the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Symposium: Whose Community? Which Interpretation? - Chapters 5 and 6

The third engagement with Merold Westphal's Whose Community? Which Interpretation? Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church comes from Andrew Talbert (part 1, part 2). Andrew Talbert is a recent graduate from Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, who has since relocated with his wife, Bethany, to the UK in order to pursue a PhD under Anthony Thiselton at University of Nottingham. His research involves the reception history of 2 Thessalonians and theological hermeneutics, with particular interest in the differences between pre-critical and critical biblical interpretation, as well as current trends of biblical interpretation in the Church. 

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Despite his borderline obsession with yurt-dominating dromedaries, Merold Westphal has put together an excellent text in Whose Community? Which Interpretation? both in terms of its concise presentation of hermeneutics and postmodern thought, and in its accessibility. There are few texts in the modern languages, translated or otherwise, more difficult to simply read, let alone comprehend, than those of Derrida, Ricoeur, Gadamer, and company. One could certainly argue that a primary reason many Christians of the conservative Evangelical persuasion (I include myself in this camp) have not personally engaged with these philosophers is due to the degree of complexity that characterizes their work. This is not to say that Evangelicals are unintelligent by any means, but to emphasize the often abstruse vernacular and reasoning of these philosophers. Westphal has done well to concentrate the principles of these thinkers into intelligible and palatable sections, thereby providing a beginning to the Gordian knot of philosophical hermeneutics and inviting Christian readers to untangle it with him.

 

Having worked through the objectivist hermeneutics of Hirsch, the speech-act theory of Wolterstorff, and having described the relativity of any reader in relation to the absolute character of God in the first four chapters of his work, Westphal turns to the trio essentially equated with postmodernity: Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida.

There are few phrases more monotonous than “all truth is relative in postmodern thought,” which frequently serves as the smoking-gun to end discussion about the potential benefit of this philosophical approach. Using these primary thinkers in chapter five, Westphal carefully articulates how they understand the cultural relativity of humanity, particularly in the case of the author and the reader. He puts forth the concept that the death of the “absolute” author has taken place in postmodern thought- “absolute” in the sense that the author is the unilateral producer of meaning in the same sense as God is the producer/Creator of the world. This does not mean that the author’s intent has no bearing on textual meaning, but that he/she no longer exerts divine control over the meaning of their text. Instead, these philosophers contend that meaning is produced in the dialogue of author, work, and reader. The author writes and intends within a particular contextual framework, and the reader, likewise, receives and interprets within a particular contextual framework. This accounts for why there are so many diverse Christian traditions at present. Part of the postmodern approach aims to move away from the psychologism of earlier hermeneutical models that focuses on the author, for, as Westphal notes, our concern in reading is generally less about “Who wrote this?” than it is “What is this text saying?” Put differently, in the phrase “someone saying something about something to someone,” Paul Ricoeur devotes his attention primarily to the “something about something.” 

Due to his position as a Christian, Ricoeur represents something of an exception to these other philosophers. Though clearly shaped by postmodern proclivities, his interest veers toward Scripture and the promises and commands contained therein. These promises and commands stand true for Christians presently, providing “a world in which we might live, a world of biblical faith.” This provides a realistic approach to biblical faith. It is neither a teaching that requires us to become first century Palestinians in order to come to terms with the New Testament writings, nor instruction that remains theologically abstract. In both of these examples, one is able to distance themselves from the claims that Scripture makes on the believer. It is more difficult to do so in Ricoeur’s conception. 

Along these lines, Westphal continues to promote the mantra that the aim of interpretation is not merely reproduction, but also production- a mindset shared by Ricoeur and Gadamer. This means that the interpreter strives both to rightly perceive the intent of the author, but also allows for the creative thought of the addressee that stems from their contextual conditioning. It is important to note, however, that Ricoeur and his compatriots insist that this interpretation must be sustained by the text and carefully scrutinized by the interpreter. An example may help illuminate this point: when I read the book of James, I find it encourages godly living as demonstrative of the faith I profess. When a friend of mine, at the time a non-Christian, read the same text he was so deeply convicted of his depravity that he eventually converted to the Christian faith. Now the question we must ask is whether the author intended both of these meanings for the same text? If not, can this text sustain both interpretations?

Carrying this conversation forward in chapter six, Westphal comes upon the primary hermeneut with whom he means to engage: Hans Georg Gadamer. Having progressed through the other philosophers, their connection with Gadamer is evident. His thought flows out of these ruminating concepts of author, interpreter, and relativity. Gadamer’s interests lie primarily in understanding how one interprets, rather than providing a method for interpretation. For Gadamer, tradition(s) stands as the primary effective agent for the interpreter. It provides both a framework for interpretation and limits within which the interpretation can manifest. We may reflect upon these shaping traditions, though never fully stand outside of them. They set our interpretive horizons, which can expand as they come into contact with other interpretive horizons, but, as Gadamer beautifully asserts, this expansion is always “unfinished business.” At this point, it would be interesting to see how Westphal would engage with a theologian like Angus Paddison, who has carried Gadamer’s position forward in somewhat of an extreme manner, though I suppose that is not the aim of this series.

As the chapter draws to a close, Westphal is quick to emphasize, with Gadamer, that traditions are not negative. They provide an epistemological framework without bestowing an omniscient, “God’s-eye view of revelation.” Traditions enable us to understand with “grounded opacity,” but they give us ground, nonetheless. As reflective, critical (in a good sense) Christians, we have the responsibility to engage with our traditions, both in a broad cultural sense and in a more specific, perhaps denominational, sense. The aim of this is not to overturn and demolish our traditions, especially because we will find that many traditions will remain intact, but to “be transformed by the renewing of [our] minds” (Rom 12:2), which is all part of the process of sanctification.

As I have contemplated my contribution to this symposium, I considered entering into the circular argument of relativity and subjectivity typical of discussions on postmodernity, Ricoeur, and Gadamer, but found this of little worth. Multiple interpretations and traditions exist. We have the responsibility of measuring their worth at least by their capacity to be sustained by the biblical witness. Who knows- this may produce fruitful trans-denominational dialogue. At the very minimum, it provides a point of entry for any Christian into the discussion of biblical interpretation with the potential of beneficial, self- and communal-critical reflection. The only other points of interest I might like to see Westphal explicate are his understandings of Canon and inspiration. 

By this point it should be evident that I have chosen not to critique (in a negative sense) Westphal’s work. Perhaps my ready agreement with the text stems from an appreciation of its presentation in a way that is accessible to those outside the scholarly guild. Perhaps I appreciate it because I am glad to see someone cut through the complexity of many issues, remembering that it once took me half a day to read eight pages of H.R. Jauss (Gadamer’s student; that’s a difficult accomplishment to explain to one’s wife). Perhaps I have little reservation because the UK postal strike limited the time that I had to appropriate and digest the text (maybe I will attach an addendum after a closer read). As a whole, I believe that this is a fine work that presents a hermeneutical approach essential to the Church in a manner that I commend.

Symposium: Whose Community? Which Interpretation? - Chapters 3 and 4

The second engagement with Merold Westphal's Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church comes from Jim Chapman (see part 1 by Carl Raschke here). Jim Chapman is currently a Th.M. student in historical studies at Duke University, where his thesis will focus upon Augustine’s Confessions. His research interests lie in the application of literary theory to early Christian texts. He hold a Master of Arts in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and a BA in Philosophy from James Madison University. Along with his wife Aaron, they are expecting their first child, Jude Augustine Chapman, in late January of 2010.

 

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I must begin with a brief “thank you” to Eric Lee for the opportunity to contribute to this blog, as well as to Baker Academic for their generosity in furnishing a copy of the book. I first had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Westphal during a two-week course on philosophical hermeneutics in the summer of 2007. Reading this book has recalled many memories, both positive (Westphal’s characteristic wit) and negative (sloshing through Gadamer’s Truth and Method over five summer days in Southern California without the benefit of air conditioning). As Dr. Westphal would point out, books suffer a limitation in their ability to carry the fullness of their author. I can only gesture here to the wonderful personality who now holds the relation of “author” to this particular book.

  

As a brief recap, chapters one and two of Whose Community? Which Interpretation focus mainly upon the development of hermeneutics from its use in law, theology, and philology to its appropriation as a general theory of interpretation in the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. The romantic hermeneutical project is set apart by its psychologism (whereby the goal of interpretation is to relive the inner life of the author) and its objectivism (the belief that an interpretation can hold as universally valid). 

Understanding the narrative reconstruction, succinctly captured by Westphal, is essential to understanding the framework for modern discussions on hermeneutics. In terms of historical development, subscription to psychologism goes hand-in-hand with a subscription to objectivism. Yet many conservative biblical interpreters and theologians today stake their interpretive claims precisely on their ability to deny the former while holding to the latter. [see Carl Raschke's engagement with chapters 1 & 2 here]

 

In chapters 3 and 4 of Whose Community? Which Interpretation?, Westphal turns to two recent attempts strike such a balance: Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse and E. D. Hirsch’s Validity of Interpretation. The feature common to both writers is their desire to ground the validity of interpretation in authorial intention. Wolterstorff, through an appropriation of speech-act theory, thinks that objectivity is gained by focusing upon the fact that in scripture God gives commands, assertions, and promises. Hirsch finds objectivism through making the author the sole determiner of meaning. For each writer, the author is seen as the only viable option for grounding objectivity because the realm of the reader is feared as the realm of subjectivity; the purposive author is contrasted with the capriciously interpreting reader. 

Westphal alludes that a major problem with each position is its ambiguity precisely with regards to either the crucial concept of author or intention, which I would like to draw out briefly. In speech-act, it seems as though you must invariably know quite a lot about an author/speaker before you can know the stance that author/speaker takes with regards to a speech-act. In other words, knowing the subjective or psychological state that a speaker/author is in seems crucial to knowing the quality of command/assertion/promise that they are making. When my father was angry, I took his commands/assertions/promises to have an entirely different urgency than when I thought him to be joking. Similar problems plague Hirsch’s attempt to allow the author privilege in determining meaning. If only an author can determine the meaning of a text, how can we possibly understand the meaning of the text without recourse to the author’s inner life?

