the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Speculative Grace: Spinoza, Immanence, & Affect

In this post, I'd like to continue exploring some side trails related to my experimental port of grace into a non-theistic context. 

This week, I offer an assortment of reflections on Spinoza, theism, and grace. A few points interest me in particular: (1) Spinoza's adherence to a thoroughly immanent ontology, (2) Spinoza's wholesale rejection of any overarching teleology (or goal-driven purpose) as characteristic of reality, and (3) Spinoza's conception of grace (or "blessedness") in the context of this ateleological immanence.

I. With Respect to Theism & the Nature of Reality

A few points with respect to Spinoza's general, metaphysical claims in the Ethics.

1. Spinoza claims that there is only one self-caused substance, that everything else exists in this substance as a modification of it (e.g., human beings are localized, finite modifications of this one substance), and that this infinite substance is God. 

Most of these claims will not be of any use with respect to the work of experimentally porting grace onto a nontheistic platform. For instance, the kind of non-theistic ontology I've previously elaborated is founded on the rejection of claims that (1) reality has a single source or underlying unity, and (2) anything can be impassibly self-caused.

2. But it does follow from Spinoza's understanding of God/Substance that immanence is the rule. Everything that exists is immanent to God and immanent to the rest of what is contained "in" God. This strict immanence - or "flatness" - that allows no ontological exception to this single substance is a welcome opening move.

3. It also follows for Spinoza that because there is only one substance, nothing else exists that could influence or interrupt the unfolding of this substance according to its own nature. Because it unfolds only according to its own nature, everything that happens within it occurs absolutely and necessarily as it must.

In short, determinism follows: every effect is determined necessarily and without remainder by the causes that preceded it. 

However, again, a non-theistic ontology would likely need to disagree with the premise that there is a water-tight causal "order" to the whole of how everything unfolds. The kind of non-theistic ontology we've explored in previous posts would not begin from a single point (it would be fundamentally multiple) and it's order of self-organization would be contingently rather than necessarily produced.

What, then, is salutary about Spinoza's determinism? It is welcome in that it introduces "the unconditional" (in the form of "necessity") as constitutive of the internal unfolding of substance. Because a preeminent mark of grace is its "unconditionality", we might (to paraphrase Novalis) describe Spinoza as a "grace-intoxicated man": the whole of reality is given without condition.

Without claiming a water-tight determinism as fundamental, a non-theistic ontology would still want to claim that the real is saturated with this kind of unconditionality. However, rather than claiming that necessity is unconditionally necessary, we would instead want to claim (following Quentin Meillassoux's argument in After Finitude) that contingency is unconditionally necessary and that it is in relation to the blind contingency of the real that (despite it's contingency) we nonetheless experience something profoundly unconditional.

Where Spinoza claims that the Absolute is unconditional, a non-theistic ontology would want to claim that contingency is unconditional. But either way, the unconditional abounds.

4. It also follows for Spinoza that because there is only one substance with nothing external to it, that there is no place else for this substance to go and nothing for it "strive for" as an "end" or "goal" to be achieved. Substance simply unfolds within itself as its nature demands. It is not "trying" to accomplish anything with this internal unfolding. In short, for Spinoza, reality is not intrinsically teleological. 

Though humans may experience a kind of local teleological orientation, there is no global teleology.

In general, this move may be productive. In a non-theistic ontology, reality would - at root - be similarly indifferent to teleology. What happens is what happens, what is given is given, and all this would happen or be given unconditionally (even if it is the contingency of its taking place that is the true site of what is unconditional).

Why might the lack of a global or intrinsic teleology be helpful when thinking about grace? It may be very helpful insofar as grace is itself ateleological. Grace just gives. To the extent that it is instrumentalized as a means to end, its graciousness tends to dissipate. (Insert here all of Derrida's now classical arguments about the structure of the gift, etc.)

Here, the essential point is that salvation seems to necessarily involve the minimal abandonment of my own teleology. That is to say: you can't find happiness by (directly and intentionally/teleologically) seeking your own happiness. This is an almost "trite" point to make but it is, I think, at the existential heart of this issue. 

Is this abandonment of my own teleology still compatible with a grand, universal teleology? Probably. 

Might the ateleology of grace be a better fit with the idea that the universe is itself fundamentally ateleological? That is one of the things this experimental port of grace into a non-theistic ontology is meant to explore.

II. With Respect to Ethics

All of this is interesting but dispensable. For my part, we haven't yet gotten to any of Spinoza's really interesting work. Spinoza's ontology sets up the metaphyiscal playing field in some productive ways, but the rubber meets the road only when we get down to the actual problem of ethics. (And Spinoza believes this too: hence, the title of the book.)

A couple of points here are particularly worth mentioning (in extremely condensed fashion):

1. Reality being the single substance that it is, Spinoza argues that it is impossible for human beings to not be in open relation with other bodies and ideas.

For what it is worth, I think that a non-theistic ontology would need to radicalize this fundamental point and claim that it applies not only to humans but to everything that is. (See my extensive argument to this effect in an earlier post.)

2. The upshot of this point for human beings is that it is impossible to avoid being affected by external causes. 

This availability for affection, for "suffering" and passivity, is absolutely crucial. As I mentioned in the previous point, a non-theistic ontology would argue that this availability is constitutive of being itself.

Call this an ontological version of the Buddha's first noble truth: (availability for) suffering is universal.

In a non-theistic ontology (contra Spinoza), God would be no exception to this rule of universal suffering.

To be = to be available for affect. Availability for affection is unconditional.

3. For Spinoza, the mind's experience of affection is called "emotion." Every emotion involves two parts: (1) the idea of the external cause acting upon us, and (2) our experience of the "feeling" that this cause produces in us.

4. Spinoza's point is that these emotions are problematic: because we are passive in relation to them (whether pleasant or unpleasant), we experience them as a kind of bondage.

Here, bondage = passivity.

5. A key point: We can find ourselves "bound" or "enslaved" (i.e., rendered passive) just as easily by things that we do want as by things that we don't want. 

That is, I can be enslaved by ice cream when I experience this craving as a bondage just as easily as I can experience being made to eat my broccoli as a kind of bondage (you may speak with my children about this latter point).

Here, grace - as what frees us from this bondage, the bondage of sin -  must be strictly orthogonal to what we do and do not want.

6. Spinoza argues that it is this passivity that makes us miserable.

7. We think then (wrongly!) that the key to escaping from this bondage is to eliminate our availability for suffering. We think: if we can eliminate our availability for suffering, then we'll have eliminated the possibility of bondage.

8. It is at this point that, I believe, we've reached Spinoza's essential insight.

Spinoza does not believe that our misery can be overcome by eliminating our availability for suffering.

Why? (1) Because it is impossible. (2) Because it would condemn us to the hell of solipsism.

In fact, trying to not be available for suffering actually makes us more passive, bound, and miserable. Sticking one's head in the sand by fantasizing, daydreaming, consumer-binging, and seeking perpetual distraction in front of big screen TVs (or computer screens!) can only render us more passive.

9. What then is the answer? Spinoza agrees with the Buddha (and Jesus) that the key is not to eliminate our availability for suffering but to shift our relation to the suffering in such a way as to become active rather than passive.

