the church and postmodern culture: conversation

"Phenomenology and Eschatology": A Review

Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, eds., Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (Ashgate, 2009).

Reviewed by R. Alexander Tracy

Alex Tracy is the Associate Pastor at Wesley Monumental United Methodist Church in Savannah, Georgia.  He received both his B.A. in philosophy and his M.Div. from Emory University, and will receive his Ph.D. in Religion from Vanderbilt University in May.  His research focuses on the intersection between preaching, pneumatology, and eschatology.

 

The subtitle of this book is an interesting play that reflects a central ambiguity in its subject matter.  On the one hand, it can be read as saying that the “not yet” is already in the “now;” on the other, it may reflect the phenomenological lag that accompanies the shift from facticity to reflective thought and, therefore, be interpreted as saying that reflective thought has not “caught up” to the now.  Both of these interpretations make appearances in the essays contained in this volume.

The book is divided into four main sections, plus an appendix.  The first part, “Phenomenology of Eschatology,” contains essays by Jean-Yves Lacoste and Claude Romano that undertake phenomenological analysis of two main eschatological themes: “anticipation” and “awaiting,” respectively.  Lacoste explores the way in which the future shapes the present through expectation and hope, specifically the hope of presence (parousia).  While enjoyment can only accompany presence, he argues, through anticipation we can have enjoyment as an act of fidelity and hope even in the midst of only partial experience.  Romano meanwhile asks how one can balance the themes of anticipation, through which the future becomes present, and surprise.  He suggests that expectation does not give us the future as such, but only the future “…inasmuch as it is determined by what we might say of our expectation” (42).

Part two turns to “Phenomenological Eschatology;” that is, eschatological models that have been influenced by phenomenology.  Richard Kearney draws on sacramental theology and the work of Merleau-Ponty to locate “micro-eschatology” in the everyday world (56); the result is an a-theology of immanent transcendence grounded in radical embodiment.  Manoussakis brings together themes from Moltmann and Zizioulas to argue that standard “protological” models of temporality that build from cause to effect do not do justice to eschatology.  Against this constructive approach he places a model of receptivity in which the present is given by the future.  Finally, Douglas Knight examines the intersection of personhood and eschatology in the work of John Zizioulas, locating the center of human being in a freedom that is only available eschatologically through communion in Christ.

The third part turns to the influence of eschatology on phenomenology.  Ilias Papagiannopoulos exegetes Sophocles’ tragedies based on the story of Oedipus as a story of refusing a “call” from otherness.  Oedipus rejects otherness and seeks to impose his creative will on his situation with tragic results.  Eschatology, Papagiannopoulos argues, is “…nothing other than the gradual reception of alterity as the very meaning of experience and of being-created” (118).  Jeffrey Bloechl locates a kind of faith in Martin Heidegger, albeit of a thoroughly philosophical (rather than theological) nature.  The truth of Being that Heidegger seeks is only available on conditions that transcend human (mortal) existence.

Finally, part four examines the “historical confluences” between phenomenology and eschatology.  Judith Tonning explores the influence of Christian eschatology on Heidegger’s early work, especially in his reading of Schleiermacher and other Protestant theologians.  In these works, Heidegger located an open-ended expectation and waiting that mirrored his own existential questioning and lack of closure.  Both Jeffrey Hanson and Kevin Hart analyze the realized eschatology of Michel Henry in which “life” or self-affection is the truth of Being and hence the eschaton.  The eschaton is not related to the transcendent world, but rather to the self.  The appendix to the volume is a reprinting of Jean-Luc Marion’s “The Present and the Gift,” the concluding section to his work God Without Being.

Rather than attempt to critique each of these essays, or even simply highlight selections from them, in what follows I want to ask how well this volume accomplishes its stated goal of exploring the conjunction between phenomenology and eschatology (1).  In this regard, one cannot help but be struck by the vast territory that the volume covers: time, protention, the self, otherness, freedom, and historical influences on key phenomenologists, to name just a few categories.  The result is that readers will find nuggets scattered throughout that will prompt reflection and further exploration.  The number of such insights would be greatly increased if one did not come away from the volume as a whole with a sense of redundancy.  The two essays on Michel Henry, for example, though not identical, cover similar enough territory that one wonders whether some of that space might be better used in other ways.  Moreover, the terrain is littered with the technical and often convoluted language of contemporary phenomenology, which will make the search difficult for those who do not bring a prior familiarity with phenomenology to bear.

