the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Hunger and Love - The Logic of "Late Capitalism" Unwinds into the Postmodern Apocalypse

By Carl Raschke

It’s another gray and misty morning here in the second district of Vienna.  The church bells toll to invite the sleepy-eyed revelers from the night before to churches that, except for Christmas tourists, will probably remain mostly empty. 

The second district is historically the Jewish district of Vienna, where Freud lived and hung out.  For some unfathomable reason Freud is in the air, virtually “everywhere”  these days.   His books are on sale, his named invoked regularly (even in newspaper ads), and he often serves as a self-identifier, as in the case of a student I know who met a girl at a Vienna dance club who in response to the standard, get-to-know-each-other  question “what do you do?” replied, “I’m a Freudian analyst, so what do you think now?” 

Perhaps the answer was simply intended as a well-practiced feint against any presumed,  male, predatory Anmarsch, as they say here.   But the “Freudian thing,” as his “Ur-postmodernist” French psychoanalyst descendant Jacques Lacan put it, may be more the temper of the times than we care to admit.   

In Civilization and its Discontents – a text that figures such as Derrida and Deleuze, for example, tend to cite – Freud sums up what might be called the “secular eschatological” implications of his lifelong work with the following quote from the German poet Schiller: “hunger and love serve as the gearworks of the world.” 

Freud was an infamous pessimist, and he certainly had nothing to "say" directly to Christian theology these days.  You can’t “take Freud to church” – really!   But Freud was definitely someone theologians should listen to, especially if you go prowling the streets of Vienna, or any European city, or any city at all for that matter, this late autumn.  You observe the growing numbers of beggars and prostitutes and every morning.  You see a new, more disturbing headline about the slow-motion economic meltdown of the EU, not to mention the ever louder warnings from economists about its apocalyptic implications for the world economy.   

Hunger and love!  Until 2008 the “gearworks” worked magnificently to generate an ever expanding global  consumer society that was supposed  to gradually alleviate all hungers by fulfilling every symbolizable and estimable desire.   Yes, we were worried about things like climate change, prompted by our using too much energy to produce too much “stuff”.   But that could be handled by both a new consensual system of intergovernmental policies and regulations and the adoption of new lifestyles that were “post-materialist,” even if they remained highly consumerist.   “Information” and “knowledge” leave no carbon footprint – allegedly.  Our increasing consumption and production of “significations” rather than material commodities -  i.e., Baudrillard’s distinction between the “hyperreal” and the real – would solve that problem, so we were told.    

It is the hyperreal that has done us in, however, I fear.   Although Baudrillard’s term converges with many familiar,  key philosophical terms used in postmodernist discourse, such as Lacan’s “symbolic order”  or Deleuze’s “difference machine,”  the force of its meaning remains symptomatic  of why the world order today appears to be inexorably and ever more painfully unwinding.    Baudrillard a generation ago playfully characterized the hyperreal as the order of “processing simulacra”, of self-generating significations in the form of commodity images, fantasies, political and social ideas, collective idealizations,  and so forth.  He argued that these idealizations take on a life of their own, and that we become increasingly unaware that they do not somehow rest on any tangible base stratum of things, a theme popularized in such movies as The Truman Show and The Matrix.   

But, more importantly, we do not recognize their generative and addictive power to guarantee what our senses assume is “really” real.  Hence, the expression “hyperreal”, which according to Baudrillard is “more real than real.”    The triumph of hyperreality in our time can thus be considered a reversal of the old order of repressed desires, which Freud diagnosed, in the sense that their purely virtual character now function as a whole new form of “repression” or unconsciously displaced meaning (the real force of Freud’s term Verdrängnis)  .   Just as our Victorian ancestors could not confront the fact that we are intimately bound up in material reality, we cannot confront our immateriality.   

Consider derivatives.   These so-called “special investment vehicles” (SIVs) proved to be the Achilles heel of the ever exploding global economy before 2008.   Although it was the collapse of the American real estate market that technically triggered the crisis, it was the so-called  derivatives that sent the worldwide jerry-rigged system into a downward spiral, which is still continuing.   As in mathematics, a “derivative” in finance is nothing more than a set of signifying linkages, the notational equivalent  of  “difference” in the relations between two or more functions. The word “spreads”, which one hears constantly right now with regard to the European debt  crisis, has a similar set of characteristics.  Without going into the technical details of what these words mean in investment parlance, we can say that the long-standing growth of “casino capitalism” was driven by a constant leveraging of the spreads, or differentials, in the mathematical algorithms that defined the new computerized global marketplace.  Much of what people actually invested in had nothing to do with commodities, real estate, the net worth of companies, and so on.  Investment increasingly was targeted toward “speculative” interrelationships between abstract calculative processes. 

This tendency to pursue an economy of pure sign functions is not some perverse immoral imperative foisted on us by the “one percent,” the “greedy multinational corporations,” or the faceless “speculators”, as garden variety anti-capitalist rhetoric routinely intones.    It follows the “logic of late capitalism” itself, as  Jameson referred to postmodernism as a whole in his book by the same title that appeared in 1991 (See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: The Logic of Late Capitalism, Verson, 1991) .  Jameson was in many ways prescient, although his work was considered largely  cranky and obscurantist at the time. 

Like Žižek, who rose to notoriety during the decade immediately after the book’s publication, Jameson did not see “postmodernism” as some new, emancipatory phase in the development of politics and culture.  He saw it as a form of worn-out modernism, at least in the cultural sphere.  In the economic  realm he regarded it as the final stage of the world-historical process Marx had analyzed in Capital.   The “crisis” Marx predicted, which actually did not come ironically until the early twenty-first century after communism itself had crashed and burned, would be a result, Jameson implied, not so much of the complete “immiseration” of the working class through capitalist expropriation of the value of their labor, but the transmogrification of labor itself into aesthetic trivialities and human consciousness itself into a whirl of  frivolous enjoyments (think mall shopping or cable television), the endless production of new commodified intensities propelled by insatiable sexual appetites (think contemporary art and internet porn),  the raising of compulsive triviality and narcissistic emptiness to the level of the pseudo-sublime (think Facebook).

Jameson wrote in 1991:  “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods.”  The “occupy” movement that has gained so much attention lately, like the Wall Street bankers themselves, therefore is  simply one more node in the vast global net of signifying differentia, as Ferdinand de Saussure, who along with Nietzsche birthed postmodern thinking, would have put it.  Saussure in many ways sketched out the theory of the hyperreal in his Course in General Linguistics given at the University of Geneva on the eve of World War I.   Jacques Lacan, who influenced a whole generation of French postmodern philosophers, put it into practice with his analysis of how what he called the “symbolic order” – the order of linguistic and conceptual sign interactions – not only dominates, but absorbs all our desires and imaginings.   

In postmodern culture the endless thirst for the “latest and newest” French thinker  - the proverbial haut couture splashy intellectual “fashion model” with the trendiest, most recent, most outrageous position, or proposition,  to come down the publishers’ runway – is but one manifestation of such developments.    In pop Christianity it is the rage for an ever sexier way of making Jesus seem cool and relevant.  Jesus, the historical singularity that fused the infinite Lord of time with the finite depravity of humanity, is now just an inexhaustibly mobile Lacanian “sliding signifier” in the global marketplace of commodified Christianities.