  

To be fair, Westphal is far kinder to Wolterstorff and Hirsch in this book, remaining quite attentive to what each author is trying to avoid saying (more or less successfully) and often stopping just short of drawing a necessary conclusion from Wolterstorff or Hirsch simply because it is left unstated. The generosity Westphal affords in his reading of others is, indeed, laudable in academic discourse. 

My only real criticism of Westphal’s book concerns the correspondence between the way he frames issues (primarily philosophical) and his intended audience (academic, pastoral, and lay theologians). Certainly Westphal cannot be faulted for focusing on philosophy in a book that concerns philosophical hermeneutics, but this is not to say that he could have provided more points of contact between philosophical and theological presuppositions. This seems, to me at least, to be vital given the books general claim that hermeneutical presuppositions often remain naively unexamined in the church. 

As a brief example of this criticism, I would like to gesture to a theological problem inherent to claiming objectivity in the interpretive process. In order for objectivity to exist, some part of the interpretive process (someone saying something about something to someone) must be determinate. A theory of authorial intention can only make such a claim through one of two moves. First, it could conceive of either God or the presence of God in scripture as static or bounded. Such a claim would be out of touch with the majority of confessional Christianity. In my own reading of history, the Nicene Creed was born from the theological tradition of Alexandria that was staunch in its refusal to allow the divine being to be circumscribed. Second, a theory of authorial intention could conceive of human intellect as of equal capacity to the divine. If humans could know something as universally valid, such as an objective meaning, they would know it in the same way that God knows it. Yet this seems far from the case: we only know in part, and we only see in part.

I know from personal experience that Dr. Westphal is capable of making these connections and I feel Whose Community? Which Interpretation? might have been a better resource for theologians if it had more self-consciously pointed beyond itself as the argument unfolded. I can only be grateful though for the resource that Dr. Westphal has provided.

What Has Mozart to Do with Coltrane?

Cynthia Nielsen has published what looks to be an exciting article entitled "What Has Mozart to Do with Coltrane?: The Dynamism and Built-in Flexibility of Music" which can be found here in the Expositions journal. Here's an abstract:

Although contemporary Western culture and criticism has usually valued composition over improvisation and placed the authority of a musical work with the written text rather than the performer, this essay posits these divisions as too facile to articulate the complex dynamics of making music in any genre or form. Rather it insists that music should be understood as pieces that are created with specific intentions by composers but which possess possibilities of interpretation that can only be brought out through performance.

Speculative Grace: Giving Thanks

No one is coming to save us from the grace of the mundane. 

There is no help on the way. Eternity is all just more of the same. Novelty is a red herring: the last refuge of that dream that is my ego.

There is no escaping the minute specificity of repetition required to move anything (in anyway) from here to there. There is no escaping the minute specificity of repetition required to keep anything (in anyway) from moving from here to there. 

(From here to there is nothing but tolls and every toll must be paid. Squatting invites its own taxes.)

Again and again, I must lift this foot then that one. Again and again I must open this book, then close it, then open that one. Again and again, I must read this student paper and then that student paper and then the other one and assign them grades, checking off each and every box in the rubric. Again and again, I must stop for lunch, pause at the water fountain, stop at the restroom, and use the key to open my office door.

Congratulations, you've just done the dishes. Do it again! Congratulations, you've just run ten miles. Do it again! Congratulations, you've just had a good night's sleep. Do it again!

Tonight my eyes will close and in the morning they will open again - then I'll blink my way through another day. 

Again I'll breathe in. Again I'll breathe out. 

Breath: the mark of the scrupulous and saturating specificity of the repetition that is being.

Breath: the raw iteration of life itself.

Life is nickels and dimes. Every moment, ten thousand points of iterated resistance, ten thousand paper cuts, ten thousand pressing irritations, ten thousand pleasures and ten thousand pains. 

I dream of the frictionless, of floating in zero-G. I dream of that symmetry breaking moment when everything will shift into the adjacent possible, my tax refund having finally (and definitively!) arrived. I dream of that "end" at which all of my (spoiled) actions aim. 

Thank God such ends never arrive!

Don't mistake me - novelty can and does come. (In some ways, there is nothing but. And in some ways it is desperately needed.) But that novelty, even while freshly salted, will not bring what I hoped. 

The fellow fancies a new job. He gets it. But he still must drive from here to there. He still must drink and pee. He still must fill the car up with gas and sit on the seat and turn the wheel and use his turn signal and check his mirrors and tap-tap-tap his fingers to the tune on the radio and wait mile after mile after mile. He still must breathe - inhale again, exhale again, repeat!

The fellow wants to fall in love. He gets it. The paper cuts don't end. How could love, however fresh, be anything other than the buttoning and unbuttoning of a shirt, the tedium of smelly socks, the asynchronicity of libido, the cough of a child, the bruise of a height differential, the sale at Walmart, the tangential pressure of a flirtation, the pull of another piece of cheesecake? What else would such a thing be made of?

The fellow wants to be rich and famous. He wants someone else to do the work, make the effort, wash the dishes. He gets it. Now there is nothing but the scrupulous and saturating specificity of the repetition that is sitting around and waiting for others to do things for him: he flicks through the channels, he gets tangled in the late morning sheets, he crosses and uncrosses his legs on the couch, his BMW still has to stop at stop signs, he still has to check his mirrors, stop and pee, etc., etc. This particular plane of possibilities, like all other planes of possibility, is just as definitively mundane as any other. 

Novelty is a red herring. There is no place to go. You won't find what you want over there. You're still going to have to breathe - again and again and again. Repeat. Again and again and again. Repeat.

At every step in the problem, life demands that we show all of our work. No credit is given just for getting the right answer. There's no skipping ahead.

It's groundhog day every day.

Can you bear it? Can you root out that secret wish for the banality to end? Can you cut the cord to this secret wish, the secret wish that animates your basest fantasies, your most ordinary chores, and your most authentic spiritual longings? How many disguises does this wish - this wish for an end to the paper cuts! - have? Have many faces does it wear? How much life does it suck from the color of your cheeks?

If you think I'm being bitter, you've misunderstood. I'm being compassionate. And I'm trying to be Mormon. 

In general, the rap against Mormonism is that it is all so (too!) mundane. God, for Mormons, is so not supra-mundane. Heaven - where people are still married, still go to work, still have children, still change diapers - is also so not supra-mundane. 

Leave it to Mormonism to see the nihilistic claim that there is nothing but the aching specificity of this repetition and raise it to the power of infinity. Leave it to Mormonism to claim that, even in heaven, we'll have to both button and unbutton our shirts, show all our work, change the diapers, wait for stuff to happen, suffer paper cuts, and - of course, forever and ever again - breathe.

There is no help on the way. Eternity is all just more of the same. Novelty is a red herring: the last refuge of that dream that is my ego.

No one is coming to save us from the grace of the mundane. 

Jesus came to give this grace not take it away.

Breathe. 

Nothing could be more merciful.

Race Theory Mini-Series Comes to a Close

As my short six-part series on race theory comes to a close, I wanted to post a little essay I wrote two years ago explaining the origins of the idea of race.  Hopefully this will answer many of the questions I’ve received through emails over the past few months.  Even though I have reconsidered some of the claims presented in the following post, I have decided to retain the original, which was (and continues to be) a work in progress.  I’d like to thank Jamie, Geoff, and Eric for allowing me to contribute to the site.  Lastly, thanks to the readers of the series.  Let me leave you with a bit of encouragement: don’t hesitate to post in the comments sections of blog entries because you fear what others will think.   (But yes, all the emails to my personal email account have been warmly welcomed nevertheless.)  “churchandpomo” is here to be an open, welcoming venue for lively discussion on topics that are great importance to contemporary Christianity.

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The twenty-first century confronts us with at least two questions: How do we respond to the horrific events of the previous century, and how do we ensure that such atrocities do not occur again? Many prejudices have been incited by the implicit systemization of Race, or racialization. Moreover, can we today imagine the possibility of living in a harmonious world, a world of pluralism — the idea that there is a multiplicity of incommensurable values expanding over various cultures? Commenting on our contemporary situation, F.M. Barnard writes:

 

Not many social theorists today, it is true, share their nineteenth-century precursors faith in unilinear progress. Yet, this does not seemingly prevent contemporary sociologists and economists from theorizing about political development as though progress in one direction — for example, in the possession of telephones or automobiles — must necessarily correlate with the arrival of stable democracy.[1]

 

It appears that many academics, clergy, and laypersons struggle with reformulating their ideas of human progress, particularly in terms of Race. However, over the past few years, we have seen a resurgence of the idea of cultural cosmopolitanism amongst America's youth (although they are unaware of it). Perhaps it is best for us to go back a few centuries in hopes of understanding our historical situation. By tracing the origins of the idea of Race, we may be on firm ground to truly accept diversity and embrace pluralism, or cultural cosmopolitanism.[2] Working through four centuries of racial discourse can be tedious. I promise to make our journey as clear and straightforward as possible while not belittling the ideas of our predecessors.

Why should such a historical trace be of importance for us today? 'Historical change in the abstract sense,' G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) states, 'has long been interpreted in general terms as embodying some kind of progress towards a better and more perfect condition.'[3] In a similar tone, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) asks, 'For what other purpose would humans have joined together, but that thereby they might become more perfect, better, happier human beings?'[4] Furthermore, Hegel claims, 'In our understanding of world history, we are concerned with history primarily as a record of the past. But we are just as fully concerned with the present.'[5] We continue to witness this dilemma. No doubt, we must know our pasts in order to know who we are. However, how much do we impose of our present situation back onto our pasts? Let us reflect upon the historical origins of the idea of race in order to better understand the racialized world in which we live today.

 

Let us ask ourselves a few basic questions regarding Race. How do we use the term Race? In other words, what do we mean when we say 'Race'? Do you belong to a Race? If so, to which one do you belong? Have you ever acted in a racist manner to another person? Have you ever been the object of racism?