While the volume aims to bring together phenomenology and eschatology, the contributors are heavily weighted toward the philosophical end of the spectrum.  This  fact no doubt contributes to the tendency toward phenomenological jargon.  It also prevents the dialogue between these two concepts from being all that it could be.  The main theological work takes place in part two; much of the rest of the volume is written from the phenomenological point of view.  The historical convergences in part four run consistently in the direction of eschatology influencing phenomenologists.  Heidegger, Henry, and Merleau-Ponty take center stage throughout the essays and theologians such as John Zizioulas seem to be sidelined by comparison.

The most significant shortcoming of the collection is its failure to systematically engage the primary text of Christian eschatology: the Bible.  While there are references to specific biblical passages scattered throughout, these are subordinated to articulating the positions of later thinkers.  One will look in vain for exegesis of Paul or Jesus’ parables along the lines that you see, for instance, in some of Marion’s work.  This oversight has some unfortunate consequences.

First, the specific shape of Christian eschatology is lost and replaced by a generic interest in “the future,” “otherness,” etc.  As Jeffrey Bloechl points out in his contribution, the specificity of Christian eschatology is what distinguishes it from Heidegger’s thought, despite the latter’s eschatological overtones.  While Bloechl is not the only contributor who acknowledges the gulf between Christian eschatology and a phenomenological interest in “the future,” that difference is largely bracketed once acknowledged; a robust eschatology informed by Scripture is not allowed to interrogate phenomenology as deeply as it should. 

            Second, the lack of attentiveness to Scripture means that the ethical dimension of eschatology – so critical in Paul’s distinction between the new creation and the “present evil age” (Galatians 1:4) – is overlooked.  Emmanuel Levinas’ writings show that phenomenology and ethics are not mutually exclusive realms, but this avenue is not pursued in this collection.  The essays that come closest to addressing these questions are those by Manoussakis, Knight, and Papagiannopoulos, but greater attention to the ethical side of eschatology would be welcomed.

            Finally, the overriding theological leitmotif in this volume is the Incarnation.  Such an emphasis is understandable, given phenomenology’s concern with the question of appearance.  But one might argue that the Incarnation takes a secondary role to the Crucifixion and Resurrection in Christian eschatology.  This is particularly true, again, for Paul, whose proclamation is “Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).  An eschatological phenomenology grounded in the Cross and empty tomb would need to address a rather different set of phenomena, such as death and resurrection.

            Overall, this book does raise some interesting questions and might prompt worthwhile reflection; but in light of the shortcomings named above, its hefty price tag of $89.95 means that it is not likely to find its way beyond philosophers’ bookshelves into the studies of pastors and non-specialist theologians.

Review Symposium: "Paul's New Moment"

[We are offering three different reviews of this book--kind of a review symposium from different angles.  You can find the first review here.]

John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Brazos Press, 2010).

Reviewed by Nathan Barczi

Nathan Barczi is an economist and an elder at Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Cambridge, Mass., where he lives with his wife and two children.  He holds degrees from Stanford University and MIT, and is currently studying Systematic and Philosophical Theology at the University of Nottingham.


Although the essays in this volume locate themselves relative to the re-discovery of Paul by continental philosophy, the main ideas set forth by at least Milbank and Žižek have been promulgated in earlier work and in non-Pauline contexts.  A reader looking for a clear debate between Milbank and Žižek, as opposed to a loosely related collection of their work, would be better directed to their earlier engagement The Monstrosity of Christ, also edited by Creston Davis.  It is, nonetheless, a powerful and provocative collection of essays.  For the sake of space I restrict attention to those by Milbank and Žižek themselves, although Catherine Pickstock’s essay on liturgy is certainly intriguing.

In the opening essay to the volume, Milbank stands Paul, with and against Giorgio Agamben, against the dominant standards of law and contract as reactions to death.  At the foundations of a civilization for which law is basic, Milbank argues, stand an original violence, a Hobbesian condition which can be no more than smoothed over by modern governments and technocrats.  Against this, Milbank develops a Pauline politics founded on an ontology of peace, which takes resurrection rather than death as basic, and in which the latent violence of law is overcome by trust.  He sees in the modern political turn to theological idiom a cynical partnership of violence between conservative evangelicalism and liberal governments, driven by the need of the latter to legitimate transgressions of their own legal authority.  “Where legal authority once more assumes a manifestly armed guise, the danger that this guise will give it an anarchic appearance may render it necessary to look for legitimation in terms of an absolute transcendent personal authority.” (28)