The key is to actively suffer our availability.

What does this mean? Spinoza, to his immense credit, is extremely clear and precise about the "method" for doing this:

In the experience of an emotion, we must turn our attention away from the "external" face of that emotion (i.e., its "external cause") and center our attention on the "internal" face of that emotion (i.e., the actual "feeling" or sensation).

We must pay extremely close attention to the effects that this affect produces: what does it feel like? what are the details of the sensation? does it make you sweat? is your face flushed? are your hands clenched? is your stomach filled with butterflys? is your pulse rate up? is your breathing irregular? does it make you feel tired? excited? etc.

Paying this close attention to the affect will: (1) render one's relation to the suffering active rather than passive, and (2) detach the suffering from the thought of its external cause.

Actively "seeing" or "understanding" one's affects (rather than passively rolling under them) produces a liberating equanimity - one sees things as they really are. 

Further, actively seeing the affect does not eliminate that affect. In fact, it brings it center stage as what it truly is. But the misery of that affect - a misery produced by the experience of it as a (passive) bondage - is eradicated. 

We don't escape passivity through the "mortification" of our availability for affect, but through our attentive intensification of it.

10. A possible objection: but wouldn't this "detachment" of the affect from the external cause also result in a kind of solipsistic navel-gazing? 

No. Precisely the opposite.

Why? Because insofar as we confuse external causes, bodies, etc. with the affect that they produce in us we have not seen them as they truly are. If, when I feel angry, I see only the external "cause" of that anger, then I will confuse that other person with the affect that they produce in me. 

In order to see the other person as they truly are, I must stop confusing them with the affect they produce in me. 

Only the operation of detachment allows both the affect and the external cause to be seen for what they are. And only the operation of their separation allows for our feelings to be actually (actively) felt as feelings. 

Detachment does not preclude feeling, it makes the feeling of our feelings in their full ramification possible.

Here, both the affect and the "external cause" of that affect can be received as they are given - i.e., as the grace that they are.

Passively received grace is misery. Actively received grace is salvation.

11. What is Spinoza's deficiency with respect to his elaboration of this method? He clearly explains exactly what one needs to do. He doesn't have much to say about exactly how to do it. 

12. Remarkably, the Buddha arrives at exactly the same conclusions as does Spinoza. He agrees about the nature of the problem. He agrees that avoiding availability for suffering is the problem, not the answer. And he agrees that the key is to shift our relation to these affects from passivity to activity through attentiveness to the sensations themselves and detachment of them from the idea of their external cause.

Next week, I'll reflect in more detail on how the Buddha ramifies (in extremely practical ways) Spinoza's insight into the nature of grace.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 3

Today's engagement of Daniel A. Siedell's God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art comes from Bruce Ellis Benson. He is engaging chapter 3 entitled "Enrique Martinez Celaya's Thing and Deception: The Artistic Practice of Belief." Bruce Ellis Benson is Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL). He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry (IVP, 2002), The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge, 2003), and Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Indiana, 2008). He is co-editor of The Phenomenology of Prayer (Fordham, 2004), Hermeneutics at the Crossroads (Indiana, 2006), Transforming Philosophy and Religion: Love’s Wisdom (Indiana, 2008), Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo (Brazos, 2008), and Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology (Fordham, forthcoming 2009), in which his essay “Chrétien on the Call That Wounds” will appear. He is an editor of the new Eerdmans book series titled “Envision: New Trends in Christian Theology” and Executive Director of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology (SCPT). He will be a visiting professor at the University of Leuven in the 2009-2010 academic year.

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Recently, a colleague from the English department at Wheaton made the point in conversation that a novel has a way of getting at the reality of ethical life in a way that philosophy generally cannot. In watching a character forced to make difficult ethical decisions—with all their varied gradations of “good” and “bad,” not to mention conflicting demands—one gets a much more profound sense of the complexity of trying to live virtuously than a philosophical theory can provide. One can, to be sure, cite a text like Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death as providing a particularly nuanced moral account. But, as if to prove my colleague’s point, Derrida needs the story of Abraham and Isaac precisely in order to tease out those complications.

In effect, Dan Siedell employs Enrique Martínez Celaya’s painting Thing and Deception to complexify such assumed binaries of belief and unbelief (as well as such opposites as banal and profound, truth and superstition—though here I will focus on belief and its supposed antonyms of unbelief or doubt). By observing what Martínez Celaya both does and says, Siedell shows us that defining “belief” and “unbelief” is, to say the least, complicated. One can hardly do Thing and Deception justice by way of description, so I urge readers to study the image for themselves. What is one to make of this veiled chocolate Easter bunny that has clearly been broken yet reassembled? That the words “Needed Proof” are inscribed below the bunny makes this even more complicated. Now, it’s important to know at the outset that Martínez Celaya is not just trying to be “clever.” As he says elsewhere: “So many contemporary paintings have this wink to say we’re both in on the joke. Any time I find myself being witty or clever, I paint over it” (see “Layers of Devotion (and the Scars to Prove It)"). So one needs to take Martínez-Celaya very seriously.

One of the complications here is that Easter bunnies are, in one sense, like Santa Claus: they are the secular counterpart to Jesus’s resurrection as Santa is the counterpart to his birth. But, since one can talk about “believing” in either Santa or the Easter bunny themselves, there are at least two levels of belief at stake in this painting. Siedell says that the words “needed proof” are “ironic, for who ‘needs proof’ when trading in the currency of chocolate Easter bunnies?” True, no “proof” is needed for the existence of a particularly chocolate bunny, but there is something like “proof” involved for the existence of the Easter Bunny. As it turns out, children do come to doubt both Santa and the Easter Bunny, so the secular symbol (if that is the right way to put it) can itself be doubted and thus be the subject of unbelief. Given this, it is interesting that the painting is titled Thing and Deception—not Bunny and Deception or Christ and Deception. We are not really sure what this “thing” is, and that makes the counterpart “deception” all the more enigmatic.

Yet now we face a further ambiguity, for Thing and Deception was first exhibited in an installation titled “Saint Catherine Watches Over Me.” That Saint Catherine is remembered for converting fifty pagan philosophers who were commissioned by a Roman emperor to convert her puts yet another spin on this piece. How exactly is Saint Catherine “watching over” Martínez Celaya? Is she trying to convert him? One might be tempted to ask who is trying to convert whom. It is significant that Martínez Celaya chooses a piece of kitsch related to his childhood “framed by kitsch” (as he puts it), though he later comes to see the painting as more about his future than his past. Siedell interprets this as moving from more explicitly religious subject matter to a more explicitly religious overall structure of his work and thought.