 

Probably all of us have an experience of Race. Let us ask a few more questions. Are there actually Races that exist? If so, are the groups we categorize as Races actually Races? For example, most Europeans understand Jews as being a particular Race. Most Americans understand Jews in terms of Ethnicity. And finally, is it possible that racialization, the experience of Race, and racism exist, but not Race itself? This final question should remain in the forefront of our minds for the rest of our investigation.

 

Let us continue this reflection by looking into the history of the idea of race, an idea that was formed not too long ago. In the sixteenth century, European nations began to speedily expand their horizons. Trade, travel, and colonization made the world a little smaller. Explorers came into contact with more diverse people groups and began to keep travel journals documenting their perceptions of physical distinct people. Such travel journals became commonplace for the educated class, particularly the educated who themselves traveled the world.

 

One such traveler was the physician Francois Bernier (1620-1688), who first used the word Race in its modern context.[6] In 'A New Division of the Earth According to Different Species or Races of Men' (1684), Bernier remarks that 'Geographers up to this time have only divided the earth according to its different countries or regions.' This new division became manifest in terms of Race. While practicing medicine in India, Bernier came to the conclusion that human beings do not make up one Race, but rather a multitude of species. Despite his attempts for accuracy, Bernier failed to give a coherent definition of Race and continued to use species and race interchangeably.

This failure in giving Race a fixed meaning can also be found in the works of Isaac De La Peyrere (1596-1676), Francois-Marie Arouet De Voltaire (1694-1778), and Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782). All three of these men argued for the notion of Polygenesis. In Prae-Adamite (1655), Peyrere claims that Adam and Eve were not the first human beings on earth and that gentiles existed prior to the life of Adamites (Jews). The conclusion of Peyrere and the other adherents to Polygenesis is that we have our origins in various local creations. We are without a single common ancestor, without a single common origin. This conclusion, however, did not keep hold among naturalists and the anthropologists to come later.

The Swedish naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), gave the first rigorous, scientific classification of human beings.[7] The 'Father of Modern Taxonomy' included human beings in the same classification system as plants and animals. He suggested that there were four basic varieties of human beings with each variety corresponding to a particular geographic location. Within each location, similar characteristics, qualities, and personalities were found. Only when one stepped outside of a particular location and looked upon all the varieties could one see the magnificent diversity of humans. However, Linnaeus's attempts left much to be desired. In striving to understand the archetype of the human species, he neglected to respect the human differences found within each of the four human varieties.

 

The last criticism was taken up by Count Georges-Louis Buffon (1707-1788). Buffon sought to bring order to human variety. Instead of classifying fixed, static varieties of human beings, Buffon offered a more genetic account of human variation. As a naturalist, he held that organisms change under environmental influence. In Natural History: General and Particular (1749), Buffon defines species as that which can continually reproduce generation to generation.[8] Buffon, like his predecessors, still lacked a consistent definition for Race and used the term rather ambiguously.

 

We have now reached the point in our investigation where Race receives its first scientific and systematic definition. The well-known philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) seemed to react quite strongly against the works of his predecessors. Living during the German Enlightenment, Kant saw the rise of Anthropology in the German academy. He was well-read regarding the various discussions of the idea of Race. Kant's attempts to give a scientific account of Race are found first in his 'Of the Different Human Races' (1st. ed. 1775/ 2nd ed. 1777). In this text, Kant bases Race solely on skin color. In Section III, Kant expresses his understanding of seeds and predispositions, both of which lead to the formation of the various Races. If original humans had the potential to develop into one of four main Races, then their offspring (if they migrate) can actualize one of the seeds. The actualization of the seed is what Kant calls a natural predisposition. One's predisposition, leads to one of four actualizations. Once actualized, one cannot go back and actualize a different seed. Kant understands this theory of anthropological causation to lead to four races: (1) the white race; (2) the Negro race; (3) the Mongol race; and (4) the Hindu race. This classification of Races held sway for sociologists and anthropologists well into the early twentieth century. The Kantian systemization of the idea of Race has led those working in Race Theory to deem Kant 'The Father of the Idea of Race.'[9]

There are many others involved in the history of the idea of Race (Hegel in particular). For now, let us complete our reflection by turning to Herder, who was a student of Kant from 1762 to 1764. In the mid to late twentieth century, we witnessed a return to studies on Herder; this was best expressed in the works of Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997). Berlin

thought that Herder's ideas on the concept of humanity, pluralism, and the futility of Race would aid us in avoiding the atrocities of the early twentieth century. These ideas are most clearly stated in Herder's Another Philosophy of History (1774) and Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind (1784-1791).

Herder, rejecting the notion of Race, continually stresses the idea of peoples (whereas Kant held to a notion of race based on skin color). Unlike Kant, Herder argued that a culture held greater importance than geographical location. No one people is superior to another. Furthermore, no people is without culture and no culture is better than another. Cultures differ from one another, 'but these differences [are] of degree, not of kind.'[10] 'Overall and in the end,' writes Herder, 'everything is only a shade of one and the same great portrait that extends across all the spaces and times of the earth.'[11] All peoples contribute to humankind and encourage the progression toward humanity, 'not as straight, nor as uniform, but as stretching in all directions, will all manner of turns and twists.'[12] Moreover, as Herder writes, 'Every nation has its center of happiness within itself, as every ball has its center of gravity!'[13] In other words, Herder was interested in the internal and external influences on a culture and emphasized the individuality of a given culture.

 

For Herder, humanity remains an immature potential within all human beings and needs to be developed over time. Herder states, 'All your questions concerning the progress of our species, which really would call for a book in response, are answered, it seems to me, by one word, humanity, to be human.'[14] The goal of history, for Herder, is for each individual to become truly human, living a full life. 'Perfection in an individual human being,' Herder writes, 'is found in that he, in the course of his existence, be himself and continue to become himself.'[15] Such development concretizes in the perfection of humankind and the harmonization (plurality) of cultures so that 'we are friends to all men and citizens of the world.'[16]

 

According to Herder, we should empathize with each culture from the point of view of the respective peoples. A culture should be evaluated based on its own terms by its own values. Even within a given culture, one should seek to grasp the culture in terms of the specific stage of development in which it exists at a given point. This, however, was the exact thing that philosophers in the Enlightenment (and earlier) failed to do. Their ethnocentrism corrupted the possibility for them to study any other culture on its own terms. Unfortunately, many seem to be continuing this tradition.

 

Hopefully this reflection will cause a few of us to rethink the idea of Race. In the twenty-first century, our denial of the existence of racial categorization is the first step in embracing human difference and pluralism. We may not be able to have a perfect world, but we can strive for a harmonious pluralistic world in which every culture is equal, understood, and appreciated. If there exists any such characteristic as perfection, perhaps Herder's Humanitat is such a thing. The first step in achieving this would be to rid ourselves of thinking that Race exists. Yes, the idea of Race exists, the experience of Race exists, a racialized world exists. But, Race itself does not; it is only an idea brought about during a time in world history when human difference was first realized on a global scale. We shall conclude with a thought from Herder:

 

Perfectibility, therefore, is not a deception; it is the means and final end to all that is called for and made possible by the character of our kind, by our humanity.'[17]

 

Footnotes

 

1. Frederick M. Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Ithaca: McGill-Queen's UP, 2003), 144.

2. Pluralism and cultural cosmopolitanism have distinct definitions in contemporary Race Theory. For our purposes, these terms, however, will be used interchangeably.

3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: CambridgeUP, 2002), 124.

4. Johann Gottfried Herder, On World History, 'On the Character of Humankind,' eds. Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997), 99.

5. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 150.

6. See Bernier's 'A New Division of the Earth According to the Different Species or Races of Men' (1684). Translated by T. Bendyshe in Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society in London, vol 1, 1863-64, pp. 360-364.

7. See Linnaeus's System of Nature Through the Three Kingdoms of Nature (12 editions. 1735-1778), eds. M.S.J. Engel-Ledeboer and H. Engel, Nieuwkoop, B. de Graaf, 1964.

8. Buffon's Natural History: General and Particular was collected in over 44 volumes. 36 volumes were published between 1749 and 1788, 8 volumes were published posthumousy.

9. See Bernasconi, 'Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant's Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race' in Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi (Malden: Blackwell, 2001).

10. Barnard, 134.

11. Johann Gottfried Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. Frank E. Manuel, trans. T.O. Churchill (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968), 7.

12. Johann Gottfried Herder, On World History, 'On the Character of Humankind,' 101.

13. Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings, trans. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 29.

14. Herder, On World History, 'On the Character of Humankind,' 99.

15. Ibid., 100.

16. Herder, Another Philosophy of History, 64.

17. Herder, On World History, 'On the Character of Humankind,' 104.

 

© Mark Westmoreland 2008. 

Originally published in Philosophy Pathways 136 (June 2008)

Whose Community? Which Interpretation? - Chapters 1 and 2 - Or Who's Afraid of Relativism?

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Merold Westphal's Whose Community? Which Interpretation?: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Baker Academic, 2009) is the kind of book that you can give to your Aunt Gussie after she queries you across the table at Thanksgiving: "Now I understand you're a postmodern philosopher.  Does that mean you're not a Christian anymore, but you're a relativist?" 

That kind of parry is a very common "have you stopped beating your wife" sort of question these days.  But you suck it up, and as you hand her the book while you scoop out the cornbread stuffing from Grandma's forty-year-old Wedgewood serving bowl, used only for special family gatherings, you simply smile and answer that you're a postmodernist because you're a "Christian post-relativist".  Relativism is not a sin.  It's just bad hermeneutics.  

The term "relativism" nowadays is routinely and indiscriminately used as a handy synonym for "postmodernism" by Christian and cultural mossbacks in the same way that "deconstruction" is taken as the first thesaurus entry for nihilistic devastation of the entire legacy of Western culture.  Pondering the "relativity" of the symbolic order - Einstein's special and general theories notwithstanding - is generally regarded in these same circles as akin to taking a puff of Ouachita Gold and then inhaling.  That is, it is the first tragic slip on the slipper of the slippery slope to reprobation and incurable insanity.