In Žižek’s opening essay the interaction is primarily with Alain Badiou and the idea of the Truth Event, the unpredictable and underivable happening which renders legible the oppression of a given structure.  Though the Truth Event has the quality of a sheerly contingent irruption upon a state of affairs, it nevertheless transforms the world into one in which it is now the old state of affairs which seems incongruous – the ancien regime in the wake of the French Revolution, for instance.  From the perspective of the new world, the contingency of the event is obscured (here, Žižek’s reading of Badiou aligns well with Milbank’s criticism of Protestantism near the end of the book, that it assumes that the history we have is the only one that could have transpired).  For Badiou, Paul is the first theoretician of the Truth Event, offering the resurrection as the archetype underlying them all, signifying a break in the reigning order of things – the “law”.  Milbank’s final essay is likewise concerned with Badiou, and in particular with the way in which Paul’s Trinitarian theology and the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo most adequately satisfy Badiou’s Platonist preference for the transcendent, actual, and relational as ontologically basic.  Like Milbank, Žižek sees Paul conceiving of a cycle of mutually supporting sin, law, and suffering, and of the resurrection as a rejection of suffering as original or redemptive in itself.

But lest one get the idea that Milbank and Žižek are in basic agreement, Žižek’s second contribution covers ground developed more fully in Monstrosity, arguing that Christ’s cry of dereliction should be taken altogether literally:  God is abandoned of God; God loses his faith; God dies and, with him, any notion of the Lacanian “big Other” standing outside our world as a guarantee of the future.  In dying, God in Christ leaves the world over to us; Žižek argues that Christianity is most properly claimed as the grounds for a radically atheist community of believers.  In his final contribution, Žižek fleshes this out further, explaining what his brand of Christian atheism would motivate its adherents to do, living in what he characterizes as an apocalyptic age.

 “We live in a world of apocalyptic scenarios,” he writes, “all too imminent and easy to imagine.” (191)  What would it mean, Žižek asks, to live in such a world following a God who has disavowed belief in God, and who has handed it all over to us, the community of the spirit?  It means that ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for,’ as put by a Hopi proverb quoted by Žižek (and also, notably, by then-candidate Obama during the run-up to the 2008 presidential election).  It means not only that there is no big Other standing outside of us guaranteeing the future but, worse, in a reversal of the optimistic Marxist-Hegelian view of the process of history, it means that the big Other stands against us, proclaiming our doom and not our salvation.  “That,” according to Žižek, “is why theology is emerging again as a point of reference for radical politics:  the paradox is that it is emerging not in order to supply a divine big Other guaranteeing the final success of our endeavors but, on the contrary, as a token of our radical freedom with no big Other to rely on.”  It was once materialism that claimed to offer an escape to freedom from the hands of a capriciously predestinating God, but today, with the end of the material world inscribed in droughts, tsunamis, nuclear crises, wars and rumors of wars, Žižek locates our freedom to fight for the future in God abandoned of God. 

This is Žižek’s answer to the question with which Davis begins his introduction to the volume, whether in a world “coming apart at the seams… Can anyone, or any discipline, speak up?” (1)  It is an answer which turns Nietzsche’s aesthetic rejection of Christianity on its head:  for Žižek, God on the cross does not elevate the weak, but discloses the weakness of God, in light of which our strength must be made perfect if there is to be any future.  The disagreement between Milbank and Žižek is here at its starkest:  for Milbank, the resurrection is the vindication of precisely the kenotic weakness of trust and, indeed, of love.  These authors “speak up”, then, with radically different voices - one which recoils from weakness and one which embraces it, one driven by the threat of final disaster and the other drawn to the hope of final reconciliation.

Review of "Archives and the Event of God"

David Galston, Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2011).

Reviewed by J. Carl Gregg

The Rev. J. Carl Gregg is the pastor of Broadview Church in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, and a Doctor of Ministry candidate at San Francisco Theological Seminary. He is also a featured blogger at Patheos (http://www.patheos.com/community/carlgregg/).

Galston categorizes his work as “philosophical hermeneutics” (ix). As part of the acknowledgements, Galston expresses gratitude to Don Cupitt, and Cupitt’s influence on this book is evident in the many references to him in both the body of the text and the footnotes. In the Introduction, Galston begins with the question of “What Is Philosophical Theology?” Then he quickly proceeds to his specific interest of what Foucault has to teach the field of philosophical theology. However, his concern is not what Foucault did or did not say about religion (which was not much overall); instead, he explores what it might have looked like if Foucault had written about religion. To this end, Galston seeks to apply basic Foucauldian moves, especially from The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, to imagine what it might look like to think theologically “in a Foucauldian way” (11-12). He also names three scholars who have previously sought to “think with Foucault” regarding religion: James William Bernauer’s Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight (theological ethics), Marc P. Lalonde’s “Power/Knowledge and Liberation” (liberation theology), and Thomas R. Flynn’s numerous essays (theology) (13).