But let us return to Freud.   As the slow motion apocalypse of the global system of empty significations (i.e., “late capitalism”) gathers momentum, hunger returns.    Not only the hunger for food, but the hunger for significations that are not hyperrealities, that are not pure differentia.  A hunger for a meaningfulness that is truly transformative and “sustainable”.  Aha, say the salivating cyberevangelists, now let’s give them Jesus.  But Jesus himself condemned the Pharisees for offering hungry men snakes and stones.  We can no longer give hungry men and women Saussurian signs.   

Just as we all suffer from so many environmental disorders because of the pollution of our bodies with additives, industrial chemicals, and waste products that we can no longer even define, so we pollute our spirits with the subtle hyperrealities we have no idea are no longer real at all.  The love of God satisfies the hunger and environmental hysteria of the postmodern soul, but it is a love that does not come through the endless natterings of the “symbolic order,” let alone the political as well as the religious preachers of completely virtualized fantasies of a new heaven and earth, of a redemption that can be carried out through out through social media theater, through nothing but private and collective gestures, posturing,  or signifying inanities. 

The apocalypse that is at hand is the apocalypse of a real God who really loves us and really loves through the real love that we show in deeds rather than our gestures, our placing of our hearts along with our bodies in the space of those who desire love, who desire intimacy, closeness, and relationship.  The love of God is inseparable from the love of neighbor (and even more so the love of child, spouse, significant other). 

The second commandment is no Baudrillardian simulacrum.  The true parousia of Christ (“Behold, I am coming soon”) is not “deferred” Derridean avenir.   

Hunger and love.  The real is relational and the relational is real.   It is NOW!

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver.  He writes regularly on religion, Christianity, culture, and postmodernism.  He is the author of The Next Reformation (Baker Academic, 2004`) and GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).  His latest book Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event will be published by University of Virginia Press in 2012.

An Interview on Approaching Texts as Philosophical Improvisations

For those interested, I was interviewed recently by a colleague and fellow philosopher, J. Douglas Macready, who blogs at The Relative Absolute. In the interview, we discuss informally, what I have called in the past, an "improvisational" approach to texts.  You can access the interview here. The prelude to the interview reads:

"Every philosopher eventually stumbles upon the question of method. How should philosophical texts be approached, read, interpreted, and assimilated into one’s philosophical project? How should philosophical inquiry proceed? What are the sources of a genuine philosophical method? Conversely, is method even necessary, or does it impede philosophical reflection?

Recently, I have been thinking through these questions with my colleague Cynthia R. Nielsen, who blogs at Per Caritatem. We have been exploring the methodological potential of jazz improvisation. The possible relationship between jazz improvisation and philosophical methodology arose during a discussion of Nielsen’s dissertation and her forthcoming book titled Foucault and Self-Writing: On the Art of Living as Improvisation (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock 2012.) Nielsen, who is both a philosopher and a jazz guitarist, has been writing at the intersection of music and philosophy for some time (see her 'What Has Coltrane to Do With Mozart: The Dynamism and Built-in Flexibility of Music,' Expositions Vol 3 No 1 (August 2009): 57-71,) but recently jazz improvisation has begun to inform her approach to philosophical inquiry in a fresh and innovative way.

In the following interview, Nielsen explains her “improvisational approach” to philosophy, and sketches out the practical application of this approach, it benefits, and its limitations."

 

The Liturgical Turn: Worshiping Among The Chaos

Earlier this week, David Gelernter posted a really good article over at Big Questions Online that caught my attention. It did so because I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine, who works as an aerodynamicist for a major NASCAR team, that centered on the relationship of entropy to eschatology.  That is, if the world is subject to disorder and decay (Romans 8:20, yes I understand that there is much more to that verse) then what does that mean for the new creation? 

Anyway, Gelernter argues that “the rituals we perform teach [us] more than the Second Law [of Thermodynamics]: they teach us to defy the Second Law.” It does this by having a constant theme in the midst of a seemingly shapeless system.  That theme, in both Jewish and Christian liturgies, is separation.  He argues that separation defies nature by defying death.  Which I take, for him, is the great equilibrium toward which all chaos runs. 

It’s a really good post, but I’d like to go further by saying that worship / liturgy / ritual is much more than simply drawing a defiant line in the sand.  In worship we participate in the overcoming of chaos; the new creation in the making. 

 

The liturgical theologian Aidan Kavanagh argues that in worship we are regularly brought to the “edge of chaos” resulting in “deep change” in the lives of the participants.  These changes or “adjustments” are sometimes obvious and sometimes imperceptible, but the fact is that the worshiping community leaves differently than it was before.  Like the Spirit that brought form out of chaos, through baptism brings new life out of chaos, the Spirit brings a new creation through worship.  This is what happens when God “recreates the World not by making new things but by making all things new.”[1] In fact this is the task of the Church and what happens ultimately in liturgy.           

Kavanagh goes on to suggest that before modernity, cities used to be places of “transactions with ultimate reality.” They were places where ideas were formed and arts were made.  With the coming of secularization, the city became profaned and no longer seen in reference to the world.  The church, he suggests, offers a different view of humanity, the world, and the city.  Kavanagh suggests that the Church because of its liturgy is the “central workshop of the human City, a City which under grace has already begun to mutate by fits and starts into the City-of-God-in-the-making, the focal point of the world made new in Christ Jesus.”[2]  In other words, it is both the Church and the world that have been redeemed by Christ.  The church’s task is that of the reconciliation, which God did through Christ between Him and the created world. And more so, to be the embodiment in the world of the world to come, of the Kingdom, of the new and final age. What he calls the “church doing world” or enacting a “normal” world as opposed the abnormality of a chaotic world. I would argue that the normal world is not subject to chaos, (but I could be convinced otherwise).

In Political Worship, Oxford theologian, Bernd Wannenwetsch takes up this notion of the church offering a redeemed world through its liturgy. He suggests that through the liturgy we see a “double becoming of the world.”[3]. The first is the negative becoming, distinguishing the world in a post-lapsarian sense from a good creation, and recognizes itself as that which does not worship God.[4] The second, is a positive becoming of the world, which follows from the first and has real political significance.  Insofar as worship shows the world its sinfulness, it “simultaneously makes it possible for the world to find a different kind of self-understanding, a new identity.”[5]  This new understanding is that the world is bound to the church’s worship as that which produces it.  It causes the world to rightly order itself in order to make space for the church to be the church.  Without doing so the world ceases to be itself.  He notes that this does not cause the world to become the church, but allows it to become “the world which is no longer hostile to God and now reflects the Creator’s original will.”[6] 

There are differences between Kavanagh and Wannenwetsch.  The former wants to say that the ‘world’ that is done is the church’s worship, whereas the latter wants to talk about the ontological world and its reordering that “springs” from the worship. For my purposes, I think they both help us see a fuller picture of what is going on when a (specifically Christian) community worships. It witnesses and participates in the new creation which (among other things) overcomes chaos with goodness and order. 

I suppose it could be argued that order and chaos don’t necessary equal goodness and badness respectively.  But in response to Gelernter, if chaos is defied in liturgy, why not go further and show how it is overcome it?  Perhaps it comes down to the difference between a Jewish and Christian eschatology?

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[1] Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology, p. 50.

[2] Ibid., p. 42. 

[3] Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christians, trans. Margret Kohl (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2003), p. 247.

[4] Ibid., p. 248.

[5] Ibid., p. 249.

[6] Ibid.