Never mind that postmodern philosophy in all its sophisticated branchings and windings has virtually nothing to do with the garden variety "epistemological" stance of conceptual or moral relativism, which in the academic literature these days is almost always termed "perspectivalism."  Or never mind that no serious medical authority these days would endorse the view popularized in the old 1950s anti-drug documentary Reefer Madness.

Prejudices or presuppositions, as we tend to call them in the theoretical enterprise known as "hermeneutics", are always with us.  We tend to regard them in the way that women say they regard men, and men say they regard women: can't live with them, can't live without them.  When it comes to reading texts, particularly Biblical texts (which is the business of hermeneutics), we tend to treat our presuppositions like we often do our spouses.  We are prone to take them for granted, and frequently ignore them entirely, except when our sense of honor or identity is threatened, at which point we get defensive, even belligerent.  

When some supposed "relativist" suggests to us that our presuppositions are really prejudices, perhaps even ignorant prejudices, or that they - well, er - might not be absolute foundational truths on which we can confidently stand and proclaim hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders, we have the same kind of crisis as when somebody comes on to our wife/husband/partner/significant other at a social gathering.  What we previously took for granted we now single out in our minds and offer romantic justifications (at least to ourselves) for our undying fidelity thereto. "Darling, I know I haven't given you the attention lately you deserve, but you need to know that you always have been, and always will be, The One."   

Postmodernism, therefore, is in its critics eyes akin to the slick and captivating Don Juan type who shows up at the party and coos to The One that she, or he, has more going for her, or him, than dull old You.  I would argue that postmodernism is really more like the insightful party host, or hostess, who after all invited all concerned and doesn't want to be responsible for creating a slippery spot that begins the slippery slope to scandal.  So she, or he, saunters up to Don Juan, The One, and You and says, "come, there are so many interesting people here you have to meet, and you've got friends you didn't know you have."

Now let's pretend that The One is the Church and Don Juan is the more seductive of those many belletristic, perhaps French-sounding, "postmodern" theorists who are rumored to be "relativists", who write a lot about sex, immanence,  the ecstasy of eros, and the magical mystery tour of the vast cultural arcade of spiritual and intellectual differance on which you somehow might be missing out because you are, after all, still dull old you, and who come to parties to hand out four-color, embossed business cards with an art nouveau likeness of Nietzsche's madman on the front along with the caption "haven't you heard that God is dead?". 

So what would you do?  You can become indignant and start trashing the interloper to anyone who will listen, all the while proclaiming that you have the best marriage in the world (option 1). Or you can quietly hope and pray the interloper won't make a move on your spouse, so you start talking to yourself, or to your spouse if they will listen, about how wonderful and sensitive and interesting you really are (option 2).  

When it comes to Christianity and the "truth" of its sacred texts, or of the "tradition" for that matter, option 1 approximates what Westphal terms "Hermeneutics 101."  Hermeneutics 101 is often summed up in the following expression: "no interpretation needed."  Since the Bible is the Word of God, it is what it is, and it says what it says.  This approach is familiar to most of us, particularly those whom we tend to call (they really don't call themselves that anymore) "fundamentalists."  More charitably, we call them "objectivists," an epistemological as well as "hermeneutical" position that probably the majority of non-philosophers subscribe to with varying degrees of sophistication.  

As I argued in my earlier book The Next Reformation (Baker Academic, 2004), this type of "naive" objectivism (often called "naive realism" in more erudite parlance, and not to be confused with the kind of   "objectivism" Westphal describes in the subsequent chapter, which is otherwise referred to as historicism), on which fundamentalist readings are based, evolved under the impact of Scottish common sense philosophy in the nineteenth century and diverges considerably from the hermeneutics of the Reformation of the sixteenth century.  Essentially Hermeneutics 101 is not really a "hermeneutics", or theory of interpretation, at all.  In practice, it is anti-hermeneutical.  Before the advent of fundamentalism, hermeneutics - no matter how scholastic or pietistic, was considered a crucial adjunct of theological reflection.

What Westphal terms "Hermeneutics 102" (in chapter 2) is more interesting and more respectable in the eyes of academic, non-fundamentalist theologians, whether conservative or liberal.  While hermeneutics 101 is a cheap and bastardized version of the venerable "correspondence theory of truth", hermeneutics 102 comports with what has come to be called Romantic hermeneutics.  Romantic hermeneutics derives from the "subjectivist" turn of German philosophy that Immanuel Kant inaugurated in the late eighteenth century, and its locus classicus is the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher.  

As Westphal points out, Schleiermacher and those whom he influenced sought to extend hermeneutical method beyond its traditional role as a handmaiden to Christian theology and establish it as a general theory of interpretation that would include not simply Biblical texts, but all forms of written communication, and even cultural artifacts.  The historicism of Wilhelm Dilthey in the nineteenth century and the work of Hans-George Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur in the twentieth century are distinguished examples of how this special theory had embedded itself at the ventricles of modern philosophy, though the latter two illustrations might be considered "post-Romantic."  Romantic hermeneutics focuses on the inner, or psychological, condition of the author himself/herself.  The question "what does this writer mean" is now targeted toward what would later be termed "authorial intent" rather than the independent meaning of the text itself (as is the case with naive objectivism).  

Dilthey, like Kant nevertheless, aimed to make this appeal to the state of the subject into an "objective science", something which Westphal, following the cues of Gadamer, finds unpersuasive.  Because Gadamer doesn't really appear until chapter 3 (which I'm not supposed to write about), I won't elaborate this point at all.  But do stay tuned.  What Dilthey did, along with all members of that dominant philosophical tribe that flourished throughout the 1800s and who were known as neo-Kantians, was to take Kant's concept of the subjective faculty for processing "objective knowledge", which he dubbed Verstehen ("understanding") and convert it into a principle of "historical knowledge."  So much of this Kantian-Diltheyean tendency in German philosophy throughout the nineteenth century is the real, hermeneutical innovation that underlies what we now know as the "historical-textual criticism" of the Scriptures," which today dominates academic Biblical scholarship while driving fundamentalists, and even Neo-Orthodox as well as Radical Orthodox types, absolutely crazy.   

Westphal's book is probably much more readable than anything that's normally called "postmodernist".  It's a great primer on the method and history of hermeneutics, including some of its current common theological applications, particularly when it comes to ecumenicism.  As I've said, I would feel very comfortable giving it to Aunt Gussie (I wouldn't give her anything I've written).  It's both sufficiently edgy and radical enough for people like her, while not at all being in-your-face, and it probably raises enough disturbing questions in her mind for someone like myself to feel justified in passing it out along with the turkey. It may not be in-your-face-enough to give it some sobriquet like Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, but might we dub it something like Rules for Relativists? I find Westphal's concluding poetic flourish provocative in its own right when he prophesies that "the divinely transcendent voice of Scripture will become incarnate in our human language, and we will hear the very voice of God in our finite and fallen interpretations." (Yea, I know I'm not supposed to give away the ending, but, hey, I'm human and therefore fallen as well) 

But I do have one serious quibble with the book - not the book per se, which is tremendous, but its location in the church-and-pomoish general project.  It's a question I've raised repeatedly in other venues.  To what degree is the task of "hermeneutics" really a postmodernist project?  Hermeneutics in the Gadamerian sense is a forceful answer to both naive objectivism and subjectivism (in its crudest form - "relativism"), i.e., "Hermeneutics 101" and "Hermeneutics 102."  As someone who wrote extensively about Gadamer and Ricoeur in the 1970s,  then discovered Derrida, I find the task of hermeneutics pre-deconstructive, and therefore pre-postmodern.  Deconstruction is aimed at taking us beyond the seeming intractable aporias of hermeneutics.  

As Derrida himself points out repeatedly, deconstruction is not at all about interpretation; it is about the movement and force of signification.  Hermeneutics asks "what is the meaning in this text and how do we establish it among the different possible interpretations?" Deconstruction asks "how does the meaning (Stanley Cavell's original question) of this meaning mean, and how does this change how we understand the problem of the text itself? That has always been the difference in my mind that makes the difference, and it is what might be termed the question of the postmodernist divide.  And we're not even talking here about Deleuze and semiotics.

I understand that evangelical Christians especially need to understand hermeneutics, because of their intractable legacy of naive objectivism (their own kind of "dogmatic slumber" at la Kant) and their fear of "relativism".  But "relativism" is a phoney type of bete noire.   Postnodernism doesn't solve the problem of relativism; it strategically ignores it, because it is, as Wittgenstein might say, a pseudo-problem indicated, relativism is a fact that requires interpretation masquerading as an interpreation, which it's not.

Ultimately, it all comes down to "how we do hear the very voice of God in our finite and fallen interpretations," and if that now be called a postmodern problem, I welcome it.     

Speculative Grace: More Non-Sequential Theology

Still speculating about an immanent approach to grace, I'd like to return to last week's topic and try an alternative way of examining the difference between a sequential approach to grace and a non-sequential approach to grace. To do so, I'll use the familiar phenomenological distinction between background and foreground.

1. Background/Foreground

The phenomenological point is straightforward: our awareness of the world unfolds as the interplay between a given focal point (or foreground) and a withdrawn periphery (or background). 

In terms of a foreground/background distinction we might say:

Sequential thinking is a kind of attention that foregrounds an awareness of the present moment as embedded in a temporal sequence of past, present, and future events.

Non-sequential thinking, on the other hand, is a kind of attention that foregrounds an awareness of the present moment as present. Present moment awareness narrowly focuses our attention in such a way as to allow the sequential connection of the present to its own past and future to significantly withdraw into the background.

Granted that sequential thinking has a variety of strengths to commend it, I'm primarily interested here in its weaknesses. 

The primary weakness of sequential thinking is that the present moment tends to itself withdraw and focal awareness tends to be dominated by the past and future.

This is a very common experience. In general, as human beings, sequential thinking tends to be our default mode of awareness.