The first seven chapters are introductory and lay the groundwork for the later chapters. Thus, those already familiar with Foucault’s work may want to skip directly to chapter 8, where Galston’s most original and constructive work begins. In Chapter 8, “The Archive and Theology,” Galston begins in earnest to apply Foucault’s concept of “archive” to theology. In his words, he begins “philosophically ‘thinking’ the concept of God in the archivist way” (95). Foucault, as a post-structructuralist, holds that “language creates (rather than identifies) a hermeneutical structure.  Thus, to undertake the study of language historically, to enter its sense within a given discursive strata . . . is to encounter the epistemological creations of language. Foucault called such strata or epistemic layers of language ‘archives.’ He examined these archives through his unique projects of archaeology and genealogy” (7). Accordingly, Galston explores “Archaeological Theology” in Chapter 9 and “Genealogical Theology” in Chapter 10.  In summary, Galston writes of “two questions for consideration in the context of the philosophical study of theology.  One is the archaeology question about the epistemological condition of thinking theologically in the archive.  This can be called the question of displaying the archive.  The second question concerns the genealogical practice of being in the archive. This can be called the question of dwelling” (134). As a helpful referent for both archaeological and genealogical theology, he uses the umbrella term “archival theology” (111).

In Chapter 9, Galston also helpfully compares and contrasts his project with forerunners such as Feuerbach. Perhaps the most important difference is the shift to a thoroughgoing anti-essentialism, letting go of any correspondence theory of truth. Instead, in the spirit of post-structuralism, “The God concept is comprehended as a side effect of the linguistic event . . .” (113). Or as Galston later writes, “The question is not whether God exists but what function the God-form plays and how that form is involved in archive productivity” (125).

Since this review is part of the church and postmodern culture: conversation blog — and since the first volume of similarly-titled book series was James K. A. Smith’s Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, And Foucault to Church — I want to at least briefly address the implications of “taking Foucault to church” in light of Galston’s archival theology. To do so, I will turn to the final chapter, “Displaying and Dwelling in the Archive.”

First, Galston repeatedly defines his work in contrast to the “dominant apologetic tradition.” Therefore, one hope of archival theology is freedom from the defensive posture of apologetics. Second, Galston does not shy away from the nihilistic implications of his work; instead, he points us to the ways that archival theology can inspire -- in the midst of nihilism -- a freedom for “dwelling transgressively in the archive.” Third, realizing one’s role in production of the “God-form” can lead to a sense of personal responsibility. In contrast to apologetic theology, which can retreat into blaming prejudices (whether for slavery or against women or homosexuals) on the Bible or tradition, archival theology recognizes that the “side effects” of one’s theology are not inevitable, but are the social products of individuals and communities. To close with the intentionally and rightly open-ended final section of Galston’s concluding sentence, “[archival theology is] about taking the space liberated from apology and, in transgression, delivering that space to awareness that eludes the weight of resolution” (147).

A Review of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement

Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen, eds. After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-231-15233-4.

 

Reviewed by J. Aaron Simmons

J. Aaron Simmons is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Hendrix College (he will be joining the philosophy department at Furman University this summer). Specializing in continental philosophy of religion and political philosophy, Simmons is the author of God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn (Indiana UP, 2011), and co-editor of Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion (Indiana UP, 2008). 

 

Edited volumes are notoriously difficult to review.  Assuming that everything cannot be covered and some essays will be given lesser attention, the reviewer is presented with distinctive hermeneutic challenges as s/he attempts to give a coherent analysis of multiple authors all approaching a topic from slightly different perspectives.  We might say that edited volumes are, by definition, pluralistic in that they bring together multiple voices under some larger thematic unity, all the while trying to maintain the individual voices as distinct.  Edited volumes that are successful, then, tend to be the ones that best display and deploy pluralism as a governing norm.  As such, it might seem that a book attempting to think “after pluralism” could only succeed as an edited volume if it failed to exemplify the very thing it was trying to critically consider in its pages.  Impressively, however, After Pluralism (edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen) successfully weaves together scholarly voices representing different disciplines, methodologies, and backgrounds. 