Martínez Celaya definitely sees Thing and Deception as part of a religious context, but then he wonders if it can find a place (to quote him) “in the new sanctitas of the Modern art gallery.” This raises the problem of the competing “religious beliefs” of the gallery and the church. In Martínez Celaya’s Guide (his own fictitious dialogue between an artist and an friend), it is telling that the friend (who is also a voice of Martínez Celaya) says the following to the artist: “For someone who claims not to be religious, you speak in a way that sounds very religious to me.” What are we to make of this “religiosity”? Siedell interprets Martínez Celaya as attempting to avoid being either a “believer” or an “unbeliever,” and Siedell characterizes Martínez Celaya’s work and thought in terms of both negative theology and spiritualistic (rather than “religious”) piety. Siedell draws a comparison to he takes to be high art’s way of belief by way of incarnation to the incarnation in Christianity. Instead of “believing” in terms of doctrines and propositions, Martínez Celaya believes by incarnational practice, what Siedell means by the “artistic practice of belief.” Analogously, Siedell claims that Christian icons and the Eucharist “not only require faith, they also generate and sustain it.” But, again, it is unclear to what extent “religious” or “artistic” belief is involved here.

One has to wonder how strongly Siedell intends to assert his closing observation that “Thing and Deception narrows the gap between belief and unbelief, banal and profound, art and religion, sacred and secular, truth and superstition, revealing each to be two sides of the same precious coin.” No doubt, these gaps are questioned and even narrowed by Martínez Celaya. Yet it all depends on what kind of “belief” and what kind of “unbelief” constitute each side of the coin. Clearly, there must be some genuine content to the belief in order for it to be the flipside of unbelief or doubt. Thus, when Siedell says that the painting and the Eucharist “require the eyes of faith to see what is truly present,” I am inclined to agree and yet also point out that what is present in the Eucharist is more defined than what is present in the painting. So the analogy only goes so far. Of course, given widely differing beliefs within the Christian community of what is “present” in the Eucharst, perhaps the analogy goes further than we might think.

In any case, once again, it is something other than a philosophical theory—here, a painting and the reflections on it by both its thoughtful painter and an astute art historian—that helps us get at the complexities of the daily reality of epistemological life, complexities that are no less real or problematic than those of the ethical life.

New Doctor of Ministry program: Can you help spread the word?

The new doctor of ministry program that I will be leading/directing for George Fox Seminary, has been in development for 18 months, and now has accreditation and authorization and is gearing up for launch January 2010.

You can now download this prospectus for the Global Missional Leadership D.Min program. I am so excited about the possibilities for this program, in particular: 

1. Theological: A vigorous and rigorous theological exploration of leadership, church and culture 

2. Relational: Co-hort based, and with face to face experiences 

3. Global: The face to face experiences in Europe, Africa and Asia, meeting with leaders, churches, missions on the ground, and the online international community around the program. 

4. Open Source: The learning community around the program that is open to anyone who wants to be involved whether they are on the program or not. 

5. Social Media: The use of social media and technology that will be integral to the program delivery and learning activities. 

In trying to get the word out, could you forward this to friends, tweet, facebook, and blog with a link to the program? Thanks in advance for all your help. 

Here are a sample twitter and facebook message that you could post, tweaking as you see fit. :

-  Tweet:  Check out the new Global Missional Leadership Doctor of Ministry program: http://bit.ly/VngV9 -   launches Jan 2010 in Nairobi #dmingml #gf

-  Facebook:  Check out George Fox Evangelical Seminary's new Doctor of Minstry program in Global Missional Leadership:http://www.georgefox.edu/seminary/dmin/gml/index.html, The first cohort lauches January 2010 in Nairobi, Kenya. The seminary is now accepting applications.

Smoking to the Glory of God?

I had hoped to begin an introductory post today to what will be a regular series by me under the title 'ecclesia res publica'.  However swine flu has been working its way through my household, and instead I offer this post, that I have drafted in contribution to another blog series.

Christine Sine sent me an invitation to write (alongside so many other wonderful writers) in response to a question she posed about Spiritual practices.  If I can summarize Christine’s question (no doubt very badly), and premise for the series, she asked why do most people experience God outside church in the world, whilst Christians see only prayer, bible study, and going to church as spiritual practices, for knowing and experiencing the death and resurrection of Jesus?

It was a good question for me, in that it bothered me and got me thinking.  In particular, how tragic it is if the bible, church and prayer become self referencing static mediators of the gospel, with no connection to the real world.  But also, how equally tragic and a measure of gospel paucity, if spiritual practices, are about experiences of God in the world, with no framing by the canonical-linguistic grammar of the gospel, prayer, and Christian community.  Both are as bad as each other, or perhaps at least lead to a question, what are the nature of spiritual practices, and how are they connected to the world, and church, and scripture?

Otherwise without some understanding of that, it’s easy to accept the opening premise at face value as fact, and in response as a Christian to reach for what I do in the world as ‘a spiritual practice’. That is to respond by listing what I do in the world, outside of the bible , prayer, and church, as where I meet God.  It’s to locate spiritual practices on those terms, and that’s something I’m uncomfortable with.  Just as I am uncomfortable with collapsing ‘spiritual practices’ into bible study, prayer and going to church.

I can easily reach for how having turned 40 years old this year, I became a cliche, and I decided to get a motor bike.  I can describe how the training process in the UK, with four separate tests and requisite training, have been forming me as a biker.  How I for the first time have a hobby away from my work, and the pressures of Church community.  How a ride through the english pastoral countryside, clears my mind, connects me to creation, and how close to God I feel compared to going to Church.  And if I were to imagine that Christians who see spiritual practices as solely the domain of prayer, bible and going to church, were to ask me, how can you ride a motorbike as a spiritual practice, my reply might be like that of Charles Spurgeon, when asked how could he smoke cigars?  That I do it to the glory of God.

But I misrepresent Spurgeon, and do him a disservice, as do many Christians, when we use his most wonderful aphorism, as a thin veneer, to baptise everything we do as a ‘spiritual practice’.  For if I justify all I do as being done to the glory of God, everything is a spiritual discipline, perhaps apart from going to Church, prayer and the bible.

So how might we begin to respond to this separation of ‘spiritual practices’ from church community, the bible and prayer?  How did we arrive at this separation, and how might we begin to frame this theologically, to understand the nature of ‘spiritual practices’ and how they form us as human beings before God?

One reading of St Augustine¹, would provide an understanding of the human condition, in which we have not fallen from God, but we have fallen from ourselves, into ourselves.  For Augustine, humanity has not fallen out of perfection, but rather out of Creation, into the condition of privation, isolation, and withdrawal.  Sin is not a fall from God, but the fall from ourselves, otherwise we could not exist as human beings.  While our response to this condition is further retreat, into isolation from others, and forming life around ourselves, redemption is the move back into Creation and presence with God and others.  While Augustine is often critiqued as being world denying, he can be seen as providing just the opposite, with a theology of engagement with the world.

As I read him, Augustine is not world-denying but world-affirming, and it is not that we have too little; it is that we are overwhelmed by the plenitude of Creation, we end up loving love itself, desiring desire, and become lost to ourselves, isolated from God and each other.  Augustine does not want us to love the world more, but rather change how we love it.  As evidenced in his own life and ministry and teaching, we see Augustine encouraging Christians to move deeper into the world and its affairs.  

For Augustine, the Christian life in response to this problem, and human condition, was one of ascesis, of re-training our desire and longings with, towards their proper orientation, and ends, that enable us to participate in the redemption of creation, by Jesus.  Within this crude summary of Augustine, we might see that ‘spiritual practices’ are those things that are located within this ascesis, that which leads to re-training and re-directing of our desire towards their god redeemed ends.