2. Zombies

Perhaps more pressingly, this withdrawal of the present moment into the background is directly connected to why we, as humans beings, are so consistently unhappy. We might refer to this kind of life in which the present moment withdraws as a “zombie-life.”

What does sequential thinking have to do with the famously undead? The withdrawal of the present moment into the background may leave us feeling "undead." It may leave us living a zombie-life dominated by thoughts of the future (in the form of fantasy) and memory (in the form of regret, nostalgia, etc.). Living in memory or fantasy may leave us unplugged from the vibrant reality of the present moment.

A zombie-life in which we spend all our time thinking about what we wish were present (but isn't) is seductive . . . but life-sucking.

We might go so far as to say that getting stuck in the kind of intentional-patterns that structure the zombie-life is exactly what, at root, we classically mean by the word "sin" in a Judeo-Christian context. An undead zombie-life dominated by fantasy, anxiety, regret, and boredom coincides with that misery we refer to as a life of sin.

3. Paul Against Works

In this light, we might additionally point out why Saint Paul, the Christian thinker of grace par excellence, so strongly denounces any works-based approach to salvation. What is dangerous about a works-oriented approach to life, even if those works are “good”? 

A works-oriented approach to life is dangerous insofar as it plays into the weakness of sequential thinking and encourages the withdrawal of the present moment. Always working toward some other goal, we risk coming unplugged from the present moment and slipping into the misery of a zombie-life.

Non-sequential thinking, on the contrary, foregrounds the unconditionality of the present moment itself. Non-sequential thinking requires present moment awareness. 

Here, the necessity of the present moment is imposed and received as such regardless of how we got here or where we’re going. In this sense, non-sequential thinking foregrounds the unconditional “grace” of the present moment as the only moment that is every actually given. We must be where we are and attend to what is given regardless of the path that led us here or where we hope to go.

Here, grace is not a kind of supplement to the present moment that takes us to some other place we would rather be. Rather, grace is the unconditional fullness of the present moment itself. Grace is life.

Or, again: grace is not what restricts our experience to feeling only good and pleasant things. Grace is feeling itself. The choice isn’t between feeling good things and feeling bad things. The choice is more fundamental: it is between feeling and not feeling. Chasing after good feelings and running away from unpleasant ones is what leads to the zombie-life in the first place.

All of this leads, then, to what I take to be a non-sequential theology's basic thesis regarding grace: the more thoroughly the present moment has been foregrounded as the focal point of attention, the more clearly grace will appear as such.

4. A Note on the Practice of Meditation

We might note, here, a connection between this thesis and the kind of religious life advocated by the Buddha. The Buddha advocates one things in particular: meditate. Why? Meditation is a method for practicing how to foreground the grace of the present moment. In other words, meditation is a way of practicing non-sequential thinking.

To the degree that we’re capable of remaining, with our full attention, in the present moment without slipping off into memories or fantasies, to that degree we’ll come to see the truth about life and we’ll become capable of joy and happiness.

What do we see once we become capable of seeing with steady, attentive awareness the present moment?

The Buddha's claim is that the more clearly and persistently we focus on the present moment, the more clear it will become that the present moment is "empty."

By "empty," the Buddha means two things in particular. To say that the present moment is empty is that say that it is impermanent and that it is incapable of satisfying desire.

How could seeing the “emptiness” of the present moment lead to any kind of happiness?

The Buddha’s argument is that recognizing the emptiness of the present moment liberates us from the endless work of trying to attach ourselves to and substantialize the lightness of the present, passing moment with the weighty supplements of past (memory) and future (fantasy). In non-sequential thinking, past and future will continue to be co-given with the present, but our relationship to them will have changed: we will no longer try to use the past and future as supplements to the perceived "poverty" of the present moment.

This is a point of some importance. Note that we earlier described how grace, when seen from a sequential perspective, appeared to be a kind of supplement to the emptiness of the present moment that allowed us to move beyond point A to that other place, point B, where we would prefer to be. In relation to sequential thinking, the risk is that the present will always appear too poor and sorry a thing for us to ever be happy. But it is this judgment of the present moment as too poor and boring that prompts us to flee what’s real and hide in the zombie-life of memory and fantasy in the first place.

With respect to the nature of grace, we could put the point in the following way. Grace should not be understand as a conditional supplement to the present moment's "poverty." It should be understood as the vibrant and unconditional reality of the present moment. A non-sequential awareness receives the present moment as the unconditioned grace that it is and it stops trying to receive it as some substantial and permanently satisfying grace that it is not.

5. A Speculative Note on "Enlightenment"

To conclude, I'll float some speculative remarks about what the Buddha may have meant by salvation or “enlightenment.”

The Buddha's basic claim is that it is possible, with persistent meditative practice, to move beyond our typical, sequential, "everyday" consciousness and to progressively foreground the present moment to such a radical degree that our typical, default awareness of sequence drops out (though only briefly) altogether. 

This progressive foregrounding of the present moment follows the basic steps outlined by all the major meditative maps (Eastern and Western). 

Very roughly, the process looks something like this. Through deep and persistent meditation (i.e., by focusing profoundly on our present, given experience), we can become increasingly aware of our bodies and sensation. This awareness of our bodies can reach such a pitch that awareness of the body itself "dissolves" into awareness of a pure stream of flowing sensations. In turn, this awareness can then shift into an awareness of how sensation is also composed of thought and of how thoughts are themselves a flowing stream. From here, one can become increasingly aware of the deep background elements that frame our everyday experiences until these forms/frames do themselves drop out and there is nothing left but an awareness that continues to abide (though only temporarily) without focal point or background. Here, the meditative process culminates in a kind of non-dual awareness that is often referred to simply as "nirvana."

The Buddha's claim is that anyone can do this and that the experience of nirvana (though itself temporary) can bring about a fundamental and permanent shift in one's awareness such that sequential thinking is no longer our default mode of awareness.

Essentially, enlightenment means that, through persistent practice and a variety of peak experiences, the brain can be re-wired in such a way that in the course of our everyday lives non-sequential thinking now becomes our default mode of awareness.

Or, to frame this in terms of grace: when non-sequential thinking becomes our default mode of awareness, then each present moment will show up as a grace that must be gratefully received.

Korean Edition of "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?"

A Korean edition of Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church has just appeared from Sallim Books.  As I noted upon the publication of the Chinese edition, it's fascinating to me that a very American book, on French philosophers, written by a Canadian, would find an audience in Asia.  But if it can be of service, I'm grateful. 

(It's also a little disconcerting when your work appears in a language and alphabet which is utterly inaccessible to the author, but I'm getting used to it.  For instance, I just learned that The Devil Reads Derrida will be translated into Polish.  Do they read chick lit in Poland?)

I was asked to write a Preface especially for this Korean edition.  I've made the (pre-translation) English version of that Preface available on my website for those who might be interested.  It provided an opportunity to clarify a couple of things for a more general audience.

Speculative Grace: Non-Sequential Theology

I’ve been playing around lately with an alternative way of framing some of my ongoing speculations about the immanence of grace. The following approach relies on the (admittedly rough) distinction between a “sequential” approach to theology and a “non-sequential” approach to theology.

1. What is sequential theology?

A sequential theology is essentially mythological.

By "mythological" I have two things in mind: 

 

(a) I have in mind the original meaning of the Greek word mythos as something like "story" or "narrative explanation.” In this sense, to say that a sequential theology is mythological is to say that it foregrounds the sequential narration of a series of events. Sequence = story.

 

In this sense of the word mythos, there is nothing inherently pejorative about a theology being mythological and nothing is implied about the truth or falsity of the events being narrated. We might say that, in general, Christian theology, to the extent that it favors history and narrative as a primary mode of theology, is a paradigmatically mythical religion.

 

(b) Sequential theology also tends to be mythological in that the scope of its temporal extension tends to be so vast that it exceeds the bounds of mortal experience. For instance, the Christian narrative tends to unfold the meaning of this present life on the basis of what came before and what will come after.

 

However, the events referenced (e.g., an Edenic paradise, judgment day, heaven/hell) are largely empty referents: they reference ways of living and being for which we have no presently dependable reference points. As a result, these narrative sequences tend to depend heavily on a series of symbolic or anticipatory references that are significantly lacking in presently available content.

 

In this sense, sequential theologies tend to be mythological in that they rely on references to what is not given. This is not to say that these references will remain empty, but it is to say that, for the moment at least, they are empty. Let's say: a theology that is grounded in what is not given is mythological.

 

2. What is non-sequential theology?

 

A non-sequential theology, then, is occupied with the immanent actuality of what is presently given (rather than with that given's place in the arc of a larger sequence, teleological or otherwise).  

 

In this sense, it would differ from a sequential theology precisely in that it would be non-mythological. Rather than reading key theological ideas in terms of an overarching narrative headed toward some particular end, it would read them in light of the key features of our current lived experience of the world.

(Note: marking this difference in terms of mythology identifies certain strengths and weaknesses of each of the two forms of theology, but it is not in itself an argument that one or the other ought to be abandoned or prioritized.)

3. Sequential theologies, as sequential, tend to be biased in favor of works.

Or, we might say: sequential theologies, due to their temporal structures (both causal and teleological), tend to highlight the importance of works/projects. Further, even in their treatment of grace, sequential theologies will tend to read grace as a kind of supplement that is useful because it does the work that works cannot do. Here, even if “grace” is valorized and prioritized, it is not prioritized as such but only as a modulation of work.

 

The result is that, as part of a conditioned sequence headed toward some particular outcome, the unconditional aspect of grace will tend to get instrumentalized.

To this extent, sequential theologies often fail to treat grace as such. In order to treat grace as such, we may need to adopt a non-sequential perspective. (Compare, for instance, the way that Marion argues for the importance of a phenomenological approach to givenness.)

 

4. Sequential theologies tend toward metaphysics.

 

Let's give this definition of metaphysics. Metaphysics: a philosophical mythology.

 

Metaphysics tends to reduce what is given to what is not given. Metaphysics tends to instrumentalize what is given as only an aspect of something deeper, something bigger, something with a grander arc. This mythological reduction of what is given tends to impoverish the grace of what is given. 