In the introduction to the volume, Bender and Klassen explicitly articulate the aims of the book.  “Our goal,” they write, “is to examine the grounds on which religious difference is itself constructed as a problem that has pluralism as its solution” (2).  The rationale for such an examination is that “the doctrines and programs of pluralism that dominate contemporary academic and public conversations do not constitute a theory of understanding religious interactions as they take place in the world” (12).  Not wanting further to perpetuate what they take to be a problematic trend, the editors add a decidedly constructive and interdisciplinary supplement to their stated goal: “This volume’s goal is to set the normative, prescriptive foundations of projects of pluralism in comparative perspective, by presenting multiple empirical studies, historical reflections, and theoretical reassessments” (12).  Despite attempting to maintain existential traction in the concrete realities of religious communities, this book is not theoretically naïve.  Frequently operating in critical conversation with such scholars as William Connolly, Charles Taylor, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, all of the contributors in one way or another stress the importance of appreciating the historical and hermeneutical factors that have given rise to pluralism as a contemporary phenomenon and social norm.  Accordingly, one of the theses of the book as a whole is that “pluralism . . . must be understood as emerging in specific contexts and places, as a discourse of the future that cannot escape the past” (11).  A shared appreciation of this complicated history, however, does not yield a monolithic account of how to understand what comes “after pluralism.”       

The book unfolds in three parts, each of which contains four essays and is organized around a slightly different issue.  Part one is entitled “Law, Normativity, and the Constitution of Religion,” and is likely to be the part of the book of most interest to philosophers and political theorists.  Part two is entitled “Performing Religion After Pluralism,” and is likely to be of interest to sociologists.  Part three is entitled “The Ghosts of Pluralism: Unintended Consequences of Institutional and Legal Constructions,” and is likely to be of most interest to historians of religion.  In general, we might characterize the three parts as mainly concerned with theory, identity, and practice, respectively.  In all three parts, the central idea is considered from a range of perspectives.  For example, the discussions of identity in part two deal with American Judaism, Native American religiosity, Islamic approaches to psychology, and the construction of Judeo-Christianity as a pluralist social reality.  Similarly, the considerations of religious practice in part three address Native American religious freedom, social justice and human rights in light of the response to Darfur genocide, Polish “monoculturalism,” and the prominence of religion in East German prisons. 

Before considering part one, let me briefly make a case for the importance of philosophical engagements with the latter parts of the book.  First, given the speculative abstraction to which philosophers are often susceptible, the careful historical, empirical, and sociological work of parts two and three can offer an important reminder that religious belief is not only a matter of logical precision and rational consistency, but also (and I would even say, for the most part) a matter of contextual, and contested, social existence in shared traditions.  Second, although few would deny the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to big problems, when philosophers of religion start searching around for interlocutors from other disciplines, some disciplines seem to be more commonly engaged than others.  The essays in parts two and three offer opportunities for philosophers or religion to consider how their own discourses might be enriched by developing constructive conversations with scholars working in departments of literature, history, and sociology.  For example, Amira Mittermaier’s chapter entitled “A Matter of Interpretation: Dreams, Islam, and Psychology in Egypt” offers important sociological support to philosophers (like myself) who are sympathetic to the notion of an “agonistic democracy” such as that articulated in the political philosophy of Chantal Mouffe.  Additionally, Tracy Leavelle’s chapter “The Perils of Pluralism: Colonization and Decolonization in American Indian Religious History,” can be read as an empirical supplement to the critics of the privatization of religious belief from social discourse.  Though many have argued that the bracketing of “comprehensive doctrines” from the public square leads to unjust exclusion and not merely stability amidst “reasonable pluralism,” Leavelle offers strong support for the specific claim that in its attempt at equality before the law, political liberalism can make some religions invisible if they don’t neatly fit into a preconceived definition. 

Although some of the chapters in the latter parts of the book leave the theoretical implications of their sociological inquiries underdeveloped (for example, the chapters by Michael D. McNally, J. Terry Todd, and Rosemary R. Hicks), they open spaces for further work in such areas.  Indeed, perhaps one of the most important questions with which I found myself left after reading this collection is “How should sociological data influence my work as a philosopher?”  In light of the recent proliferation of senior scholars claiming that disciplinary boundaries (and even tenure) should be abandoned in the emerging global academy, this question is one that has high stakes indeed. 

