eventually “reabsorbed by the deeper mechanisms of oppression” and the “prevailing language of the status quo” (8).  Thus, Segundo answers the question of epistemology with recourse to methodology.  In fact, it would not be wrong, in this case, to assert that a true theology of liberation is one that is concerned not only with concrete historical praxis but with the methodological processes that give rise to such action vis-à-vis the current situation.  For as Segundo provocatively claims, “the one and only thing that can maintain the liberative character of any theology is not its content but its methodology” as it is “the latter that guarantees the continuing bite of theology…however much the existing system tries to reabsorb it into itself” (39-40). Read the rest of this entry »

Contrary to the plethora of blog reviews I’ve read, I don’t think Brian McLaren goes too far in his newest book.  I think he doesn’t go far enough.  I’ll explain.

One of McLaren’s major claims in the book — in fact, the claim on which the entire book rests — is that traditional biblical hermeneutics have been limited to what he calls the “six-line Greco-Roman narrative” which constructs the rigid dualisms and binaries with which we are all familiar: spirit/body, heaven/earth, form/substance, good/evil, etc.  When applied to Scripture, this interpretive lens results in the following trajectory that has prevailed in traditional, conventional Christianity for quite some time: (1) perfection in creation, (2) fall into sin, (3) condemnation, (4) the possibility of salvation, and either (5) eternal damnation or (6) a return to perfection in heaven.  The picture below gives you sense of the movement of the lines.

McLaren maintains that this Greco-Roman narrative has been transposed over Scripture as a narrative overlay.  As such it guides interpretation of the text and, in turn, the trajectory of theology.  For McLaren, this is the dominant way of reading and interpreting Scripture, it is, quite literally, the water in which every Christian swims.  The deeper question, though, is whether Scripture is being circumscribed and restricted by this narrative overlay.  That is, whether the arc of the Greco-Roman narrative is actually indicative of Scripture itself or whether it has been imported to the text.  McLaren thinks it has.  And he spends a good deal of time drawing comparisons between the six-line interpretation of Scripture and Platonism.  I’ll spare you that piece and simply throw up another picture that does the trick. Read the rest of this entry »

“Emergent is dead” and emergent “break-up” posts seem to be in vogue lately.  The latest round have to do with the release of Brian McLaren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity.  In the eyes of some he’s gone way too far; for others he is finally clarifying his own positions.  I tend to fall in the latter category.  I am still a few chapters shy of finishing, but it seems to me that this book is the next logical step in the evolution of Brian’s work over time.  In other words, ten years later he is putting more substance to the wild ride he started with A New Kind of Christian.  And the result is the most cohesive and the “best ordered presentation to date of emergent theology.” That last statement has, quite frankly, pissed some people off because Brian hasn’t conformed to their expectations or notions of “orthodoxy”¹ (although I think the subtext to some of the more vitriolic reactions has to do with some built up disdain over the trajectory of the conversation for the past several years) .  Hence the eulogies and dear John letters. The problem, though, is that people had fixed expectations.  This isn’t that type of conversation.  I’m of the opinion that emergence isn’t dead, rather it is evolving and maturing.

Among the more charitable critiques are those offered by Jeremy Bouma who, along with bidding emergent goodbye, is submitting some of the thought to some much needed, though perhaps misguided, thoroughgoing theological critique.  I raised some issues on a few threads that I think are worth exploring here a bit more.

Bouma’s main issue that is that the trajectory of emergent in the past several years (he cites Doug Pagitt, Peter Rollins, and McLaren among others) has departed from “historic orthodox Christianity,” a monolith to be determined by “the rule of the faith.”  In other words, emergent fails the litmus test.  The real question, though, is what is this rule of the faith and who gets to be the arbiter of orthodoxy?  Here Bouma cites both the Nicene and Apostle’s Creed (which, for the purposes of this post, I have no qualms with) alongside his own constructive theological interpretation of them.  This is where we run into problems. Read the rest of this entry »

1. I’m not one to suggest issuing moratoriums on buzzwords, but if I were this word (along with maybe “biblical,” “scriptural” and “heretical”) would be one of them.  It has lost virtually all of its meaning and is only used as a rhetorical trump-card [↩]

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?

Philosophy, as logocentrism, is present in every scientific discipline and the only justification for transforming philosophy into a specialized discipline is the necessity to render explicit and thematic the philosophical subtext in every discourse. The principal function which the teaching of philosophy serves is to enable people to become ‘conscious’, to become aware of what exactly they are saying, what kind of discourse they are engaged in when they do mathematics, physics, political economy, and so on.  There is no system of teaching or transmitting knowledge which can retain its coherence or integrity without, at one moment or another, interrogating itself philosophically that is, without acknowledging its subtextual premises; and this may even include an interrogation of unspoken political interests or traditional values. From such an interrogation each society draws its own conclusions about the worth of philosophy.

–Jacques Derrida, States of Mind, 165.

Substitute (or supplement) “philosophy” and “society” with “theology” and “church” and this is precisely why I believe that academic theology is so important.  Because without it all of the tacit, implicit, and sub-level practical theologies — whether they be good, bad, healthy or destructive — remain unnamed, unchallenged, and are never critically examined.  The church must take seriously the work of academic theological discourse.  Likewise, the academics must — must! — see to it that they are in serious and intentional dialogue with the communities and collectives that take them seriously.  We need more church folk reading serious theology and more theologians talking to people in the pew.  Better yet, we need more of those rare persons who occupy the liminal and transient space between the church and the academy.

This is precisely the aim of Philip Clayton (and Tripp Fuller’s) new book, Transforming Christian Theology. Consider this post a prolegomena to my engagement with that book.  I have had it for a while and been busy with other things and I have only just begun to really get into it but I will say this:  it is refreshing and deeply encouraging to see a prominent academic theologian taking this seriously.

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. [↩]