Or in response to my own question posed at the start of this post, I might see that prayer, church, and the bible that does not form us in engagement in the world, is as bad a process of ascesis as spiritual practices that move us too deeply into the world and become disconnected from the church, prayer and the bible.

I can ride my motorbike as a spiritual practice and meet Jesus.  I can offer God my motorbike riding within his re-training me from someone within a fallen self identity as a workaholic, into someone who can find his identity in the sheer indulgence of the enjoyment riding through God’s creation.  Or it can become an ecclesiology for one, having more in common with the problem of my isolation from God and others, and idol of my own making that forms me around my own isolated desires and disconnection from others.  A substitute for real ‘spiritual practice’, justified around my own fallen desires and ends, rather than those learned and practiced within the community of God’s people.

Everything can be a ‘spiritual practice’, but not everything is a ‘spiritual practice’.  It is the ends, the means, and the formation that takes place within our activities that determines what is ‘spiritual’.  Charles Spurgeon new this well I think, which is why when Christians questioned his smoking to the Glory of God’, his reply in a letter to the Telegraph Newspaper was:

 ‘"The expression 'smoking to the glory of God,' standing alone, has an ill sound, and I do not justify it; but in the sense in which I employed it, I still stand to it. No Christian should do anything in which he cannot glorify God—and this may be done, according to Scripture, in eating and drinking and the common actions of life.

 

When I have found intense pain relieved, a weary brain soothed, and calm, refreshing sleep obtained by a cigar, I have felt grateful to God and have blessed His name; this is what I meant, and by no means did I use sacred words triflingly. If through smoking I had wasted an hour of my time—if I had stinted my gifts to the poor—if I had rendered my mind less vigorous—I trust I should see my fault and turn from it; but he who charges me with these things shall have no answer but my forgiveness.” (http://www.spurgeon.org/misc/cigars.htm)

^{1 For example see, Cavanaugh, William T. Torture and Eucharist : Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.}

________. Theopolitical Imagination. London ; New York: T & T Clark, 2002.

Gregory, Eric

nd the Order of Love : An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Hütter, Reinhard. Suffering Divine Things : Theology as Church Practice. Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: W.B. Eerdmans, 2000.

Mathewes, Charles T. A Theology of Public Life Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Miller, Vincent Jude. Consuming Religion : Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. New York: Continuum, 2003.

O'Donovan, Oliver. Resurrection and Moral Order : An Outline for Evangelical Ethics. 2nd ed. ed. Leicester: Apollas, 1994.

________. The Desire of the Nations : Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996 (1999 [printing]), 1999.

Schweiker, William, and Charles T. Mathewes. Having : Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life. Grand Rapids, Mich. ; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004.

Wannenwetsch, Bernd. Political Worship : Ethics for Christian Citizens Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Speculative Grace: Hive Causality

I. Pump Priming

Having sketched some of the basics involved in experimentally porting grace onto a non-theistic platform, I’d like to spend the next few weeks exploring some related side trails.

This week, I liked to again address the way that a non-theistic ontology diffuses and distributes the supernaturally singular transcendence of a theistic God across the face of a fundamentally flat world. In particular, I’d like to address this issue from the perspective of causality. To prime the pump, I’ll take a look at Susan Oyama’s incisive book The Ontogeny of Information.

II. Definitions

First, just a brief reminder about how I’m using the terms “theistic” and “non-theistic.”

By “theism” I mean any ontology that understands God, as the Creator, to be the single unifying source of reality. In this sense, a belief in God is not necessarily incompatible with a non-theistic ontology. Only a belief that God is the single unifying source of reality is incompatible with a non-theistic ontology.

But, further, I want to claim that any ontology founded on the axiom that reality is ultimately “One” (whether this basic unity shows up as a governing principle, a macro-totality, a micro-uniformity, a transcendental horizon, etc.) remains essentially theistic. Such ontologies have simply substituted a philosophical avatar of original unity for “God.” 

To be clearly and decisively non-theistic, an ontology would need to break fundamentally with this traditional assumption of basic, original unity. Rather than accounting for how localized multiplicity comes from an original unity, it would have to account for how various localized unities emerge from an original multiplicity.

III. Pre-Formationism

The thrust of Oyama’s argument is that many contemporary biologists – at least tacitly and perhaps often unwittingly – have adopted an essentially theistic understanding of biological development (i.e., ontogeny).

Here, Oyama does not mean that most biologist are crypto-creationists. Rather, she means that they tend to treat ontogeny as a process that, though “godless,” is structurally theistic. They have simply substituted a biological avatar for “God.”

What is it that, in contemporary biological discourse, often functions as an avatar for “God”?

The gene.

The structural homology with theism is three-fold: (1) the assumption that a given form can only be accounted for with reference to a prior instance of that same form, (2) the assumption that some kind of central “intelligence” must be driving and guiding the developmental process, and (3) the assumption that the order and continuity of ontogeny can only be accounted for if they are essentially the result of a single, driving, root cause.

In contemporary biological discourse, Oyama claims, the gene functions an an essentially theistic avatar capable of fulfilling all three of the above functions:

“Powerful and protean, and far from being banished from secular science, the argument from design is ubiquitous. Complex design, it claims, is evidence of creative, typically divine, intelligence. . . . It is a short step from this statement that we are as we are, and do as we do, because of our essential nature as biological creatures to a variant of the argument from design: our nature is created by a genetic plan, an intelligence in the chromosomes, which was in turn created by natural selection. By slow evolutionary winnowing, Nature placed knowledge of herself in chromosomes of her creatures.” (12, emphasis mine)

From this perspective, the gene is understood as a kind of homunculus – a ghost in the machine – that allows preformatted “intelligence” to be packaged in the body of the cell itself. Here, the “gene” is homologous with a theistic “God”: it is the single, unified, already formatted, fundamental causal source that single-handedly formats the unformatted material chaos.

Oyama summarizes this understanding of development with the term “pre-formationism” because it holds the classical view (even despite itself) that “form” is separate from matter, that “form” must precede matter, and that “form” must be the seat of animation.

“Most solutions to the puzzle of how form arises, therefore, including the most recent biological dogma, have incorporated the assumption that form is to be explained by pointing to a prior instance of that very form. To the extent that this is true, they are of limited value in answering questions about origins and development. Whether it is God, a vitalistic force, or the gene as Nature’s agent that is the source of the design of living things and that initiates and directs the unfolding of the design thus matters little to the structure of the argument.” (1, emphasis mine)

As a result, in pre-formationism, form (i.e., Mind, Intelligence, or [genetic] Information) continues to get all the glory and matter continues to get the short end of the ontogentic stick. 

“Whether one traces present conceptions of life to Aristotelian notions of form and matter . . . [or] to Newtonian and Cartesian definitions of matter as inert and therefore requiring outside animation, it is clear that our preoccupations with organisms as material objects whose design and functioning must be imparted to them has a long and complex past.” (14, emphasis mine)

Matter, according to this model, is fundamentally passive, disordered, and inert. Only the imposition of a pre-formatted intelligence can save it.