Since the first part of After Pluralism will be of most interest to, and obvious use for, philosophers, I will give a bit more detailed attention to the contents of that section.  In an essay entitled “Ethics After Pluralism,” Janet R. Jakobsen argues that pluralism faces an ethical problem insofar as it fails to “fulfill” the “promise of democracy” (33).  In response to this problem, Jakobsen proposes that queer ethics provides a helpful supplement/corrective to “liberal modernity” (46).  In chapter two, which is entitled “Pluralizing Religion: Islamic Law and the Anxiety of Reasoned Deliberation,” Anver M. Emon offers a careful historical analysis of the distinction between hard and soft naturalism in premodern Islamic jurisprudence and theology.  His goal is to propose an alternative to the “liberal” notion that “religion is something that inheres in people rather than an area for reasoned deliberation” (60).  Demonstrating that “similar essentializing tendencies with regard to the Other” can be found in both the liberal secularist approach to the rule of law and also in an Islamic legal framework, Emon advocates the importance of reasoned deliberation without the assumption of “objective assumptions about nature and knowledge” (76). 

Chapter three is by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and is entitled “Religion Naturalized: The New Establishment.”  Taking her impetus from the fact that “separationist ideology no longer has the purchase it once did in the United States,” Sullivan proposes that there is something very deep at work: “a shift in religious anthropology” (84).  “Religion,” she claims, “is being naturalized” and, as such, “it is becoming an accepted part of the domain of government” (85).  Through a close reading of two court cases, Sullivan provides evidence of the way in which the Supreme Court has attempted to “get itself out of the business of deciding what religion is” (95).  The upshot is that the delimitation of what counts as legitimate religious belief and practice in the public square is no longer a matter for the courts, but has instead become a matter for individuals working in arenas that depend upon such delimitation and, subsequently, for the political process that eventually approves or rejects the decisions of these individuals. 

In chapter four, entitled “The Cultural Limits of Legal Tolerance,” Benjamin L. Berger focuses on Canadian law in order to argue that “the lens of legal multiculturalism” obscures the fact that the relationship of religion and law is one of a “cross-cultural encounter” (100).  The problem is that this encounter is not one where both parties are able to approach each other on their own terms.  Rather, “when religious groups find themselves before the bar of the law, the terms of the debate are, in important ways, always already settled” (100).  Accordingly, the very norms to which we appeal in the attempt to carve out spaces for difference (e.g., “pluralism, tolerance, and accommodation”) can, Berger explains, end up being “experienced as a language of power, coercion, and enforced transformation” (100).  Drawing on and critically engaging a wide range of political theorists (including Fred Dallmayr, Bernard Williams, Will Kymlicka, Ayelet Shachar, and William Connolly), Berger offers a detailed critique of legal multiculturalism.  He calls for going beyond the three options of assimilation, conversion, and dialogical encounter and, instead, encourages a more robust conception of what might be termed legal humility and fallibilism (118).  In the terms of the contemporary debate, tolerance masks intolerance and so something more is needed.  This something more will “have to differ fundamentally in its basic assumptions and self-understanding from that which we currently possess” (120-21). 

Although the essays by Sullivan and Berger are the ones that I consider to be the most philosophically fecund and do the most work in moving the contemporary debates about pluralism forward, the entire volume contributes admirably to an important area of emerging scholarly concern.  After Pluralism ultimately succeeds not because it answers all the hard questions, but because it helps us to see why the questions are so hard.   

CFP: Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology, 2012 Conference

Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology 2012 Conference:

Creation, Creatureliness, and Creativity: The Human Place in the Natural World

April 20-22, 2012 | Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

Keynote Speakers:

Bruce Foltz (Eckerd College)
Janet Martin Soskice (Cambridge University)
Norman Wirzba (Duke Divinity School)

CALL FOR PAPERS

SCPT's 2012 conference takes today’s ecological crises as its point of departure. We invite theological and philosophical contributions informed by continental traditions such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, eco-feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonial studies, deconstruction, and social and deep ecology that help us understand and implement a sustainable future together. Authors may submit papers that address ecological issues head on, as well as those that tackle philosophical and theological themes that underlie these issues.

Only complete papers with a maximum of 3,000 words will be accepted. Papers should be prepared for blind review and sent to bruce.ellis.benson@wheaton.edu.

DEADLINE: JANUARY 15, 2012

The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit http://www.scptonline.org.

The Paradox of Love: A Mini-review of "Paul's New Moment"

John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Brazos Press, 2010).

Reviewed by Maxwell Kennel

Maxwell Kennel is a student in Philosophy and Rhetoric & Professional Writing at the University of Waterloo Ontario, Canada. His research interests include the continental philosophy of religion, speculative realism, deconstruction-and-religion, and critical theory. He is beginning is second term covering a pastoral sabbatical leave at Steinmann Mennonite Church, and can be found at http://maxwellkennel.wordpress.com/.