Do we really get Romans? A little Badiou and Žižek can help.

It's been said that reformations and revolutions in Christianity begin with a re-reading of Romans.

That is certainly true of the Protestant Reformation with Luther's epoch-shaking insight into the meaning of the phrase "the righteousness of God."   

It is true as well of Barth's commentary The Epistle to the Romans, which in the words of a Catholic commentator "burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians."  Barth's leveraging of Paul's argument in Romans served, in the shocking aftermath and disillusionment of the First World War, to turn the scholarly, cozy, and complex arguments of 19th century Protestant thinkers on their head and usher in the relatively long era that we today know as Neo-Orthodoxy.

The long-tenured regime of Neo-Orthodoxy collapsed - quite quickly really - in the mid-to-late 1960s with the cultural revolution of that period, which coincided with the rise of both religious studies as an "alternative", at least in America, to the intellectual cartel of Barthianism and the Barth-based mainline Protestant establishment and the emergence of so-called "secular theology," which gradually morphed into a new establishment with its own signature and features.  Much of today's Christian postmodernism has this latter development as both its source and heritage, although it is also fair to say that its initial impulse in the form of applied Derrideanism was derived from the sense of a thoroughgoing "gappiness" in conventional liberal constructions of God along with the realization that there was room for postulating a "holiness" that could be glimpsed in all the holes of the not-so-monolithic text.  That is the genealogy of all "religion without religion."

Secular theologies, whether they be grounded in the grand narratives of 19th century bourgeois progressivism or the "apocalypse now" and "destruction of metaphysics" themes of the post-Sixties decades, are always the products of good economic times and social stability.  The varieties of "crisis" theology" - the original terminology for Neo-Orthodoxy - find fertile soil in political or economic anxiety and social upheaval.   All the current discussion of what may be coming "after postmodernism" may be setting the stage for the emergence of a 21st century crisis theology, though one completely and obviously unlike what reigned from the 1930 up to the 1960s.   

Besides Romans, crisis theologies - if that's really the word we want to use - always turn out to carry the genetics of a previous and hitherto marginalized philosophical movement.  Luther relied indirectly on nominalism for his critique of Thomism, indulgences, and Catholic sacramental theology.  Barth "discovered" Kierkegaard.  If a new crisis theology is in the making - most likely with its own re-appropriation of Romans - what might that be?  

The word "postmodern," as we have known for years, carries way too much freight if it is to be intelligible in a serious philosophical or theological setting.  The term itself was deployed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge during the mid-1980s to provide a label for the Zeitgeist of the time, although it has been applied a bit retroactively to the thought of the early Derrida and proleptically to much in the history of philosophy since then.  The feeling that "postmodernism" is now slowly fading from the picture may have more to do with a general weariness in the face of our recent past, not to mention a growing recognition that things have significantly changed in the past few years. One needs, however, to put aside the strife over labels and ask what is happening on the broader intellectual, philosophical, and theological levels.  

There has been a larger major trend since the late 1990s in Continental philosophy, especially on the French side, that has not yet gained traction in the American theological world which may be the key to the beginnings of a new "crisis theology."  The trend is closely associated with the prevalence of two special words nowadays in our postmodernist discourse - "singularity" and "event."  The nomenclature on the main can be traced back to the writings of Gilles Deleuze (though ultimately as far back as the middle and late Heidegger) But these words have become staples in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoy Žižek. 

Without delving extensively into the technical usage of these words in postmodern philosophy, we can make the general observation that they focus our attention on the productive power of certain nameable "phenomena" in our struggle to signify the unsignifiable. Events are "singular" incidences within our narratives and articulations of what we experience that have both broad-ranging origins and consequences, though we cannot "say exactly" what the event is "all about."   The singularity of the event both derives, and derives from,  chains, complexes, and assemblages of potentially meaningful, yet inherently indiscernible, moments of signification that run invisibly back into the past and forward into the future.  The event itself, however, is unnameable.  

Deleuze talked about the singularity of the event in terms of what he called the "virtual."  This kind of talk has deep affinities with the stock, but non-mathematical, language of theoretical physics - e.g., virtual particles, virtual states.  The event, however, is unnameable.  The visible phenomenon, which from Husserl through Heidegger to contemporary "phenomenological" theologians such as Nancy and Marion, can be named by philosophy.  But the event itself surpasses the horizon of everything that is even potentially nameable.   Just as "black holes" in physics are "singularities" with their own "event horizons" that point, without signifying, beyond the laws of nature, so events in the philosophical sense indicate, without naming, beyond the horizon of our syntax and linguistic iterability.

For Žižek the event can be associated with the irruption of the "real" in the endless, but futile, formation of the psychological subject.  For Badiou the event is always identifiable and locatable, yet not "explicable," within history.  It is a "singular truth" that cannot be achieved by philosophical discussion and controversy, yet arises as a surprising and fruitful breakage within the perceived "flow of events" to be seized by thought, which then makes it meaningful through the rigorous application of "truth procedures."

For most post-Sixties French intellectuals the genuine event - l'eventement as Badiou and others call it - was the sudden and fateful inbreaking of the student protests, worker strikes, and the crisis of the Gaullist state in 1968.  For America - at least in recent memory - it might be considered 9/11.  In one's own life, if we go with Žižek's take, the event can be a breakdown of all the cognitive and the "symbolic" routines of processing our experience in accordance with our own personal imago  that we suddenly name as a collapse or "failure" in the generation of a sense of selfhood.  From the Christian point of view the latter is close to the unexpected profound awareness of brokenness and the need of grace.  "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me."  And so forth.  The event is the moment of "crisis" and redemption that has ramifications far beyond its own horizon of nameability. 

But what does all the foregoing have to do with theology? Much of the appeal of the earlier version of crisis theology rested on its unabashed Biblicism as well as the implicit cry of "back to the Reformation," where shibboleths like sole fide and sola scriptura resonated strongly with the fast-growing, implicit critique of secular authority.  If we are living in a time of religion's return, we are also witnessing a rapid collapse of confidence, not just in America but throughout much of the Western world, in political and secular authority.  Some kind of "Biblicism" - because of the intrinsically iconoclastic register of the Biblical canon itself, which elevates the singularity of the ancient Judaic faith experience over the would-be universality of the Greek sophrosyne or the Latin ratio, the principle of measured and "enlightened" thought in keeping with harmonious living that supposedly is a mandate for all human beings.

The Pauline indictment of such "measured thought" is most concentrated in his dialectic of "wisdom" and "foolishness", or "vanity", that are found in Romans.  The same dialectic, of course, appears in l Corinthians.   "For though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking...Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles." (Rom. 1:21-23).  

This kind of dialectic is very familiar to theologians, but what remains unspoken is the implications of Paul's repeated use of variants on the Greek term mataioites (those things that are "futile" or "vain").  The Greek word commonly suggests idolatry, but it has the primary meaning of "lacking force" or "unproductive of sense".  In other words, Paul is contrasting the emptiness or fecklessness of Greek dianoia, or discursivity, which from Plato onward was supposed to lead under the direction of sophia (i.e., "wisdom") to the pure eidetic, or ideal, vision of universal truth.  The dianoia of philosophy, which yields a specious wisdom, results in what Nietzsche termed nihilism, the "twilight of the idols." "What does nihilism mean?  That the highest values devaluate themselves.  The aim is lacking; 'why' finds no answer." (Will to Power, 2).      