 

In this same vein, the metaphysical concepts par excellence (e.g., "substance" and "potential") are classically the key (but non-given!) supplements needed in order to get a sequential account to work: they facilitate our sequential story about how change is possible.

(More about the relation between the sequential and non-sequential in a coming post.)

The new German postmodern Christianity - beyond deconstruction

The new German awakening

Unbeknownst to most of us who try to keep albreast of these things, Germany – the largest nation in the European Union, the site of the Protestant Reformation, and the historical homeland of modern theology itself – is stirring and awakening when it comes to what is distinctively Christian as well postmodern.   The main reason this development is largely off our radar is because the German-speaking churches and the German universities have not exactly been pace-setters in the postmodernist movement over the past three decades.  In addition, most of the blogging, publishing, and other forms of “conversation” is in German, which American academic read less and less (don’t we all speak English and French?) 

But in Karlsruhe on the Rhine a few weeks ago Alan Hirsch, one of the most familiar faces of the global postmodern church movement, keynoted a the second annual Novavox conference that drew the largest ever audience from Protestant, Catholic, and  the German “Free Churches” around Germany.  So-called “emergent cohorts” have sprung up all over Germany in recent years, most notably in such cities as Marburg and Erlangen.  As one Novavox conference attendee put it, “now I’ve got all the buzzwords and the concepts.” 

When we say "postmodern" we don't tend to think of the Germans.  Even though virtually all the streams of postmodern philosophy cascade directly down from the intellectual heights dominated by the great German philosophers Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, it was the French "post-structuralists" who, starting in the 1960s and commandeered by Derrida and Deleuze, cleared and built out the vast terrain with which most of us in the academy and in the church are now familiar. 

The word "postmodern" itself was minted by the French academic Jean-Francois Lyotard in the early 1980s in an effort to assess the changes in the culture, values, and education of the Francophone peoples in the wake of the social upheavals of the Vietnam era.  But it was the "ontology" of Husserl and Heidegger, to which Derrida reacted during this early period,and which he sought to de-Teutonize in order to accomodate the new forms of cultural and social-psychological critique that had emerged with figures like figures like Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan and to re-invigorate the deeply embedded tradition of  structural linguistics, invented by Ferdinand de Saussure, in France as central to philosophy. 

Most of what we know as "deconstruction" had this largely linguistic, neo-Marxist, anti-phenomenological, a-theological origin.  As a footnote it is highly ironic that what in the past decade has become known to theologians as "postmodernism" tends (with the exception perhaps of Žižek) tends to be highly idealistic, phenomenological, anti-linguistic, anti-psychological, and a-political.  

The tables have been turned completely, and your typical reader of this blog would have little knowledge of, or interest in, the early French figures that pioneered the phenomenon. So much of the "theological turn" in philosophy, which has generated what we know as "Continental postmodern theology," is influenced largely by French thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy, but the tradition of French phenomenology going back to Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Maritain, to whom these thinkers belong, has a solidly Germanic coloring and background, which the early "deconstructionists" thoroughly rejected. 

While French ideas and trends have largely shaped postmodernism, the now vaguely defined "postmodern church" is almost strictly a product of the American evangelical identity crisis that surfaced in the mid-1990s.   Trends in youth culture were the catalyst during this era, but it was the presumed "authority" of figures such as Derrida in challenging the authority of the kind of inerrantist fundamentalism that had overshadowed  the evangelical agenda for a generation that drew interest from progressive-minded church leaders. 

Of course, Derrida himself was always far more far complicated and opaque than he was understood to be as the would-be icon of the new, typically American anti-authoritarianism. Even those semi-academic types who helped make the master of deconstruction a household name among pastors as he had been earlier among humanities scholars barely realized that Derrida himself had emphasized repeatedly that deconstruction was not the same as critique and that it had much more to do with how we read texts while unlocking the signifying power of the seemingly unsignifiable in our thinking (e.g., God as the "not-God" of negative theology, the messianic or the unrepresentable that is "to come").

Postmodern Christianity and American anti-authoritarianism

It has been said wryly that since the American project started (not counting the Puritans) in the seventeenth century as the true revolution of the subject whose insignia were always the "axe and the Bible," the Bible became the true canon katholikon that was never ever really challenged, even after the Scopes Trial in the late 1920s.  The axe was really not turned against the Bible in mainstream Protestantism until the late 1960s and against "fundamentalist" evangelicalism only at the end of the millennium.  

But the result of this anti-authoritarian and anti-fundamentalist revolution, or "reformation", even in the churches, was a pure rootless and largely contentless subjectivity that could be sustained only by endless variations (including "spiritual" versions) of the old Romantic idea of limitless freedom and the inexhaustible possibilities of "personal liberation" and lifestyle choices, which back in the 1980s were dubbed "New Age;
American  postmodern Christianity, while it seeks nowadays to be "socially engaged" and  "missional-minded" in current parlance, has always been a form of "me-Christianity," a sophisticated Christian-tinted personal experientialism. 

That is not to say the old evanagelism was not that much different.  'Seeker-sensitive" megachurches followed the same pattern with a different appeal to a different generation.  But if the "missional turn" in American postmodern Christianity is ever really going to happen in substance more than in rhetoric, there will have to be a serious prophetic challenge to the kind of cultural DNA church structures in this country that forever configure the Gospel as a form of personal self-enrichment, not so much in terms of wealth but in terms of distinctive Christian cultural or intellectual "experiences." 

In the American and (to a lesser extent) the British scenes, where postmodern Christianity as we know it has both its roots and its contours, there is a significant disconnect between theology, philosophy, and Christian praxis.  Pastoral types, with the exception perhaps of those who read this blog, don’t pay that much attention to serious philosophical trends and ideas, and when they do often become involved in The Conversation, they make the familiar point that they are doing so for their own self-improvement and are frustrated by the utter lack of interest in these topics on the part of the Christian communities – even the most hip – that they work with.  

I’ve lost count of how many inquiries I, as a professor of religious studies at a major university in this country with a significant PhD program in philosophy and theology, have received even in the past decade from “burned out” pastors who are tired of ministering and “just want to study and teach exciting ideas like you do.”  

In the more distant past theological revolutions in the American church have more often than not been imported from Germany.  That was true not only in the nineteenth, but also throughout the twentieth century.  Since the 1970s, however, the flow of philosophical and theological products for import has been coming from France and the UK (the Germans at one time gave us “neo-orthodoxy”; then the Brits invented “radical orthodoxy”).   But it was always the genius of German theology that it could be theoretical and practical at the same time (look at what happened to neo-Kantianism up until the First World War).   

However, in recent years most of the postmodernist agitation in the churches of Germany, which is still statistically the most “religious” EU nation, if one does not count the cultural Catholicism of Italy and Spain, has come from American groups who want to “evangelize” those neo-pagan Europeans.  The Novavox conference itself was co-sponsored bv a California-based “missions” organization.   American groups often try to persuade the Germans to adopt their own version of fad-driven, practical, pop theological approaches for the primary purpose of “planting and growing” churches, but the results are not very effective.  Germans prefer their Christianity heavier and stronger than we do, like their beer.

From deconstruction to "globopomo"

When it comes to current philosophy, however, Germans are not all that interested in “deconstructing”.  The well-known, early putdown of Derrida and Derrideans by Jürgen Habermas during the 1980s left long-term marks, even though the two philosophers eventually became good friends and collaborators.   But there is another key underlying condition – a Grundzustand, as the Germans would say – that explains this reluctance.  Hitler and the Holocaust essentially deconstructed the entirety of the German conceptual landscape.   The postwar German theological preoccupation has been the task of coming to grips with its monstrous, recent political and cultural past.  Germans never really needed to “postmodernize” in the loose sense of having to problematize modernist progressivism and rationality, because history did it for them. 

But this now more-than-half-century of self-doubt, self-pity, and endless national self-reflection is coming to an end.  Germans are looking outward and pondering what one scholar privately referred to me as a “new global Christian thinking” that is radically and globally engaged at the same time it is disengaged from all parochial, cultural, and identity-obsessed forms of purely “critical” postmodernism.  There are no German Derridas yet on the scene, though the so-called “public philosopher” Peter Sloterdijk, who himself is based in Karlsruhe, late in his career is starting to gain a certain European notoriety for his own distinctive take on postmodernity, globalization, and the current world financial crisis.  

Sloterdijk in his own way is challenging Germans, and his readers outside Germany, to think beyond the kind of self-referential postmodernism that through new media fosters a hypersubjectivity and esthetic inwardness that effectively cancels the earlier globalist thrust of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism toward a unified sense of humanity.  Today’s apparent new “cosmopolitanism” is one in name only, he insists, because it is constituted primarily by the intricate and patchwork parochialisms that together make up what he dubs das Weltinnenraum (the “world private space”), which global consumer capitalism has seeded, “malignantly” perhaps, in religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy.  

Sloterdijk’s theory of a “mediated” cosmopolitanism, which like Gilles Deleuze’s earlier theory of nomadology represents an effort to map all concepts and signifying processes in terms of spatial relationships and spatial flux, confronts the runaway differentialism of postmodern thinking along with the very hypersubjectivity that in age of collapsing global consumerism may be on the verge of extinction.

Since late last summer I have been in conversation with a German academic, who is also a pastor, in Marburg named Tobias (“Toby”) Faix, who can be considered one of the leading lights of the indigenous German-speaking “new wave” of Continental Christian postmodernism.  We have only exchanged a few thoughtful emails, but I have been tracking down and reading his blog posts, essays, and books, all published in German, which are both extensive  and provocative.   

Whether he has read or been influenced by Sloterdijk is immaterial, because Faix has much of the same take on the global as the latter, albeit from a Christian theological perspective. Faix is currently Dozent or Lecturer in Practical Theology and Sociology at the Marburg Bibelseminar, a state-accredited professional school for pastors that corresponds to the American version of the theological seminary, as well as director of Empirica, a research institute specializing in youth culture and religion.