 

There is one particular paragraph that I would like to draw out of Paul’s New Moment which I believe contributes greatly to the book being worthy of its title. Not far into the essay entitled “Paul and Subtraction” Creston Davis writes briefly on the topic of love:

In this way, love is better understood as taking the ultimate risk as paradox: in death there is life, in life there is death. Love then is that stance that arises in the most unlikely of places, namely, in the very grip of death. But, of course, this basic approach to love cannot be comprehended directly, as if its very disclosure violently empties out its core content without reservation: neither propositions (universal axioms and other bare-bones “truths”) nor any subgroup of people can capture the truth of love. Love does not, if you will, display its heart on its sleeve; rather, love is like the unconscious, which operates on a deeper, more indirect level that takes time, patience, and a relationship to know it; and yet its appearance is never predictable (104).

This exposition on love, specifically in its being paradoxical, is deserving of a generous reading. To begin with, we can see that a loose paradoxical treatment of love is also present in the contributions of both John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek. In his essay “Paul Against Biopoloitics” John Milbank addresses the problematic ‘doubling of the religious’ (in the worship of commodities by capitalism in both the economic and political spheres) and its mitigation in Paul’s writings by a paradoxical overcoming and cancellation of the dichotomies between law and life, and life and death. Milbank writes of a Neo-Weberian moment in which capitalism takes a turn for the religious in its “worship of the spectacle of idealized qualities”. While reading Agamben and Foucault against Saint Paul, Milbank suggests an overcoming of death by life through the overcoming of the law by trust, a point which I take to be compatible with Davis’ chiasmus between life and death. In Davis’ view, life overcomes death through love (which is as hidden as the unconscious), and in the same way Milbank suggests that in order to be loving disciples of Christ we must trust in others despite the fact that trust shows itself to be weaker than the law.

Along these paradoxical lines, Žižek appears to provide a theological counterweight to his often irreverent Stalinist/Leninist attitudes in his contribution entitled “A Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross”. In his essay Žižek criticizes the treatment of the idea of evil as a blemish or stain that is somehow necessary in the greater context of a harmonious universe. He states instead that through kenosis God rejected any human temptation to find transcendent meaning, not only in incommensurable events such as the holocaust, but in reality itself. Near the end of his meditation Žižek rejects any construal of theology as secular humanism, and explains that for him “there must be a moment of thinking that it is not we who are acting, but a higher force that is acting through us”. Žižek explains this idea in his usual way, through popular culture, in this case referring to the standard horror movie scene where the parasitic alien, previously thought to be dead, ominously reconstitutes itself. This image of Žižek’s ‘divine element’ constitutes, for him, negative theology and the apophatic view. Taken further, this Žižekian view of the divine is found in Paul’s new moment as it is embodied in the Church which acts like the alien parasite that is resurrected after its supposed death.

The view of love-as-paradox is also evident in the greater venture of continental philosophy and its connection with Christian Theology. One example among many can be seen in the relationship between John D. Caputo and Jacques Derrida, which serves as testament to the paradox of love in both content and form. Where content is concerned, Caputo points to Derrida’s view of love as arising in the paradoxical relationship between possibility and impossibility. In What Would Jesus Deconstruct? Caputo quotes Derrida’s On the Name, where Derrida states that, among other things, love means surrendering to the impossible.[i] Where form is concerned, the very fact that Derrida the continental philosopher is being read in such a profound way by Caputo the Christian theologian, means that there is a relationship between the two disciplines that manages to overcome the tension that exists between them. Furthermore, and in closing, if we are to return to the treatment of love as being inherently paradoxical (by Davis, Milbank, and Žižek), we will find that this aspect of the sublime nature of love lends itself well to any interdisciplinary dialogue.

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[i] John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2007), 80.

Beyond Evangelicalism: A Review

Steven Knowles, Beyond Evangelicalism: The Theological Methodology of Stanley J. Grenz (Ashgate, 2010).

Reviewed by Jonathan Heaps

Jonathan Heaps has an MA in Philosophy from Boston College and lives in a small intentional Christian community in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

It is a peculiarity worth noting that Stephen Knowles’ overview and critique of Stanley Grenz’ later theological methodology contains little in the way of, well, methodology. Which is to say, it lacks much specific talk about method. In its place, Beyond Evangelicalism offers extended analysis and criticism of the philosophical concepts and presuppositions at work in contemporary Evangelical theology. I have to say, Knowles handles this unruly gang of philosophies and theologies with aplomb. He has gone to the admirable effort of mapping the conceptual terrain in which evangelical theology finds itself and narrating the genealogy of Grenz’ particular approach to that terrain. He also offers some even handed middle paths between what he feels are needlessly entrenched conservatives and overly enthusiastic post-modern apologists. I commend (and recommend) Beyond Evangelicalism heartily on this score. However, I would like to hold a magnifying glass up to how Knowles offers a good deal of discussion on what Grenz and others think about what theologians think about, but scant examination of how theologians think about what they think about, Grenz included. 