In contrast, Paul goes on throughout the rest of Romans to explicate the mystery of the Cross, the importance of what he calls the "obedience of faith" in the gospel that is "the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith (Rom. 1:16)," and the subtle and rather complicated of the relationship between the Jews, "entrusted with the oracles of God", and the role of Christ followers.  What makes Christians special?  It is not that they have a "knowledge"  of God (gnosis), which is reserved for the "Greeks", or a special relationship to God through the Torah, which is reserved for the Jews.  The "obedience of faith" specific to Christians consists in a complete re-orientation of our lives and the formation of our hopes around a once-and-for all event, the event for which the horizon is Christ death and resurrection.  This event can be discerned neither through sophrosyne, which leads to futility, nor as part of the (Jewish) awareness of one's own distinctive election in the economy of God's Heilsgeschichte, which leads to "boasting" and arrogance.  It can only be discerned through the "weakness" (astheneia) of both our philosophical and religious understanding that finds the Cross intelligible only as a pure singularity that remains otherwise impervious to the inferential capacity of our computative minds (dianoia).  "But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." (1 Cor. 1:23)

For the event Paul, of course, employs the term kairos to indicate this singular and infinitely productive event, which can never be named per se.  "For while we were still weak, at the right time (kata kairon) Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6).   The kairotic character of the event is only perceptible to the "weak", who experience overwhelming "power" while right-minded Greeks sense futility and conscientious Jews a total humiliation, which was the Roman aim in crucifying their victims.  A crucified messiah?  How absolutely insulting to the divine majesty!  Indeed, the Cross signifies not just abject failure, but absolute nihilism so far as Western "ontology" is concerned.  "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not (ta me onta), to reduce to nothing things that are."  On the face of it, what Paul is saying is the most shocking thing that the "onto-theological" version of Christianity can beard - God himself is the author of a strategic historical nihilism that is totally necessary to reveal the "power of the Gospel" in all its fullness and immensity.  

The fascination of today's would-be "atheistic" French philosophers like Žižek and Badiou with the singularity of the crucified Christ is not accidental.  So much of postmodern thought is not merely an "overcoming of metaphysics" and ontology, but a quest to penetrate to the singularity that is neither logical, ethical, nor ontological, but (as Heidegger would put it) the "origin" of the intelligibly determinative. Beginning with Heidegger himself, whom Derrida never really understood and who inaugurated the quest itself, we find a struggling to find some kind of "name" for this origin.  Heidegger calls it the "Being" that can "be" only by crossing it out.  Derrida names it khora, Deleuze the virtual, Badiou the event.  It is a quest for the name of the origin of the "universal."  As Badiou the  tells us, however, the event can be discerned, though not named, in the very "name" of Jesus - not the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of Christology qua onto-theology, but the event to which we give that name, and from which all names emanate.  "He is the name for what happens to us universally" (Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 60).  

A "crisis theology" would be concurrent with a new explication of the original sense of the Christ event. But postmodern thinking has already brought us to that crisis.

Hence, we need to re-read Romans. 

Carl Raschke

          

 

 

 

        

Response to "Some Provisional These" on Kingdom-World-Church

I want to continue the conversation (really just questioning) begun by James K.A. Smith between an ecclesiocentric view of mission and the "apocalyptic theology" of Halden, Kerr, and Siggelkow.  (James commented on the Preamble). Really, I'm not offering a defense of an ecclesiocentric understanding of mission, but offering critical questions springing from "Kingdom-World-Church: Some Provisional Theses." 

I usually won't demand too much rigor from a blog entry, and I don't want to be too critical, but not withstanding the 'provisional' nature espoused throughout, the authors seems to be desiring to start a new theological agenda that may "contribute to the task of theology" and have publishes these theses "for citation purposes" at The Other Journal, so I feel free to judge it by a somewhat stricter standard.

The text reproduced, and my comments/questions are in bold.

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    Thesis 1: The church is an event within the event of this world’s apocalyptic transfiguration. This is a midrash on Robert Jenson’s insight that “the church is neither a realization of the new age nor an item of the old age. She is precisely an event within the event of the new age’s advent” (Jenson, Systematic Theology, 2:171). The church is an apocalyptic event just to the extent that she lives from the Ascension and Pentecost, and so towards the second advent of Jesus Christ. Thus the church can never fail to see itself as inhabiting this apocalyptic space. Or rather, the church’s whole mode of being is “timed” by God’s own apocalyptic act of invading the world, transforming it, and redeeming it. As such the church, in every aspect of its life, abides at the intersection of the old age and the age to come. The church lives in saecula saeculorum precisely and only at this indissoluble interstice of God’s redemptive and life-giving invasion of the world of sin, suffering, and death.

How is this “event within the event” distinguished but related?  Or rather, how is the habitation of the apocalyptic space made possible, practiced?  Is there a habituation of inhabiting?  I certainly agree with the “abiding” nature of the church between the times, and that we “abide” in Christ, Christ in us, and we in the Spirit.

    Thesis 2: The church’s primary task is apostolic. The church exists as a function of Christ’s own singular apostolicity; that is, its existence is a matter of its participation in Christ as the “sent one” (Heb 3:1). “The church has no other existence than in actu Christi, that is, in actu Apostoli” (Hoekendijk). The church thereby exists to serve the ministerium Verbi incarnati (Barth)—the church’s share in the apostolicity of Christ consists in its being sent out by the power of the Spirit to proclaim the euangelion of Jesus Christ to the world. In this sense, the church’s “priority” with regards to the world is that of a distinctively apostolic precedence.

What of priest?  What of prophet?  What of king?  Certainly evangelicals all too often get caught up in the prophetic nature of the church (which is usually a Constantinian function), and Catholics self-consciously adopt a priestly function.  And of course there is the King and Christendom?  But just to ignore these images and opt for a different one (albeit, a missionally focused one in-line with the Johannine corpus) seems short sighted.

    Thesis 3: The euangelion of Jesus Christ, as Yoder puts it, is “not a religious or a personal term at all, but a secular one: ‘good news.’” (But what is the gospel then?  And to say "apocalyptic rectification" does little help.  Rectification from what?  And Yoder isn't totally correct on this for the gospel was declared by Isaiah well before Ceasar used it).  As heralds and witnesses to this gospel the church’s visibility is thus “not a cultic or ritual separation, but rather a nonconformed quality of (“secular”) involvement in the life of the world” (Yoder, Politics of Jesus, 39). The apostolic mission of the church is secular because God’s apocalyptic act in Jesus Christ abolishes religion. The proper starting point for Christian reflection lies not with the nostalgic lament that “once there was no secular” (Milbank), but in the genuinely liberative good news that in Christ “there is no longer religion.” From the standpoint of God’s apocalyptic act in Christ religion is “unbelief” (Barth). Religion is “the attempted replacement of the divine work by a human manufacture.”[4] The apocalyptic inbreaking of God in Christ does not affirm the “world-in-itself,” but rather ruptures and suspends the religious distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane” (and between “church” and “world,” as such). The new antinomy created in the coming of Christ is not between the “secular” and the “religious” but between apocalypse and religion. It is God who apocalyptically comes to the world in the sending of his Son and his Spirit to liberate the church, and indeed, the world, from enslavement to religion. And so Paul can confidently proclaim: “It was to bring us into the realm of freedom that Christ set us free” (Gal 5:1).[5]

This seems to use “secular” in a self-serving and equivocal manner.  What the secular means for an Augustinian like Milbank is very different from Martyn (I see his language all throughout) and his use of ‘religion’.  If religion is equated with sin, then yes, the gospel frees us from it.  But if religion is the pursuit of the good and transcendence, then such an antinomy is not so clear. 