In his institute’s most recently published volume entitled Zeitgeist 2: Postmoderne Heimatkunde (“Zeitgeist 2: Postmodern Local History”, Francke, 2009), Faix and his co-contributors asks the question where the postmodern Christian can find a sense of place with which to identify themselves, a site of particularity, a  Heimat or “homeland.”   

Contrary to the consumer-based “identity politics” or “identity religion” that has been the hallmark of global consumerism, the authors argue in different ways and with differing rhetorics that our only “homeland” is the world and its openeness, what in The Creation of the World, or Globalization Nancy terms “the world of singularities, without their plurality constructed as a unitotality.”   

Instead of seeking a “private space” of singularity as a point of retreat in our radically “disenclosed” world, as Nancy would say, the Christian finds his or her singular, or heimatlich, identification in the world-historical purpose of God through missional service both in our immediate communities and abroad.  That is the kind of Christian postmodernism that I have written about in my own book in this series entitled GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008), a Christianity that is not only "postmodern" per se, but "globopomo."

Challenging comfortable Christian "identity theology"

In his most recent email describing the pastoral situation in Germany, Faix notes that the recession of the past year, which has produced massive unemployment in Germany as elsewhere, has generated a crisis for the comfortable “postmodern pluralism” of Western nations, including Germany itself, whose complexion has been altered irremediably by immigration and the democratic mingling of peoples and cultures.  Suddenly the presence of economic stress everywhere, not just among the marginalized but among the once well-established middle class, reveals the “otherness” of the other in our midst rather than as a piece of a pretty pastiche of society’s “diverse” elements.  

The crisis, according to Faix, has also exposed the the white middle classiness of the church, even that part of the church which is theoretically conscious of the need to serve the other.  This kind of “social change brings with it [the need for serious] theological change,” Faix writes in his email, a change that may have “painful” (schmerzlich) side effects.   

The pain of the new world disorder we are facing today will force sweeping theological change throughout the theological spectrum of the West, even the postmodern sectors of it.  As it has been said, there is no gain without pain, and of course no change without pain either.  

If Faix’s typically German practical-theoretical vision for the current need to re-invent theology, the country that has experienced much historical pain – unlike America – may be the place where it will begin to happen.  

Note: photos above are those of Peter Sloterdijk and Tobias Faix, respectively.

Racial Reconciliation in the Flesh of Jesus: Part II

In "Racial Reconciliation in the Flesh of Jesus: Part I," I ended with a quote from Peter Goodwin Heltzel's Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics: "[Dr. Martin Luther] King's Christology," according to Heltzel, "emphasizes Jesus as a redemptive sufferer who suffers with the oppressed and as a prophet who challenges sin both in the human heart and in social structures" (63).  Here in Part II, I wish to use this statement as a launching point for investigating the way(s) in which Christology may be the lens through which we can investigate racial reconciliation.  In A Testament of Hope, King claims that "the cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community.  The resurrection is a symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that seek to block community" (20).  While I do not share King's theory of atonement, I do think that he is on to something regarding reconciliation.  (And, certainly "community" is a much contested term as well.)  Jesus' own life should be understood as the paradigm for how one engages with and within a community.

I wish to make several points in this regard.  First, one should not attempt to relativize Jesus to fit a particular context other than the one to which he belonged, i.e., 1st c. Palestine.  If Christology is the key, then one should compare particulars to Jesus, not vice-versa.  Second, this first comment needs some nuance for which I will turn to Graham Ward:

First, Christological enquiry is a profoundly hermeneutical one--no appeal can be made to immediate knowledge of God....We have no access to how Christ views and knows things.  We only have access to interpretations of the way Christ views and knows things; interpretations which may participate in God's grace, but which we cannot claim to be so inspired without scandal.  Secondly, the focus of this hermeneutical inquiry is the nexus of relations in which the historical, social and cultural engage with the divine.  Every statement about Christ cannot be reduced to, but is, nevertheless, a statement about ourselves and the times and cultures we inhabit.  Thirdly, the enquiry itself is governed by the time and circumstances within which it takes place.  For to speak of operations is to speak of what has been observed in the past but always in the present....Hence... the engagement of Christ with culture and the enquiry is to engender Christ; to enter the engagement is to foster the economy whereby God is made known to us.  To do Christology is to inscribe Christ into the times and cultures we inhabit.  It is therefore an operation of redemption undertaken in obedience to witness by faith, in grace. (Christ and Culture [2005], 1-2)

At first glance, it may appear that these two points stand in contradiction.  However, the conclusion to be draw here is that (1) Jesus cannot be relativized, (2) the interpretations of Jesus can be made to fit particulars, and (3) Christology is the key to Anthropology. 

A. What is it about humanness that Jesus takes upon himself?  Capax divinitas: the capacity to divinity is built in to being human. 

B.How can the finite mediate the infinite?  The incarnation itself is an event, an operation; to be Christ is to be actively in operation.

C.We further the effects of Christ in the world.  Our own furthering of these effects is to continue the event/operation of Christ.  In other words, the study of Christology is a moment of Christology.

So, how do these claims relate to racial reconciliation?  Let us look at Ephesians 2:13-16:

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, putting that enmity to death by it (NAB).

Heltzel also points to this particular verse.  He explains that the invocation of this Pauline Christology in the context of racial reconciliation unveils the Jewish flesh of Jesus as the very site in which the Jew and the Gentile are reconciled.  The reconciliation between the Jew and the Gentile in the early church period becomes the theological basis for the reconciliation of black and white in the Americas.  For white evangelicals to listen and learn from black evangelicals about racial justice entailed a deeper transformation of evangelical theology.  Christologically this meant that Jesus would not longer be viewed primarily as divine, but also as a fully human, earthly prophet whose ministry crossed "racial boundaries" and whose death and resurrection is the site of redemption for people of all races and ethnic groups (141).

Vanity: a position of last resort (2)

            In my last post, I proposed that vanity constituted the last intentional position or posture human being can take in seeking the divine. From the perspective of vanity, humanity moves from its easy habitation of the possible and into the difficulty of dwelling in openness to “something else,” i.e. that which is impossible, divine advent. I offered a preliminary definition of vanity drawing from Ecclesiastes: a disappointment of the autarkic self that results in separation from and indifference to the world. From this distance emerges the potential to readdress the identity of the human self. I would like to explore vanity further in this regard in the context of Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 6.

            In Matthew 6:25-36, Jesus challenges the definition of life as we know it. “That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and what you are to wear. Surely life is more than food, and the body more than clothing!”^[1] In this passage, Jesus is rejecting a definition of human life that is coextensive with the procurement of necessities and he is suggesting that life may be “more than” this kind of appropriation. Immediately, the question of limitation arises: What is restricting my access to “more”? The answer is worry. Jesus is rejecting a life in which the self is entangled in worldly anxiety. Jesus indicates that human life is potentially more than securing existence through the appropriation of objects.

            In this passage, worry should not be confused with a mere pessimistic feeling. Rather, worry is the occupation of anxious provision. Humanity is held hostage by the seeming need to get ahead, make good, be productive. In a way that recalls Ecclesiastes, Jesus remarks that the life of worry is essentially futile, not able “to add a single cubit.” Additionally, he directly opposes anxious provision to the “kingdom of God and his justice.” When we read this selection with the verse directly before it, the dichotomy between the kingdom of God and the life of worry becomes more pronounced; it is impossible to serve both God and mammon. While some translations and traditions prefer a limited definition of mammon (money, riches, excessive wealth), the grammatical connections between the passages suggest a meaning for mammon that includes food, drink, and clothes. In this way, we discover that Jesus is calling into question the life of appropriation, not just of amenities, but of necessities as well.

            By criticizing worry in connection to the acquisition of necessities, Jesus seems to be in danger of dispensing with all possibility of providing for life. However, Jesus indicates in verse 6:33, “Set your hearts on [God’s] kingdom first, and on God’s saving justice, and all these other things will be given to you as well.” The necessities are not the essential problem, but the worried manner in which they are acquired. We can further clarify his meaning by appealing to another “life” passage in the Gospel of Matthew. In Chapter 16, the apostle Peter has just admitted that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. Jesus recognizes this title and begins to reinterpret its signification. He describes a messiah that will be handed over to be killed. Anyone who would follow him as a disciple must also take up his or her cross. Jesus says, “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. What, then, will anyone gain by winning the whole world and forfeiting his life?  Or what can anyone offer in exchange for his life?” The criticism in Matthew 16:25-26 is against the impulse to “save life.” By “saving life” Jesus is not describing a rescue from illness or accident; he is not admonishing the lifeguard or the doctor. Rather, Jesus’ condemnation falls again on worried appropriation, specifically the impulse to snatch up life as a possession. In other words, he is criticizing the human identity which secures certainty in worried appropriation, i.e. the autarkic self. The autarkic self is an identity that is based on self-sufficiency, in this case, the ability to possess and manipulate objects in the world. The worried or autarkic self mistakes adequate provision for life itself and the security of provision for a “world” without worry. In this way, Jesus equates “winning the whole world” with “forfeiting life.” 

            Just as Jesus is not advocating the full scale forfeiture of human life, neither is he counseling that the world as such be repudiated. With vivid pictures of birds and flowers, Jesus carefully appeals in Matthew 6 to nature’s beauty and its value as cared for by God. Jesus makes another distinction along the fault line of worry; he juxtaposes the world viewed as a series of appropriations with the world as creation. To that point, the beauty of the flowers  is held against their transience. In “the wild flowers growing in the field which are there today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow,” Jesus employs the standard, scriptural image of vanity. Acquisition cannot form the basis of security, because in the end it cannot correct mortality. However, the ephemerally of the world is held against God’s vigil over it. The world derives its value from its being the subject of God’s care. The anxious self opposes this very quality, preferring the illusory certainty of appropriation to the recognition of God as caregiver over creation.