There’s a real issue here, beyond any failure to live up to the sub-title and despite my own anxiety about peevish nit picking. The philosophical assumptions a thinker employs about the objects of his or her inquiring and theorizing undoubtedly affect the manner in which he or she go about inquiring and theorizing. They are not, however, identical with the method used to inquire and theorize. For example, Knowles makes much of Grenz’ attempts to develop an evangelical theology that is not dependent on correspondence theory and realism. Neither truth-as-correspondence nor realism are methods or methodologies. They are conceptual commitments about the ontological status of knowing and known, respectively. Knowles has much to say about Grenz’ concepts about concepts, but fails to provide insight into how Grenz develops the concepts he does from theology’s sources and their philosophical periphery.  

To only focus on methodological presuppositions and ignore methodological activity opens one up to the very postmodern, anti-metaphysical arguments that evangelicals are trying to stave off. If the only admissible grounding of Grenz’ theology, in Knowles’ estimation, is a proper conceptual apparatus, then Knowles is enacting or performing his own foundationalism for the reader. Thus, only concepts will be examined in the argument and those that are not foundationalist will be a priori unacceptable according to the implied first principles of Knowles method.

 For example, one comes to realize that the title, Beyond Evangelicalism, is for Knowles an indictment of Grenz’ pre-theological commitments. Knowles holds Grenz’ work to the criterion of whether or not his conceptual foundations would be acceptable to the Evangelical community of theologians. When Grenz attempts to move away from Enlightenment over-dependence on classical foundationalism, Knowles argues for a diplomatic adoption of soft-foundationalism, not necessarily because it’s a superior philosophy of knowledge, but because Evangelicals won’t accept an anti-realist understanding of Christian doctrine. Those first principles, the astute postmodern reader will be quick to point out, are rather blatantly not self-evidently objective. They are, instead, the products of the socially constructed standards of a community of discourse; namely, evangelicalism. Knowles’ very articulation of what counts as “true methodology” is not grounded in a correspondence to an objectively best method.

 Though his protestations against the abandonment of correspondence and foundationalist commitments in Grenz reveal an inconsistency with his own methodology, Knowles’ admiration of Alasdair MacIntyre’s communitarian epistemology helps to smooth things out some. Toward the end of Beyond Evangelicalism, Knowles suggests alternatives for an evangelical theology that takes postmodern developments seriously. There, he takes the time to praise Alastair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, quoting at some length about the constitutive role of tradition and community in any and every form of inquiry. For MacIntyre, all arguments begin “in and from conditions of pure historical contingency,” namely a given community that confers authority “upon certain texts and certain voices.”#  Knowles applauds MacIntyre for granting this contingency while maintaining that real development can occur through further discourse in (and even between) these communities of inquiry. Indeed, it is the authenticity of these communities’ shared practice and discourse that grounds the arguments themselves, such that “to justify is to narrate how the argument has gone so far.”# In this light, Knowles’ criteria for Grenz’ philosophical foundations amounts to throwing his hat in a particular community-argument and holding Grenz to the standard of how the conversation has gone so far.  Insofar as Grenz identified himself as an Evangelical theologian, this seems perfectly methodologically consistent. 

That methodological consistency, however, still doesn’t retrieve for Knowles even a chastened objectivism.  Instead, this method of community practice and discourse (which likely has a much smaller ax to grind with Grenz’ Holy Spirit grounded knowing-in-community) resembles the Gadamerian hermeneutics articulated for church folk in Merold Westphal’s Whose Community? Which Interpretation?. That approach, however, demands fidelity not to a set of presuppositions (though it takes the role of presuppositions seriously), but to the ongoing activity of conversation.  It is for this reason I’ve insisted on a more precise meaning of “methodology.” The authenticity of our theologies is found more in how we proceed than from where we begin. This activity, however, is not a method in the sense of a set of rules guaranteeing objectivity. However, it is a method the same way “method acting” is a method: an open structure for utilizing one’s history in a fresh moment to perform/interpret/understand truthfully. Objectivism, no matter how humble, is for us no longer.