    Thesis 4: Christian worship does not lie in a realm outside of religion. To seek a direct correspondence (Who seeks a direct correspondence?  Any liturgical theology would never make such a claim.) between leitourgia (“the work of the people”) and divine action is to forget that worship itself is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Calvin). Furthermore, such easy correspondence risks fetishizing and instrumentalizing worship. The problem is structural and runs deep; in truth, the very discipline of “ecclesiology” is prone to idolatrous self-aggrandizement. Thus the critique of religio strikes at the very heart of Christian worship.[6] The occasion for sin occurs preeminently as leitourgia—the “work of the people” to self-justify, to strive to stand aright before God. Indeed, worship is the site marking our deepest estrangement from God. But this is not the final word! In Jesus Christ, God decisively wills to be God-for-us and so our idolatrous “work” becomes the site of our reconciliation with God. Reconciliation occurs not as exchange or production, but as a gratuitous event of grace. In this event the Spirit “takes up” our “work” to stand aright before God and transforms and transfigures our prideful attempts to “make a name for ourselves.” Our worship only becomes true praise, then, as our “work” loses track of itself under the great pressure of God’s own doxa. Such doxa happens as the event of God’s grace evokes gratitude “like the voice an echo.” Indeed, “Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightening” (Barth, CD IV/1, 41).

 And the criticism regarding instrumentalizing worship needs to be substantiated.  Too often we fear capitalist production that we can’t think the relation of divine/human activity.  Worship, ecclesiology, and Christology all work together as arenas of human and divine action.  How does the event of grace interact with human attempts to worship?  The answer has classically been through the sacrament which unite the physical and the spiritual?  How does this ‘event’ happen for you all?

    Thesis 5: Dispersion, or diaspora, names “the truly ecumenical reality of the church in this world” (Stringfellow). The church’s first ecumenical reality is to exist as a priest among the nations. Here mission and ecumenics are shown to be inseparable. True Christian unity is inseparable from the realization of the koinonia of the whole world with God that Jesus Christ has actualized. It is for this reason that the church cannot itself be considered a “home” or as constitutive of an alternatively “habitable world” (Hauerwas), for the Christian vocation is to be in the world, without reserve—that is, in the one whole world whose true reality is to be reconciled to God in the one whole Christ. It is as such that the church realizes the truth of its “catholicity”—the fullness of koinonia in the apocalypsis Iesou Christou.

Again, as Jamie mentioned, “world” is ill defined here.  And who of the “ecclesiocentrists” claim the church as our home?  "God is our eternal home" (Isaac Watts).

    Thesis 6: It is as Lord of all humanity that Christ is rightly to be understood as Head of his body, the church. The true body of Christ (corpus verum) is thus in reality all of humanity crucified and resurrected with Christ, and so reconciled to God in him (Aquinas; Barth). The church in via is thus “but a part of the larger Body of Christ” (Nicholas Healy).[7] So the church “is” the body of Christ as precisely and paradoxically what it “is not,” in itself. And so to make use of the image of soma Christou for the church is not ontologically to prescribe what the church is, but rather to remind the church continually that precisely as such it is not an end in itself. 

This thesis looses the emphasis of Healy, who is pulling from Aquinas, that Christ is the Head of humanity in that his power for redeeming humanity is sufficient for all, but not currently effective in all.  That all of humanity is crucified in Christ is surely more a Hegelian universalist dogma in the way state above.  Why would Paul draw such attention in Gal. 2:20 to his being crucified in Christ if all humanity already was, regardless of faith?   This does not adequately engage with scriptural and/or sacramental understandings of the body of Christ.

    Thesis 7: Jesus Christ alone is constitutive of the church’s sacramental existence. (No sacramental theologian disagrees with this.)  And Christ is so constitutive as in his priestly office he himself is sacramentally given for the whole world’s transfiguration in the singular event of his cross and resurrection. (But what does that mean?  Is the whole world transfigured in the cross/resurrection?  But does the world know this?  And if not, how does it come to know it?)  The ultimate reality (res) of which the church is a sign and for which she is given, then, is nothing other than the mystery of the world reconciled to God in Christ. “Sacrament” is thereby the language by which the church is given to communicate that for which she exists, as also the praxis whereby the church is plunged into the heart of the world (I thought the sacraments plunged the Church into the paschal mystery, but now it is into the world?) and given to live for that reality—the coming kingdom of God—which she is not in-itself (McCabe). The sacraments are neither constitutive of an alternative social program—a polis, as such—nor are they constitutive of an alternative mode of production, or the expression of an alternative “technology of desire.” Rather, the sacraments are but ways by which Christ gives the church over to a dispossessed readiness for service (disponibilité) in the world.  (I don’t understand the antithesis here.  Why can’t an alternative technology of desire prepare one for a dispossessive readiness?)  As such, the language and practice of the church are sacramental to the extent that they are utterly dependent upon the active presence, by the Spirit, of Christ’s ongoing reconciling and transfiguring presence in the world, which must continually be received afresh by the church from the world (as from without), as both judgment upon and justification of its existence. To affirm the church’s sacramental existence as such is thus to affirm that “the Church would be lost if it had no counterpart in the world” (Barth). Or, to put it another way, the language of sacrament is but the difficult work of learning “all that is involved in refusing to say that the dominion of God over his world is manifested here but not there” (MacKinnon). 

I could be wrong, but would it have been easier to say, “The sacraments help the church to know that God is at work in the world,” or something like that.  But I think the sacraments lead us into the paschal mystery (cross/resurrection) so that we can live in Christ in the world.  Or rather, in the sacraments the church learns to see that Christ is near, and in this learned perception the church begins to see Christ everywhere.

    Thesis 8: At the heart of the church’s existence is the claim that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19). This world reconciled to God in Christ is the “new humanity” (I don’t think exegetically this stands.  The world does not equal the new humanity for Paul.  The new humanity are all those who have died/risen in Christ, who are heirs of Abraham, participate in the life of the new Adam, etc.)  for which the church is sacramentally given. Our baptism is baptism into this new humanity precisely insofar as it is a baptism into the reality of this world’s transfiguration. It is this transfigured world, moreover, that provides the context for the practice of the Lord’s Supper. The eucharist, then, is not the ritual means of “inhabiting the church,” but rather the way by which the church inhabits the whole world (oikoumene) in grace, joy, and hospitality. It is the whole world reconciled to God in Christ to which we are opened in communion. And so it is the sacrament of baptism, as entrance into this world, that carries with it the imperative of open communion—without conditions! “With the gospel goes an open door” (Hoekendijk).[8]

I’m not totally sure if Herr Hoekendijk is informing your discussion at this point, but are their more recent missiologists that we could pull from instead of book written in 1967?  What of Bosch, Newbigin, or Hirsch?  And I think the ecumenical discussion of sacraments, and the discipline of missiology have far advanced beyond these claims.  It feels like you know that someone (I for one) would make a stink about the sacraments so you pre-empted by categorically redefining them.  But no liturgical, sacramental, ecumenical theologian or missiologist that I know of

    Thesis 9: If the world reconciled to God in Christ is that for which the church exists, then the church is visible precisely at the point of such reconciliation—the church is visible as an event of this world’s apocalyptic transfiguration. This is a “very special visibility” indeed (Barth). For according to such visibility what one sees is a liberation of this world from the old age of sin and destruction and a liberation for participation in the new age inaugurated in Christ. The visibility of the church then occurs precisely in the reconciling and liberating event in which “we no longer regard one another from a human point of view” (2 Cor 5:16). The church is thus made to be a visible sign of reconciliation in the world precisely in the event of being conformed, given over by the Spirit, to God’s new creation brought about in Christ. But one only sees (yes, perception, epistemology, this is essential) this transfiguration and liberation of the world by believing the church—that is, by way of faith in the gospel of the kingdom which she proclaims for the whole world.