IV. Hive Causality

In opposition to pre-formationism, Oyama advocates a notion of distributed causality that she refers to as “the reciprocal selectivity of influences.” 

For my own part, I suggest that we might refer to such a network of distributed causes as hive causality.

Rather than continuing to tinker with pre-formationism, she claims that contemporary thought must make a clean break:

“What we need here . . . is the stake-in-the-heart move, and the heart is the notion that some influences are more equal than others, that form – or its modern agent, information – exists before the interactions in which it appears and must be transmitted to the organisms either through genes or by the environment.” (31, emphasis mine)

In the spirit of Bruno Latour’s principle of irreduction, Oyama claims that we must abandon an overly simplistic (and, I would add, essentially theistic) gene-centric view of ontogeny and acknowledge instead the immensely complex network of actors (some genetic, some epigenetic, some environmental, all contingent) that each play discernible and variously crucial parts in the process of development. To grasp ontogeny truthfully, we must recognize the way that causal responsibility for the process is decentralized and distributed among all the actors.

“What I am arguing for here,” she says, “is a view of causality that gives formative weight to all operative influences, since none is alone sufficient for the phenomenon or for any of its properties” (18, emphasis mine).

If this is done, then change “is best thought of not as the result of a dose of form and animation from some causal agent, but rather as a system alteration jointly determined by contemporary influences and by the state of the system, which state represents the synthesis of earlier interactions” (37).

From this perspective, it is recognized that no single, external, and preformatted force guides the unfolding of the process toward order and intelligibility.

Rather, order arises as the result of a hive causality in which the causal pathways are weakly determining and multiply contingent. Information and order are the result of the process rather than its pre-formatted condition. And matter is itself understood to be an active, independent, and intelligible force in ontogeny.

V. Hive Grace

In my view, the shift from pre-formationism to hive causality is an essential step in grasping the structure of a non-theistic ontology. Further, it is my view that, if ported into a non-theistic ontology, grace will then be manifest in terms of the ubiquity of the world’s distributed relations. 

My take-away theses:

Grace: the reciprocal selectivity of influences.

Grace: the intersection of multiply contingent and weakly causal pathways.

Grace: hive causality.

 

God in the Gallery: A Symposium, ch. 2

Today's second engagement with Daniel A. Siedell's God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art comes from Matt Milliner, who writes on chapter two entitled "A History of Modern Art." [Part I by James K. A. Smith may be found here.]  Matthew J. Milliner is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Princeton University. His blogger profile continues: "In a previous life he graduated from the same town's Theological Seminary. In the life before that he was a Youth Director at Media Presbyterian Church (PA). In the life before that he went to Wheaton College (IL). In the life before that he went to Haddonfield Memorial High School (NJ). In the life before that he was born and raised mostly in Jersey. In the life before that he did nothing, because the Origenist doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul was condemned in 553AD." Matt blogs at http://millinerd.com.

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The fact that I have no authority to make grand pronouncements will not keep me from doing so: God in the Gallery is the starting point for the future of the Christianity and art conversation, at least (or especially) in the North American evangelical, not to mention post-evangelical, milieu. I am consequently grateful to participate in this forum which, following James’ opening remarks on the importance of informed engagement, now proceeds to the topic of “modern” art, which I understand to be distinguishable from postmodern or contemporary art (beginning c. 1960), a topic which Siedell addresses in later chapters.

An analogy to describe Siedell’s aim in this chapter can be found in the task of historians, such as Edward Grant, who seeks to show the undeniable, but normatively ignored, Christian backdrop of modern science. But while there are many scholars at work correcting the doggedly secularized narrative of science, there are far fewer, if any, doing the same for the history of art, let alone the history of modern art. Siedell seeks to fill this lacuna, describing his agenda as follows: “A history of modern art can be written that reveals that Christianity in all its myriad cultural and material manifestations is never absent from the modern artist.”

To accomplish this, Siedell begins by relating modern art’s introduction to the American public in Manhattan’s 1913 Armory Show. He then takes two figures who bookend modernism - Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Alfred J. Barr Jr. (1902-1981) – and highlights the overlooked Christian aspects of their given perspectives. Likewise, Siedell marshals Peter Berger’s post-secular sociology, and theologian Graham Ward’s contention that “the saeculum [has] no autonomous existence” to buttress his transcendent reading of modernism. Siedell has just scratched the surface. We can hope that he, or someone inspired by his account, will extend this traditionally religious (not merely “spiritual”) reading of modernism into the book length treatment it deserves. New Republic art critic Jed Perl seems to already be moving in that direction, as has Steven Schloesser with his book Jazz Age Catholicism (albeit in a way that encompasses literature and music as well as art). However the religious account of modern art is broached, an inevitable discovery awaits: A double-barreled attempt to reconcile Christianity (specifically Catholicism) to modern art has long been on offer in the careers of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson.

And yet, these figures have long been outside the Protestant purview, making Siedell’s Protestant reading of modernism unusual. Perhaps overly determined by the more negative Protestant perspective (Siedell seems to have Hans Rookmaaker’s Modern Art and the Death of Culture in view), God in the Gallery aims to actively oppose it. Siedell contends that when Christians adopt a negative stance towards modernism, they play into secular hands: “Neither secular scholars nor conservative Christian critics want Christianity in the history of modern art.”

Still, as Siedell unfurls his more positive take on modernity, he does not strike a Tillichian bargain, that is, he refrains from writing a theological blank check to high culture. Instead, Siedell actively opposes the Liberal Protestant paradigm that he has criticized in this forum before. To use a familiar analogy, Siedell founds his cultural engagement upon the rock of the Seventh Ecumenical Council’s iconic Christology, in contrast to vague theologies of culture which have, in retrospect, proven to be houses built on sand. In practice, this means Siedell both permits a quintessentially modern artist such as Mark Rothko only an “undetermined iconicity,” while allowing Rothko’s participation in the economy of the icon nonetheless. While some might suggest this is not dissimilar to Maritain and Gilson’s modernist reconciliation strategy, the case could also be made that it constitutes an improvement.

Refreshing as I find Siedell’s perspective to be, I conclude with a criticism: A student who reads this chapter and plunges into (what’s left of) the world of modern art in search of - to use the book’s guiding analogy - altars to an unknown god, would be like a young evangelical who reads his way into Anglicanism through the poetry of George Herbert, only to then open last week’s newspaper. St. Paul may have found one agnostic altar amongst literally thousands of Athenian idols, but Siedell seems to take this exception to be the rule. He cites Augustine and Origen’s strategy of “despoiling of the Egyptians;” but it should also be noted that heated debate with Varro (constituting a hulking chunk of City of God) and Celcus (Origen’s longest treatise) were their more normative modes of cultural engagement. Many modern artists knew exactly what God they were seeking to offend. Accordingly, an equally appropriate exemplar to illustrate Pauline engagement of modern art would be not only the altar to an unknown God from Acts 17, but an approximately contemporary creation: The famous “ass-Christ” graffito, (beating Serrano to the punch by two millennia), instructively inscribed, “Alexamenos worships his god.”