            However, Jesus holds out the possibility of “finding” life. Jesus’ message in this passage includes the possibility of a life apart from the domination of anxiety in openness to the impossibility of God. If the impossibility of advent is in opposition to the bid for a “world,” then it must be predicated by a relief from worry. Worry is countered, not by repudiation of the world as such, but by an understanding of the world’s essential transience and especially a realization of the futility of pursuing certainty through acquisition, e.g., vanity. When the world is colored by vanity, appropriation looses its ability to guarantee certainty. In turn, the perspective of vanity grants a distance from and indifference to the world that potentially allows humanity to gain a new perspective on life itself and opens the impossibility of divine advent.

 

           

---

[1] New Jerusalem Bible (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1998).

Taylor on Habermas on Religion and Secularity

While Habermas and critical theory don't get as much play here as they ought, readers will want to check out Charles Taylor's post on Jürgen Habermas over at The Immanent Frame. 

This is in anticipation of an upcoming dialogue about "The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere" hosted by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, October 22.  The dialogue will bring together Taylor and Habermas with Judith Butler and Cornel West.  (Have I mentioned how much I wish I lived in New York City?) 

Forthcoming Symposium on Merold Westphal's Whose Community? Which Interpretation

In the months of November and December we will be hosting a symposium here on the Church and Postmodern Culture blog to engage Merold Westphal's latest book--and the latest book in the Church and Postmodern Culture series along with Graham Ward's The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens. Westphal's book is entitled Whose Community? Which Interpretation: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church, and touches on the following issues:

In this volume, renowned philosopher Merold Westphal introduces current philosophical thinking related to interpreting the Bible. Recognizing that no theology is completely free of philosophical "contamination," he engages and mines contemporary hermeneutical theory in service of the church. After providing a historical overview of contemporary theories of interpretation, Westphal addresses postmodern hermeneutical theory, arguing that the relativity embraced there is not the same as the relativism in which "anything goes." Rather, Westphal encourages us to embrace the proliferation of interpretations based on different perspectives as a way to get at the richness of the biblical text.

Here is the schedule of engagements with the book:

• November 14: Carl Raschke, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver
  ch. 01. Hermeneutics 101: No Interpretation Needed?
  ch. 02. Hermeneutics 102: A Little Historical Background
• November 21: Jim Chapman, Th.M. student at Duke University
  ch. 03. Against Romantic Hermeneutics: Away from Psychologism
  ch. 04. Objectivism and Authorial Privilege
• November 30: Andrew Talbot, PhD student at the University of Nottingham
  ch. 05. Revoking Authorial Privilege
  ch. 06. Rehabilitating Tradition
• December 7: Cynthia R. Nielsen, PhD student at the University of Dallas
  ch. 07. On Not Clinging to the Prejudice against Prejudice
  ch. 08. Art as the Site of Truth beyond Method
• December 14: Christina Smerick, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Greenville College
  ch. 09. Performance, Application, Conversation
  ch. 10. Conversation and the Liberal-Communitarian Debate
• December 21: Father Robert Coates, SSC, Vicar of St Augustine's at Bexhill-on-Sea, England
  ch. 11. The Church as Conversation
  ch. 12. Transcendence, Revelation, and Community

Please read along and join us in the conversation starting November 14th! If you don't already have the book yet, an excerpt containing the preface and first chapter may be obtained here on the Baker Academic website.

Speculative Grace: "God" as Audience

I. The Passage

I turned to philosophy after stumbling across Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death my junior year at BYU. I've never been able to set the book aside.

The fourth chapter has always mattered most to me. In this chapter, Derrida reflects at length on the Sermon on the Mount. In part, I love this book because it gave to me (for the first time?) the Sermon on the Mount as a question to be borne - and this is a gift indeed.

One passage in particular interests me today:

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. 

(Matthew 6:1-4)

Of the multitude of things that might be said of these verses, I'm interested here in a general problem that we might refer to as "the problem of audience."

II. The Advice

The (apparent?) problem with these verses is the variability of its advice about how one ought to relate to the presence or absence of an audience. 

Is the problem here addressed by Jesus (1) the problem of doing an action for the sake of being recognized by an audience of men, or (2) the problem of doing an action for the sake of being recognized by an audience period (even if that audience is God)?

The passage's basic advice is to act without regard for the regard of one's audience. Or, act in such a way that your course of action is not influenced by your perceived reflection of that action on your own life and character. Don't act in order to be seen. "Glory" is a name for one's being affirmatively seen. Avoid glory.

This is good advice, but there's just one tiny problem: it runs against the grain of my own deepest desires.

What impulse is Jesus' prohibition meant to countermand? 

It is, I believe, meant to countermand my deep impulse to double every one of my actions. It is meant to oppose my impulse to not only do something or think something but to double that doing or thinking by registering it with an audience (exhibit A: this post ;). I don't just want to think thoughts, I want other people to know that I've been thinking thoughts. I don't just want to do work and develop competencies, I want other people to know that I've been doing work and developing competencies!

III. The Problem 

One problem: doubling every action requires an immense amount of energy. It's hard work!

A deeper problem: doubling every action tends to make the work itself of only secondary importance. The work itself comes to be done only for the sake of some other end (i.e., the end of being seen). Which is to say: the work itself becomes unimportant in and of itself. It is a chore to be done on the way to something else. And chores, we all know, are miserable. In this sense, doubling one's actions as a performance for an audience is a sure fire way to make even the most pleasant of tasks miserable.

Why go to all this trouble? My "self" demands it. In fact, my "self" depends (almost?) entirely on the registered response of the audience. Unless registered through the loop of an audience's feedback, my "self" doesn't show up.

But I love my "self," I need my "self," I have a fantastic story I've been constructing for years about this guy (much of it patterned on sports-movie cliche's about underdogs winning the day against all odds, etc.).

But I can tell that people are suspicious about the accuracy of this story I've been peddling and it worries me. In particular, I can tell that I am more than a little suspicious about the accuracy of this story! 

The anxiety keeps me awake at night: I've got to successfully fabricate a certain series of events and have an audience register those events in order to pull this thing off. Otherwise, "I" threaten to dissolve away like so many fingerprints being Windexed off my three year-old's rear-door passenger window. (This image is relatively apt: life is like a window and my sense of "self" depends on those damn fingerprints leaving their residue as a kind of a phantom double. In other words, my sense of self depends on making sure to leave the window dirty! Then I can say: "Look at the dirt on the window! 'I' exist!" But Jesus says: "Do your work and stop leaving fingerprints!")

My "self' is this story I'm telling myself about myself and everything depends not just on manipulating this story to go along as I'd like but on getting someone to listen to the story and believe it . . . because then I just might believe it too.

IV. Shortage of Appropriate Audiences

The basic problem here: audiences are in short supply. In fact, most everything I do on a daily basis lacks an adequate audience. Why aren't people paying attention to me? Can't they tell I'm working (in order to be seen) here? Can't they tell my "self" depends on them noticing?

This brings us back to the (only apparent?) variability of Jesus' advice about one's relation to an audience. 

Fortunately (and this is a major relief!) I am never without an audience. In fact, I couldn't ask for a better, more meticulously attentive audience: God. He even knows my thoughts and intentions. Nothing gets by this audience. With my knowledge that God is watching, I need never stop performing.

And, as a matter of fact, I almost never do.

Alone in my office at school, the performance (and the doubled effort of that performance) continues. Alone in my car, the show must go on. Alone in my living room at 4:30 AM, I smile knowing that God sees the fact that, while all those other crazy (inadequate!) people are still sleeping, I've once more proven that my self/story is better than their's - and I'm pleased to know that at least God has taken appropriate note of it.

V. Insidious?

It is more and more clear to me that this is, in fact, the basic role that "God" plays in my psychic economy. God is my uber-dependable audience. I'm counting on the fact that he's keeping track and will ultimately vindicate the story I've been telling myself about myself. He sees my "heart" even when I'm a screw-up (thus knowing I'm not really a screw-up). He hears my petitions for things to turn out the way that I'd like ("Dear God, the story is supposed to go like this . . ."). And when things don't turn out that way I know that he (at the very least) has taken those petitions under serious advisement. He sees all the things about "me" that no one else has been keeping track of and knows the "truth" about "me" (i.e., my "story"!).

I can't speak for how this works (or doesn't) for anyone else. And I'm not claiming to. But all of this (increasingly) strikes me as deeply insidious. 

I'm tired of the show. I'm tired of performing. I'm tired of this endless work of fabrication, the endless pandering for votes. I want to work and think - not work to be seen working or think to be seen thinking. I want to lay down the burden that is my vanity. 

What if no one is watching? What if there is no pan-galactic mirror? What if God is not an uber-audience? What if there is no super-duper, heavenly safety net for my ego? 

What if there is just the work? Just the thinking? Just the loving? Just this? 

Could I even bear this thought? Could I even bear the idea that my fingerprints don't do anything but smudge up my own view? 

What if there is no place to go? No prize to win? No audience to impress? Could I get up tomorrow and do what I do anyway? Could I work and think nonetheless? Would I collapse in a worthless heap of nihilism? Or would I finally be able to stand-up and act, free from the dead-weight of that dopple-ganger known as "me"?

VI. Alternate Reading?

I wonder if we might read the second half of Jesus' admonition in the following way: the key is to work in such a way that not even your own left hand serves as an audience for what your right hand is doing. In short, the key is to work in such a way that the work is itself grace rather than work.

The promise that follows (that God will see in secret and reward us openly) may, then, do something other than function as "audience-insurance" for the temporarily absent minded.

Rather, if our left hand doesn't even know what our right hand did, how could we know that God knows what our right hand did? The chain has already been broken. The left hand did not itself (as that fail-safe auto-audience!) force the action to be doubled as a performance.

What then of the promise of "open" reward?  What if the reward is the opening of the action itself: completed, performed, accomplished as itself and for its own sake without the burden of its own vanity.

If so, then the reward is already (openly) given. There was no doubling of the action in a performance that could cause the action itself to be "hidden" behind the screen of the narrative that "I" am.

And if this is so, then the promised "reward" for acting in this way would not be a kind of additional supplement unveiled as the result of successfully accomplishing a truly secret action. 

Rather, the reward would be my failure to veil the action behind the screen of its doubled performance.