So does one have to be “in” the church (“believing the church”) to see the liberation of the world?  How is the different from the ecclesiocentric crowd?  But it seems like so much more than ‘emphasis’ is at stake.

    Thesis 10: As such, the church is visible not by way of its ritual or cultic separation from the world, but by way of is kenotic solidarity with the world. Such solidarity with the world happens as a matter of concrete kenotic, cruciform obedience to the way of its Lord in this world. To be in such solidarity with this world is to struggle with the oppressive and sinful powers of this world by being given over to a mode of living and suffering and dying with the victims of these powers that embodies and proclaims in its very living and suffering and dying a hope and a joy and a celebration that these powers can neither produce nor control. Sent out in the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ the church stands in concrete solidarity with the oppressed peoples of this world.

 

    Thesis 11: Such kenotic, cruciform solidarity in obedience to the way of the cross leaves no room for the church to be anything other than the “church of the poor.” The church’s kenotic solidarity with the world thus occurs as solidarity with the poor. As Jon Sobrino reminds us, “The mystery of the poor is prior to the ecclesial mission, and that mission is logically prior to an established church” (Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor, 21). Or as Moltmann puts it, “It is not the Church that ‘has’ a mission, but the reverse; Christ’s mission creates itself a Church. The mission should not be understood from the perspective of the Church, but the other way round.”(Moltmann, Church in the Power of the Spirit, 10). With the Catholic bishops at Medellin, the church must reaffirm and exercise the “preferential option for the poor.” This “preferential option” is not simply one of many tasks of the church—it lies at the center and heart of its mission. In fact, it is its mission, because this is Christ’s mission.

 

    Thesis 12: The “church of the poor” is in fact the one genuine “church for others” (Bonhoeffer), which lives, simply, by giving its property away. Such is the “ecclesieccentric” existence that the “Christeccentric” (R. Coles) relation of God’s kingdom to the World calls us to. It is precisely by way of such “ecclesi-eccentricity,” moreover, that the church happens as not only sign but also a foretaste of that new creation, that kingdom to come. If the way of God’s eternal life as revealed in Christ just is the way of an eternally outgoing, self-giving love, then it will have to be thus in the church. Only as the church throws its life away in love for the other, only as the church loses itself completely in the world for which God’s kingdom has come, might the church be given to happen as an event within the event of that world’s transfiguration. Only as such, in precisely this kind of solidarity with the world, might the church be given—in the event of this world’s transfiguration—to see and to taste that love by which alone she mysteriously lives, that love that shall reign forever when God will be all in all.

 

    Thesis 13: Existing as we do in the “crater” of God’s own singular action in Christ (Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 36), the church lives utterly by prayer. The incursion of God into the world of sin and death breaks open our failed history, liberating the world from its bondage to death. As such, the church, which lives as a sign of this event, awaiting its consummation in the Parousia, can only be ultimately understood as a communal event of lived prayer that is created by the Spirit who bears us in our weaknesses, “with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8: 26). God’s apocalyptic invasion of the world in the sending of Jesus and the Spirit does not create a stable, habitable place from which we as the church might grasp for ourselves a mode of intellectual or political coherence and control (Doesn’t Hauerwas always preach the gospel of “living out of control”?). Rather, this radical grace leaves us in the same place as the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58). And it is precisely in this being upended and unhanded that the church exists as prayer. “The true church is thus co-extensive with the community of true prayer” (Forsyth, Soul of Prayer, 54). As a people “timed” by the apocalypse of God in Jesus Christ, who live solely by the grace of the Spirit who conforms us to Christ, the church can embody its calling only by throwing itself in faith upon the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Thus we can finally only speak of the essence of the church in terms of lament, intercession, and doxology. To seek more than this is ultimately to seek another gospel altogether.

 

These theses are, quite clearly, only the rudiments of a beginning, the fragments of a hope that strains the bounds of theological articulation. The God with whom we have to do in Jesus is truly “exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we could ever ask or think” (Eph 3:20). These theses, such as they are, are here simply to be offered in the fullest sense of the word. Let anything in them that does not speak truly of the gospel of Christ perish and be forgotten forever. The three of us seek, in our discussion, prayer, and writing together to do nothing more than to become transparent to the liberating gospel of Christ, crucified and risen.

 

As such we hope that in the very doing of theology under the authority of the gospel that we may be given, by the Spirit to be conformed to Christ’s kenosis, his self-expending life given for us and for our salvation. We agree with the words of Donald MacKinnon: “To live as a Christian in the world today is necessarily to live an exposed life; it is to be stripped of the kind of security that tradition, whether ecclesiological or institutional, easily bestows.” It is precisely this exposed life, a life which, in prayer, desires nothing more than transparency to the way of Jesus Christ, that we seek. It is our desire to move forward in the task of theology in the service of the gospel precisely in this mode of kenosis, prayer, and weakness. With MacKinnon “we can only hope that because a false dream has yielded or begun to yield to a temper more deeply perceptive of the mystery of kenosis, we will be a little better prepared to recognize our frailty, and that it is in genuine weakness that our strength is made perfect: in genuine weakness, not the simulated powerlessness of the spiritual poseur” (MacKinnon, Stripping of the Altars, 34, 39).

 

And so we move on together, praying without ceasing that God will have his way with us in the task of theology in the service of the gospel. At the heart of our common work is the passionate conviction that, in Christ, God has truly brought about a new creation which exceeds and transcends all our attempts to control, regulate, and manage our lives through the various configurations of the power of death. We offer all of this, then, in the spirit of doxology. With Paul, we can only end in praise of the One who has set us free:

 

    O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen. (Rom 11:33–36)

 

[1] See John Flett, “Communion as Propaganda: Reinhard Hütter and the missionary witness of the ‘Church as Public,’” Scottish Journal of Theology 62 (2009) 457–76.

 

[2] On the apocalyptic nature of reality in Bohoeffer’s work, see Philip G. Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer—An Ethics of God’s Apocalypse?” Modern Theology 23/4 (2007) 579–94; see also Ry Owen Siggelkow, “The Lamb that Was Slain is Worthy to Receive Power: Christology, Apocalyptic, and Secularity in the Ecclesiologies of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder” (MA Thesis, St. Paul Seminary, University of St. Thomas, 2009).

 

[3] Ziegler, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” 585–87.

 

[4] Karl Barth, CD I/2 302.

 

[5] See especially J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1997), and “The Apocalyptic Gospel in Galatians,” Interpretation 54/3 (2000) 246–66.