But to press this point too hard would be unfair: Siedell, who has himself admitted “sharp sympathy pains” with those who dismiss the art world wholesale, anticipates it. He is, of course, aware of modernism’s anti-religious strain, but suggests we don’t take the bait: “Even as rejected, [Christianity] lingers to haunt the avant-gardist, for it will not be rejected completely. Ultimately, it cannot.” Still, the Christian must reserve the right to reject some strands of modern art (due, perhaps, as much to boredom as offense). This is to say, Siedell’s positive perspective should be read alongside, not in replacement of, the previous, more dismissive accounts of modernism that he seeks to correct – accounts which, I like to think, retain their value.

Please note: My more full-length review of God in the Gallery can be read at First Things.

Speculative Grace: A Nontheistic Soteriology

I. Redux

In light of the non-theistic characterization of grace I've developed thus far, I want to say a few words this week about how porting grace into such an ontology may affect or clarify our conception sin and salvation. 

You may recall that last week employed Bruno Latour's "principle of irreduction" as a key to describing those characteristics of a non-theistic ontology that would distinguish it from a more traditional approach. I summarized this principle as follows:

Given an original multiplicity:
(1) no multiple can be entirely reduced (without remainder) to any other multiple or set of multiples, and (2) no multiple is a priori exempt from being reducible in part to any other multiple or set of multiples.

I summarized this principle in terms of "resistant availability." Because an assemblage cannot be exempt from the possibility of reduction to other multiples, it is characterized by an unavoidable availability. However, because it can also never be entirely reduced to other multiples (even those that compose it), it is also characterized by an unavoidable resistance.

It is my claim that grace, in a nontheistic ontology, should be understand primarily in terms of this "resistant availability."

Finally, I deduced several consequences from this identification of grace with resistant availability, one of which is particularly important for what follows: to say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of resistant availability is to say that grace guarantees the universality of passibility or suffering.

 

To be is to suffer, and this in two senses. Outside of theism, suffering characterizes both activity and passivity. Unavoidably available for relation, every assemblage passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, or re-distributed by other assemblages. Second, even in actively influencing other multiples, an assemblage suffers their irreducible and unmasterable resistance.

II. Suffering*

With respect to soteriology, my thesis is this: understanding the nature of sin and salvation depends on understanding the fact that suffering is the universal mark of grace.

In short, grace is the name for that which we suffer.

To get a handle on this, I need to first more precisely define suffering. To this point, I have used the word “suffering” as synonymous with a more general, ontological passibility. However, in order to make sense of sin, I will hereafter use the term “suffering” only to refer to that kind of passibility that is unique to human beings. Sin is a uniquely human affair and it is rooted in the uniquely human experience of suffering.

What is unique about human suffering? While all beings (alive or not, sensible or not) are subject to the double-bind of resistant availability, only human beings appear to be aware of this bind and experience it as such.

Let’s give this definition. Suffering: the uniquely reflexive experience of passibility that is peculiar to human beings.

Another way to say this is that humans are flesh. Now, I don’t want to entirely set aside the provocative resonances of the term “flesh,” but I want to use it here with some precision. By “flesh” I mean the human capacity for auto-affection, the human capacity to not only feel but to feel ourselves feeling. Flesh names our human ability to not only receive but to receive ourselves as receptive and receiving.

For example, when undergoing a minor medical procedure, we may not only feel the cool, thin blade of a surgeon’s scalpel when she makes a small incision, but we will also feel ourselves feeling this feeling as we respond with fear, indifference, or relief. Human suffering is unique in that it bears this compoundable reflexivity. Love, joy, peace, compassion, gratitude, agency, etc. all depend on the way that human experience folds over in such a way as to touch its being touched. Flesh names the site of our human reception of grace as a grace.

III. Sin

What, then, of sin? Sin is possible only for those who have flesh. It intervenes precisely at the site of this reflexivity. Sin is a refusal to feel ourselves feeling our own passibility.

Sin: a refusal of suffering, and, hence, a refusal of grace.

Sin does not want to be unavoidably available and it does not want to experience the world as irreducibly resistant. Sin, as pride, wants mastery. It does not want to be impinged upon by a grace that it did not request and it does not want to be dependent on a grace that it cannot control.

Sin, afraid to suffer the grace of life, attempts to withdraw from feeling. In particular, it attempts to withdraw from feeling itself feeling, from a reception of itself as that which receives, or, in other words, as that which is graced.

We could say a great deal about the nature of sin’s attempt to withdraw from the double-bind of resistant availability and the strategies it employs to this end, but it will be suffice for our purposes to sketch in a very broad way what is at stake.  

In general, sin attempts to refuse grace and suffering by screening experience in terms of its perceived “desirability.” Some things are reflexively marked as desirable and so we hunger for them and fantasize about them. Some things are reflexively marked as undesirable and so we flee from them and worry over them. Some things are reflexively marked as neither, and so we ignore them. Sin refuses to suffer by dividing the real up into what it wants, doesn’t want, and doesn’t care about.

The results are predictable: cut off from bulk of what is real, we are filled with dissatisfaction, fear, and anxiety and we, intentionally past feeling, are effectively dead (or, at best, “undead”). Zombie-like, striving after the gnat of pleasure, straining away from the sting of pain, we ignore the bulk of life and wonder at our own morbidity. Failing to be where we are, to feel what we are feeling, we fantasize instead about what has not come, fret over what has already passed, and are bored to tears by the grace of what is actually given.

Fantasy, fear, and boredom: the hallmarks of sin.

IV. Gratitude

In this light, we might further characterize sin in relation to gratitude.

Let’s say that gratitude is a name for the positive affect that grace ought to produce in our experience of it.

Gratitude names a particularly powerful reflexive affect because it arises precisely in connection with our willingness to feel ourselves feeling. Gratitude is the auto-affect par excellence: it not only feels itself feeling, it affirms with a solemn “amen” its reception of itself as available for receiving — even when what it receives is painful, undesirable, unexpected, or “uninteresting.” Gratitude affirms what is given as whatever kind of grace it is — even if the only thing gracious about it is its confirmation of our availability for reception.

It is obvious, then, that gratitude is precisely what sin forgoes. As a refusal of grace, sin refuses to affirm (via gratitude) its unavoidable availability. As a refusal of suffering, sin refuses to affirm the ubiquitous resistance of everything around it, overlapping with it, or internal to it. Forgoing gratitude, life denies the double-bind that is constitutive of the real and condemns itself instead to the lifeless prison-house of its own, endlessly empty fantasies of mastery, exceptionality, and control.

A final definition of sin. Sin: the correlation of grace with any reflexive affect other than gratitude in the absence of gratitude.

It is simple enough, then to alternatively define the nature of salvation.

Salvation: the correlation of grace with — minimally, though not exclusively — the affect of gratitude.

Gratitude frees us from sin because it affirms our availability for relation and rejoices in the graciousness of our flesh. Grateful, life feels itself feeling. Grateful, we are born again, we come back to life, and we are begotten sons and daughters of a God who is himself filled to overflowing with gratitude. Here, no longer confined by the impassibility of traditional theism, God himself would be free to gratefully affirm his own unavoidable availability, the world’s ubiquitous resistance, the absolute requirement of work, and the reception of grace.