 

[6] See Matthew Myer Boulton, God Against Religion: Rethinking Christian Theology through Worship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).

 

[7] See Nicholas Healy, “Practices and the New Ecclesiology: Misplaced Concreteness?,” International Journal of Systematic Theology, 5/3 (2003) 304.

 

[8] For more on the nature of the church’s life as being solely one of opened possibilities see Robert W. Jenson, Story and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel about Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 81–82.

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I don't really have much to add from the last several theses or conclusion.  But overall, I'm not sure who advocates for what you are against, and what you are advocating for seem ill thought out.  

25 Years of "Modern Theology"

If there was one journal that was a "go to" venue for the sorts of discussions encouraged by the "Church and Postmodern Culture" series, it would have to be Modern Theology (which Greg Jones describes as a "mis-named journal" since the conversations there have been largely concerned with a critique of modernity).  In particular, it has been a theological journal very hospitable to first-hand engagement with contemporary philosophy, particularly in the Continental tradition (Heythrop Journal also comes to mind in this respect).  And while some mistakenly see it as the organ of a particular "school" of thought, if one scans the contents from the past decade one will find an array of perspectives and traditions represented, including voices that are otherwise quite hostile to one another.  So relatively speaking, it's a "big tent" venture that is also focused on a particular 'region' of philosophy and theology.

So, many churchandpomo readers will find the latest issue of MT of interest: a 25-year retrospective (and prospective) evaluation of the project launched by Ken Surin in 1984.  It includes contributions from past and president editors (including a fascinating peek into its origins from Surin, who then offers some interesting comments on the state-of-the-field today); some usual brio from John Milbank (think what you will of Milbank, but don't pretend he's not erudite, and I still find him one of our most provocative theologians in the best sense of the word, even when I'm disagreeing with him); a call from Stanley Hauerwas to perhaps rethink who we're publishing for; and some don-like reflections from David Ford which close with his list of 10 (forthcoming) books he's looking forward to reading.

One of the virtues of this collection, it seems to me, is that it could be profitably read by non-specialists who are looking for a snapshot on where the field has been, and where it's going.  (Footnotes are minimal, and almost all the articles have an autobiographical element to them which makes them almost immediately accessible--though there may be 'names and faces,' so to speak, which are not familiar.)

Some light holiday reading I'd highly recommend.

Gadamer on Hermeneutical Experience

The following post is by Cynthia R. Nielsen. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Dallas and an adjunct professor of philosophy at Eastfield Community College. Cynthia blogs at percaritatem.com.

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According to Gadamer, experience, including hermeneutic experience, is a process which is essentially negative. By “negative,” he means that our expectations of what something is or means are regularly disappointed and disconfirmed. But if we begin with an expectation, a hope, then hope is always prior to experience and is its condition. As we move through our disappointments and struggle to understand—in light of our shattered expectations or dislodged assumptions and biases—the person or subject at hand, new expectations/hopes arise. Thus, hope both precedes and follows disappointment and disconfirmation. Experience, as Gadamer understands it, is characterized by alternating cycles of hope and disappointment, which is why it should be understood as a process rather than a staticized end.[1] Gadamer is not denying that our experience of history leads to (historical) knowledge. However, as Weinsheimer explains, “in his consideration of hermeneutic experience he is concerned to reverse the normal line of thought—that is, he conceives of knowledge in terms of experience and process rather than conceiving of experience in terms of knowledge and result” (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 202). The theory of induction is an example of experience conceived in terms of result or conceived teleologically. For example, I look for patterns in my experience that produce the same results. When I do X, Y results. From various similar experiences, I abstract a general concept that now applies to all such experiences. Thus, the need for further experiences of this kind is eliminated. Weinsheimer puts it nicely,

“Inductive experience is fulfilled in the knowledge of the concept—which, in both senses, is the end of experience. Thus, in the teleological view, experience finds its fulfillment in its extinction. The theory of induction implies that confirmation is the primary and most important aspect of experience. The process of experience is essentially an experience of repetition and the identity of experiences” (Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 202).

Instead of an exclusive focus on confirmation as the important element of experience, Gadamer highlights the disappointments and disconfirmations of experience (which is not to exclude the role of confirmation) in order to show how “the negativity of experience has a curiously productive meaning.”[2] Here Gadamer follows Hegel in affirming the dialectical character of experience. For Hegel, “experience has the structure of a reversal of consciousness,” and this reversal results in the emergence of a new object, as we come to see that our former understanding was either misguided or inadequate. This new object is not entirely new, however, because it “contains the truth about the old one” (Truth and Method, 354). Yet, both the original understanding and the object encountered change, which also means that we change. Up to this point, Gadamer agrees with Hegel’s account of experience. However, he rejects Hegel’s idea that “conscious experience should lead to a self-knowledge that no longer has anything other than or alien to itself” (Truth and Method, 355). For Hegel, the goal of experience is knowledge, and “his criterion of experience is self-knowledge. That is why the dialectic of experience must end in that overcoming of all experience which is attained in absolute knowledge—i.e., in the complete identity of consciousness and object” (Truth and Method, 355). As we’ve seen, for Gadamer experience does not find its consummation in something that overcomes or staticizes it; rather, experience is a process and the experienced person is not someone who already fully possesses knowledge or even knows more that others. He is

“someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them, is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself” (Truth and Method, 355).

Experience in this sense is tied to what it means to be a historical, finite being. It means having one’s expectations upset, overturned, unsettled. Gadamer is not expressing a pessimistic view of life; he is highlighting the fact that experience and growth by way of experience—so long as we maintain an attitude of openness—involves constant confrontations with our own assumptions and convictions. When confronted with new information about a person or event, or when we are able to genuinely “see” an issue or subject matter from a different perspective, we put ourselves at risk. Why? We allow questions to be put to us, questions that can expose our own (negative) biases and misguided assumptions. Putting ourselves at risk in this way means that we are open to exposure, open to considering what it means, for example, that we hold certain views about people group X. The realization that we have been operating under counterfeit assumptions, and the uprooting and relinquishing of our former beliefs that follows, is, though necessary, often unpleasant. If we are honest, it’s actually painful. Yet, if Gadamer is right, and experience (including hermeneutical experience) is characterized by repeating cycles of hope and disappointment, then hope is on the horizon and awaits a new “fusion.”

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[1] Weinsheimer, Joel C. Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 202.

[2] Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method, 2nd ed. trans. and rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. (New York: Continuum), 353.

A Note on Postmodernism, Noncontemporaneity, and Me

     This is my first post as one of several newly named contributors to the conversation being engaged in here at Church and Postmodern Culture. I am a relatively recent convert to Roman Catholicism. I was a Lutheran. I am a graduate student at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology (DSPT), a member of the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) located at Berkeley.[1] Prior to becoming a graduate student, I was a securities lawyer for twenty-five years. My undergraduate education is in international business. I obtained my undergraduate education in the late 60’s and early 70’s. I am a witness to the proceedings now commonly referred to as “the 60’s.” I lived them, more and less.

     According to Stanley Grenz, “[p]ostmodernism was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m.”[2] On this day, time, and place the Pruitt-Igoe government sponsored housing project representing the culmination of all the best ideas born of modernity was dynamited into rubble by the sponsors as unworkable. Grenz goes on to discuss the emergence of postmodernism as an historical, cultural, and philosophical epoch.

     Notwithstanding the views of Grenz and others, including some contributors to the conversation here at Church and Postmodern Culture, I am not yet convinced we are in a new historical, cultural, and philosophical epoch. Rather, I tend to think of the contemporary period as a “corrective.” The significance of the distinction, in my opinion, is that a new epoch is indicative of a paradigm shift, but a corrective involves only the redrawing of the boundaries of the established paradigm. I do not believe that notions born of modernity, or even the Enlightenment project, are dead and buried. In that regard, the general population may well be noncontemporaneous. There is no question, however, that there is an important and potentially productive conversation taking place that cannot be ignored and in which I am very interested and wish to participate.

     David Tracy in his book Plurality and Ambiguity states, “Conversation is a game with some hard rules: say only what you mean; say it as accurately as you can; listen to and respect what the other says, however different or other; be willing to correct or defend your opinions if challenged by the conversation partner; be willing to argue if necessary, to confront if demanded, to endure necessary conflict, to change your mind if the evidence suggests it.” [3] Conversation takes place within some relationship (respect, community, friendship) and has as its end a meeting of the minds. Consider, for example, the interaction between Job and God contained in the book of Job. God with Job are not engaged in a dialogue but a conversation—Job changes his mind.

     What, you may ask, can a Roman Catholic deep in the throes of obtaining a Dominican education possibly contribute to this new, emerging, developing conversation on church and postmodern culture? I suggest that the possible answer to the question lies in the notion of “productive noncontemporaneity,” as expressed by Johann Baptist Metz.[4]

     According to Metz, “[a] Christian religion worthy of the name… is in the highest degree and almost irritatingly noncontemporaneous.”[5] The “exclusively contemporaneous [human being]” who ignores the seeming anachronisms of religious noncontemporaneity narrowly and fortuitously abandons the irritation and the tensive, and perhaps tensile, nature of religion and at the same time the creative character of religion and its ability to provide the basis for ”a new individual that differs from the tiny unit of labor power, from the cunningly adaptive animal, from the smoothly functioning machine, or from the individual as a potentially criminal clog in a totalitarian grip?”[6] It seems to me that the contemporaneous debate over the justification of the use of extreme forms of torture such as water-boarding on “captives” is an excellent example of a situation where the use of noncontemporaneous religion might be inspirational and productive.

     In conclusion, I can be counted on to contribute to the contemporaneous conversation taking place here at Church and Postmodern Culture in a manner that is irritatingly, but hopefully productively, noncontemporaneous. On the other hand, I am particularly interested in and have written on the contemporaneous field of relational theology and the role of community and within community, friendship, as it relates to theology, and especially ecclesiology and ecumenism. It is in the spirit of friendship that I offer my remarks. I thank Dr. James K. A. Smith and Geoffrey Holsclaw for inviting me to be a contributor to the conversation. 

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[1] The views expressed herein are solely my own and not necessarily those of DSPT or GTU.

[2] Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), 11.

[3]  David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 19.

[4] Johann Metz, “Productive Noncontemporaneity,” in Observations on “The Spiritual Situation of the Age” ed. Jürgen Habermas, trans. Andrew Buchwalter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 169-177.

[5] Ibid., 169.          

[6] Ibid., 177. 

Postmodernism without the Angst? The “As” with the “Is”

I don’t tell it because I think it better or worse than others, but because I think it is much less often heard these days.  We frequently hear of how some version of postmodern philosophy or theology saved so and so’s faith, bringing it back from the of modernist despair.  Postmodern philosophy delivered certain believers from the angst of modern faith.  However, we don’t hear as often the tale of a postmodern conversion which doesn’t entail a movement from, or to, or beyond angst.  The stories told are many times those of a stormy sea crossing, with little hope and much consternation.  But my story is more of a calm journey from the propositional 'is' to the hermeneutical 'as'.

While it may seem rather odd, I had a rather smooth transition from apologetic theology to theological politics facilitated by postmodern philosophy, at least a postmodernism of a certain variety.  I grew up in a ministry family, not quite a pastor’s kid, but as my father was the consummate ‘teaching’ elder and my mom was the women’s ministry director, it was close.  In this environment I guess it was somewhat natural for me to find a calling into some form of church ministry at an early age.  But it was only when I got to college that I realized that I had a brain and might actually enjoy using it.  It was here that I really began investigating the intellectual side of faith.  And this is where things began to get interesting. 

You see, my understanding of the church as polis didn’t come from reading John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, or John Milbank.  Rather it came from a strange collision of the Christian apologetics of C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaffer and the linguistic philosophies of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Ricoeur (please contain your laughter).  My first two years of college I poured through Lewis and Schaffer and began exploring philosophy as a topic of study.  I loved apologetics, the defense of the faith, and everything pertaining to theology.  This was the first current.  But alongside it also flowed my college coursework in philosophy: existentialism, logic, Greek philosophy, empiricism and rationalism, and particularly Wittgenstein and Heidegger.  Now at that time I didn’t realize that Wittgenstein and Heidegger were the boogiemen of conservative theology.  I just loved what I was reading.  Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning as contained within the ‘use’ of a ‘form of life’ and Heidegger’s articulation of the ‘as’ structure of understanding were compelling to me.  And for whatever reason reading them didn’t produce a crisis of faith, but opened doors for a deeper expression and living of faith. 

Sometime just after I graduated college, before I went to seminary, everything began to fall into place.  Once the propositional ‘is’ of classical apologetics was replaced by the hermeneutical ‘as’ I realized that they only true gospel apologetic is the life of the Church.  Let me explain.  The propositional ‘is’ of apologetics is always situated within an hermeneutical ‘as’ which creates the horizon of meaning for the proposition.  God ‘is’ the first cause only when the universe is thought of or seen ‘as’ a mechanical process.  God ‘is’ the eternal creator only when the cosmos is seen ‘as’ a contingent creation.  God ‘is’ the forgiver of sinners only when one sees oneself ‘as’ a sinner.  The plausibility of the propositional ‘is’ is related to the existence of the ‘as’ structure already in place. 

So, for me, I began to realize that the propositional ‘is’ statements of Christian apologetics as well as the ‘is’ statements of typical evangelistic presentation really only functioned within the ‘as’ structure of Christendom, when it could be take for granted that everyone knew they were a sinner, that the world was created, etc.  But after the Enlightenment this ‘as’ structure of meaning was no longer as plausible as it used to be, and indeed, was in competition with multiple ‘as’ structures via pluralism.  So, via Wittgenstein I realized that only through the ‘form of life’ of the ecclesial community could the ‘as’ structure of Christian apologetics and evangelism be build up again.  And for this reason the life, or politics, of the Church is the primary apologetic of the faith and the primary mode of evangelism.

In my intellectual development, postmodern philosophy was like walking through the looking glass: everything was different while remaining the same.  And for this reason it was a postmodernism without angst.  Through Wittgenstein and Heidegger I received back propositional apologetics and evangelistic practices in a chastened form, resituated within the primary task of expressing a gospel ‘form of life’ which extends the plausibility of the ‘as’ structure of Christian faith.

This gradual realization is my story of a postmodernity without angst which bolstered and renewed my faith.  This was mostly worked out in me before seminary, before heated debates regarding postliberalism and deconstructive theology, before I read of the conservative backlash against the loss of propositional truth, and all that other stuff that the still goes on.  Anyhow, that’s roughly my story.  Are there others for whom a postmodern faith was not a storming sea, but more of gentle cross?