V. Summary

Allow me to conclude with a brief summary of some of the key points I've worked out over the past few weeks. Even granted that the above experiment is relatively rough, compressed, and schematic, what can we say about grace in a non-theistic context?

1. Grace, rather than being associated with God’s theistically exceptional supernatural transcendence, is associated instead with the diffused plurality of transcendences that characterize the world’s differential immanence.

2. Grace, rather than naming an unknowable macro-force operating mysteriously behind the scenes, is operationalized as the self-organizing work of everything that is.

3.  Grace, in light of the principle of irreduction, is the double-bind of resistant availability that characterizes without exception the being of every multiple or assemblage, God included.

4. Grace is not opposed to but identified with the resistant availability that is characteristic of work.

5. Grace is unavoidably intertwined with passibility.

6. Grace, because there are no exceptions to passibility, guarantees the universality of suffering.

7. Grace, as the double-bind of resistant availability, is the mark of the real.

8. Grace, with respect to human experience, unfolds in the auto-affective reception of ourselves as receiving what is given. That is, grace unfolds for humans in connection with the flesh.

9. Grace, as what prompts sin’s refusal of suffering, is anterior to sin. Grace is not a response to sin. Rather, sin is derivative and secondary with respect to grace.

10. Grace, in order to avoid sin, must always be minimally correlated with the affect of gratitude.

11. Grace, in relation to the compoundable reflexivity of human experience, can be infinitely amplified by our grateful affirmation of whatever has been given.

This list, then, though brief, is, I think, good evidence that the experiment begun here may be worth pursuing with greater care, rigor, and attention to detail. 

Grace, wherever and however it may arise, calls for our attention.

* Note: the image of the "Suffering Servant" is by Marcella Paliekara (Paliekara@yahoo.com).

Race: Is the White Face of Christ the Proper Normative Standard?

Over the next few months, I will be posting several entries investigating the relationship between Race, Continental thought, and Theology.  My humble hope in writing these posts is to provoke thought in ways that allow for rethinking the/a Race issue(s).  These entries, these vignettes, shall investigate Race through a variety of perspectives and approaches rather than in any systematic way.  On the front end, let it be known that I think of Race as a social construction.  At the same time, I acknowledge that Race does produce real effects for our lives.  We have an experience of Race.  In other words, even though Race is not biologically real (as discrete natural categories of human difference), it is real in so far as this idea helps shape the world in which we live and in the manner in which we live it.  Race cannot be ignored.  This vignette will focus on (racist) structures of power based on racial sameness rather than racial difference.

 

“White men consider themselves superior to black men.”[i]  Following this, Fanon claims that, in return, black men try to prove themselves as equal.  Equal to what, to whom?  They prove themselves as equal to white men, equal according to the standard of whiteness.  Whiteness becomes the apex of power and, as such, regulates our understanding of (racist) racial categories.  The black man becomes equal to the white man but within the white man’s world and according to the white man’s rules.  Speaking of power and the effects of colonization, Sartre claims that “racism is ingrained in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonist methods of production and exchange.”[ii]  This ingrained racism remains today in so far as white privilege lingers on, allowing for the myth of the white standard to be perpetuated.

 

No doubt, the experience of Race and racism is much more complex than Fanon presents here. Even so, the structure of power keeps distinct whiteness on the one hand and all other races on the other.  (This two-hand metaphor may need modification.)  This is the racial binary that “transform[s] human populations into ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ men.”[iii]  Deleuze and Guattari offer something unique to this understanding of the binary.  The structure of power that normalizes whiteness does so by determining “degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face.”[iv]  In other words, racial categories are not marked by excluding one race from another; rather, racial distinctiveness is understood in so far as one deviates from the white standard.  Those who are nonwhite—this expression even perpetuates the white norm—exist on rays stretching away from the focal point of whiteness.

 

So, what are we to make of the “White-Man face” according to Deleuze and Guattari?  Foucault once claimed in a lecture, “History is the discourse of power.”[v]  Today, our history is marked the dominance of the white norm.  The White-Man face permeates our “Western” world.  Is this a particular face?  Is it a paradigm?  Perhaps the White-Man face is the face of Christ, “your average ordinary White Man."  (Jamie alludes to this when he mentions kitsch in his last post.)  Think of all the images of Christ, usually images of a blonde and blue-eyed carpenter, you have seen throughout your life.  While Christians want to elevate Christ as the normative standard for humanity, they are forced to express the Son of God as a white man (not as a 1st c. Palestinian Jew).  In order for the power structure of white dominance to remain stable, even Christ cannot deviate from the white norm.  To have a Jewish Christ or a Black Christ or a Yellow Christ or a Red Christ would be to have a deviant Son of God. 

 

Perhaps this deviance is productive.  It may be the case that understanding Christ in nonwhite terms would be of benefit to “the Church.”  Christians who express Christ in ways other than the standard might develop new approaches to orthodoxy and orthopraxis.  How might “the Church” manifest itself differently if there was no standard of whiteness?  It would help many sects of Christianity to relinquish their obsession for a homogeneous religion that plays to the advantage of white normativity.  Likewise, many Christians may be challenged to let go of the myth of hegemony.  How much would our religious practices change if we were to embrace Christ’s deviance?

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[i] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 10.

[ii] Jean-Paul Sartre, Introduction to Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, xxiv.

[iii] Charles Mills, The Racial Contract, 13.

[iv] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 178.

[v] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 68.

What are we doing again? And why?

As a new voice here on the “Church and Postmodern Culture” website, it is most prudent for my first post (or few, perhaps) simply to establish my personal starting points, commitments, limitations, aims and so forth. While admittedly a bit unorthodox or trite, I see this as a necessary first step into a “conversation” riddled with abstract and oftentimes challenging issues of philosophy, culture and theology—not all of which I agree with. In so doing, then, I hope not only to set some necessary groundwork for my future posts, but also to raise some crucial points of practical consideration so that this post can stand as an intellectual contribution in its own right. This, hopefully, will set an example for other persons to consider and recognize similar concerns in their own thinking and writing on whatever topic is at hand, including here on the Church and Postmodern Culture. For this post, to start, I will temporarily put aside much necessary groundwork (i.e. on my theological commitments, my cultural experiences, my intellectual limitations, etc.) and address just one point toward this end—our purpose or mission.

As professionals and as persons, we cannot overstate the value of occasionally stepping back from our workaday marathon lives (or in this case, blogging) and asking ourselves: “What are we doing again? And why?” Therefore, one of my aims for my authorship on this site is to remain true to [my own tweaked version of] its stated purpose. I see four places from which to sketch a holistic vision of what we are even doing here. First, the title of this website is: “the church and postmodern culture: conversation.” Second, the tagline reads: “contemporary philosophy...for the church...in the vernacular.” Third, the right sidebar states the purpose of this site as “offering discussions of high-profile theorists in postmodern theory and contemporary theology, for a non-specialist audience that is interested in the impact of postmodern theory for the faith and practice of the church.” Finally, the about page states our purpose as “to bring postmodern theory and contemporary theology into conversation with concrete faith and practice of the church.”

So what are we doing again? And why? It seems to me, based on the four quotations above, that through our participation and authorship on this website we intend to do several things that cohere into one holistic purpose: We intend to (1) write on the church, (2) postmodern culture, (3) contemporary theology, and (4) contemporary, especially postmodern, philosophy, in order to (5) have a [fruitful] conversation and discussion. In the process, we intend to (6) write in the vernacular, (7) so that we are understandable to a non-specialist audience, (8) and, in the end, contribute something of value to and for the Church, (9) expressed through concrete faith and practice. Your words, not mine. Sounds good. This is a purpose with which I am very sympathetic and to which I am excited to contribute. As a regular reader turned contributor to this website, however, it is evident to me that we can do far better than we are currently. In fact, it seems to me that both our authors and readers would do well to remind ourselves of what we are doing here, and why.

But who am I to come in and ruffle postmodern intellectual feathers? Maybe I am just a young, pompous, overly critical aspiring academic. Maybe not. My friend Eric will be a junior this fall at a large, public, highly selective university in a progressive city. He is majoring in political science with a minor in philosophy; he is twenty years old, kinda artsy, loves to think, ask questions and be cognizant of what is going on in the world. Every week we meet in a local coffee shop and he asks me probing questions about Christian theology, philosophy, church history, college, relationships, and the like. Eric is what Western evangelicals and professional developmental psychologists, albeit with different meanings, have called an emerging adult (see Arnett 2004). He is our demographic. He is an archetype of the person who is currently living out the questions and issues surrounding orthodox Christian faith, postmodern culture, and contemporary philosophy. Would my friend Eric gain something from this website? Would he even be able to understand our posts and engage with useful questions and topics regarding the Christian faith and the culture in which he lives?

Throughout my stay here, I will aim to provide critiques, commentary, reflections and insights on social theorists (or more accurately, their theories), postmodern or otherwise, as they apply to the local (visible) church and the global (invisible) Christian Church composed of all regenerated followers of Jesus throughout region and history. As a scholar and student of sociology more than philosophy, I will also speak regularly to the relationship between the local church, the Christian faith, and postmodern culture. And I will do so with Eric in mind. Again, this is for the church and for the Church. I am most favorable toward Driscoll’s recent definition of the local church as: “a community of regenerated believers who confess Jesus Christ as Lord. In obedience to Scripture they organize under qualified leadership, gather regularly for preaching and worship, observe the biblical sacraments of baptism and Communion, are unified by the Spirit, are disciplined for holiness, and scatter to fulfill the Great Commandment and the Great Commission as missionaries to the world for God’s glory and their joy” (2008:38).

If our thinking and writing fail to advance the global Church, and its tangible expression in the local church, then we ought to “commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” My intention here is not to be harsh or overly critical. Instead, my intention is to “consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds” [Hebrews 10:24]. Included in “love and good deeds,” I believe, is to “love the Lord your God…with all your mind” [Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27]—as we are pursuing here. But our purpose is not to use unnecessarily big words, engage in fruitless abstraction, impress readers with one’s knowledge of “high-profile theorists,” or mere intellectual masturbation. We have been called to a much greater mission—the Missio Dei. I urge you, then, to live, think, and write in a manner “worthy of the calling you have received” [Ephesians 4:1]. Please come alongside me as I pursue this divine purpose.

God in the Gallery: A Symposium

[I'm very happy to open our engagement with Dan Siedell's book, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art.  Over the next several weeks, we'll have different folks engaging the book, chapter-by-chapter.  Consider joining us by reading along!] 

Overture: In Praise of Elitism

My city of residence, Grand Rapids, is currently abuzz about ArtPrize, a public art competition open to artists from around the world.  Artists team up with local venues downtown who will host installations this fall.  Viewers then vote for the "best" work of art, and the winner takes home $250,000. 

Dan Siedell's "overture" to God in the Gallery helps to explain why this is a horrible idea. 

But I should back up a bit first.  Siedell frames his task as Pauline, in terms of Paul's engagement with the philosophers at the Areopagus (Acts 17): Just as Paul was willing and able to "see through" the altar to an unknown God, so Siedell is pressing Christians to "read" contemporary art with new eyes.  This is an uphill battle, for at least a couple of reasons: First, given that Siedell is especially trying to reach evangelicals, he has to counter both its iconoclasm and the popular evangelical preference for kitsch (and Thomas Kinkade).  But second, for those evangelicals who appreciate art, he has to counter a certain romanticism that regards 1900 as the beginning of the end in the arts.  Thus he's particularly out to engage and appreciate contemporary art. 

But unlike kitsch and Thomas Kinkade, contemporary art is not (to adopt Heideggerian categories) just "present-at-hand;" it's not sitting there "available" for easy appropriation.  In short, contemporary art is not trying to be "popular;" rather, there are historical and philosophical conditions which are necessary for its appreciation.  Contemporary visual art is part of a century-long conversation within the "tradition" of art, but also with philosophical (and, at times, theological) concepts.  What Siedell describes as "museum art" is inherently "insider."   It is "a profoundly historical practice with a developed tradition" (p. 23). Thus he cautions that "[v]iewing and understanding art, as much as practicing it, requires hard work and discipline" (p. 22).

One of the upshots of Siedell's account, I think, is to affirm this "elitism."  He explains how and why contemporary art assumes a familiarity with an ongoing philosophical conversation, and then grants absolution for that.  What contemporary art is doing, he emphasizes, requires and is enriched by this "background" conversation.  And that's OK!  Indeed, far from just being acceptable, it is something to be affirmed and celebrated.  If one is not willing to put in the work of becoming part of this conversation, then one forfeits the right to complain "I don't get it!" when making a touristic pilgrimmage to MoMA.  (The same principle should hold for the naive rantings of congressmen who love to grandstand about NEA project funding.)

I appreciate this framing of the issue precisely because Siedell is willing to take "the risk of being considered an elitist."  Indeed, his argument runs counter to the democratic populism of both pragmatic evangelicalism and American civil religion.  (It also runs counter to trends in my own Reformed tradition, where aestheticians like Wolterstorff and Seerveld often spend a lot of time making a case for valuing craft and are generally uncomfortable with an emphasis on "high" art--in fact, they're uncomfortable with the low/high distinction.  I've expressed some discomfort with this trend elsewhere.) 

You can see how this also helps us to appreciate just what's wrong with ArtPrize.  The (perhaps brutal) fact is that most of the people who will be "judging" these works of art through their votes lack an understanding of the tradition and background conversation of contemporary art.  As a result, the works of art that are most likely to win a majority vote will be, not surprisingly, "popular"--that is, easily accesible, "available," present-at-hand. 

But at the end of the day, Siedell's argument is not elitist.  Or we might see it as a kind of "democratization" of elitism.  While he risks "appearing" elitist by requiring that we pay the price for being rightly attuned to contemporary art, at the same time he's written a clear, accessible, inviting book trying to help non-specialists appreciate this state of affairs.  God in the Gallery is a kind of invitation to join the "elite"--which is not something that an exclusive elitist would ever do.  Siedell is inviting us to join the conversation.  And in doing so, I think he illustrates a vocation of the church to be an "enculturating" institution--making 'democratically' available, irrespective of class or wealth, the riches of the conversation that is contemporary art, to find there "anonymous icons" amidst the idols.