Against the Stream

Recent Interviews

 

I've recently been interviewed on a couple of podcasts, and I thought it would be worthwhile to bring them to your attention.

First, there's my two-part interview at Homebrewed Christianity:

Part One

Part Two

Then there's my interview on 12Enough with Jonathan Malone.

Queen of the Sciences!

Happy listening!

The Barth That Failed

Matthew Rose's article in First Things on Karl Barth has been getting a bit of attention among the internet's theobloggers, and reading it, it's easy to understand why.  While damning him with faint praise, he opens by claiming that Barth's theology, which continues to demand the attention of Protestant (and many Catholic) theologians throughout the world a half century after his death, his a "dead letter." Rose makes a fairly sweeping argument that  Barth, in attempting to rescue Protestant theology from liberalism, ultimately failed to free himself and his theological project from the shackles of modernity. Quoth Rose:

By rejecting the speculative power of the intellect, Barth was drawn into making two mistakes. First, he turned his back on the metaphysics of classical theology, rendering almost unintelligible the conceptual idiom of the doctors and creeds of the Church. Barth did not hide this, and he worked hard to square his dogmatics with Christian tradition, replacing appeals to nature and causality with appeals to history and narrative, but the result was that he could not properly and consistently distinguish God’s nature from his actions in the history of salvation.

Barth’s second and deeper mistake was to sever the mind’s speculative relation to God. He dissolved the classical synthesis of faith and reason, collapsing all theological understanding into an exercise of faith. Unable to appeal to truth besides Jesus Christ, Barth was powerless to explain how truth could be known and communicated without supernatural assistance. He was even pressed to invoke divine revelation as proof of the existence of the external world, a sign something had gone very wrong.

His basic error is evident in his rejection of natural theology, which holds that careful observation of contingent beings can disclose the necessary being of God. This argument comes in several permutations, most of which are sketched by Thomas Aquinas, but its success in demonstrating God’s existence was arguably a secondary concern. The primary purpose of traditional natural theology was to show the indissoluble connection between the human intellect and a transcendent God who is Being itself.

Thus, Rose argues, Barth's fatal mistake was in doing theology in response to and in the context of modern philosophy, rather than retreat to an earlier form of theological speculation, Rose's "classical theology."

What Rose fails to note, as several of the commentators on his article point out, is that modernity itself was a response to the failure of that classical theological tradition to answer many of the perplexing epistemological and metaphysical problems that haunted theology throughout the middle ages. Descartes did not write his Meditations because he was looking for something to do on a slow day, but because he was attempting to answer the epistemological problem of how one arrives at certain knowledge in the face of the fact that our senses often deceive us. Rose writes as though that problem can be safely ignored simply by invoking the name Aquinas, but it can't.

What's more, as some of the commentators have noted, the assumption of modernity in Barth's theology is itself rooted in the reality that Barth is a protestant theologian. Modernity itself is a product of Protestantism, and, as David Congdon argues, can be seen as more faithful to the heart of Christian teaching than the kind of speculism that Rose endorses:

Here is my thesis: Barth’s rejection of natural theology is grounded in the theological conviction of the justification of the sinner by grace alone. This is not an especially novel claim, and I have made it elsewhere, but it is worth repeating. Barth is a Protestant, and as a Protestant he is convinced that God is the sovereign saving agent of the world. God justifies the ungodly and gives life to the dead sinner. Barth’s dialectical theology is based on the conviction that what holds for soteriology also necessarily holds for epistemology (and, later, for ontology). Why does he think that? The short answer is that he finds strong biblical support for the notion that to know God is to be in a right relationship with God; to know God is to be known by God (Gal 4.9). We can say more about that another time. If we apply this reformational soteriology to epistemology, we find that just as salvation is by grace alone, so too knowledge of God is by grace alone, by revelation alone, by God’s word alone. And this means that natural theology is denied from the outset on the grounds that it compromises the very nature of God.

Now this claim has some interesting implications, the most controversial of which would be that modernity is actually more faithful to the gospel than not. And indeed, that is precisely the claim I, along with others, want to make. Here I am drawing especially on the work of Gerhard Ebeling. I think there are two main ways in which modernity is itself theologically grounded. First, though, we need greater clarity about what modernity actually means, intellectually speaking. Rose defines it as the idea that human reason does not have speculative power to reach knowledge of God. But this is only a part of the picture.

Congdon continues:

Modernity can be defined more accurately as the rise of historical consciousness. The rise of historical consciousness names the replacement of the old metaphysical and teleological interpretation of the world—what Hilary Putnam calls a “ready-made world”—and our existence in it with a historical interpretation. Whereas a metaphysical interpretation understands God, the world, and human existence in terms of an eternally fixed and unchangeable cosmic order, a historical interpretation understands them in terms of a historically situated and ever-changing nexus of forces. Whereas a metaphysical interpretation posits timeless essences underneath the contingencies and complexities on the surface of history, a historical interpretation denies that there is anything behind or beneath the historical that could stabilize and secure human existence in advance. The rise of historical consciousness thus coincided with the rise of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics presupposes that truth is elusive, but truth is only elusive when our existence is subject to myriad interpretations and possibilities. Modernity is the age in which the safe and stable explanation of life was called irrevocably into question. It is no accident that the Vatican and Protestant scholastics both sought to find ways of securing authority, with doctrines of papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy becoming central in this period in a way they had not been before.

Thus, Barth's theology does not fail by remaining rooted in modernity. Modernity is the presupposition out of his which theology necessarily developed, since it was intentionally answering questions rooted in the Protestant conception of Christian faith and its relationship to other spheres of human experience. The elusive nature of truth, as Congdon puts it, cannot itself be eluded simply by an assertion of the adequacy of speculative reason. On the contrary, speculative reason needs to justify itself in light of the critique offered by modern philosophy. And, as Kant demonstrated fairly devastatingly, it can't.

Barth did theology with the tools that he had at his disposal, as we all do. The particular tools that he had ready to hand were those of philosophical modernism. However, as Barth would insist, his theology was not dependant upon any particular philosophical school or set of presuppositions, but rather emerged from the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. This is a point made well by David Guretzki in his response to Rose:

Rose’s reading of Barth itself makes a fatal misstep: It assumes that all modern theological discourse necessarily starts from the assumption of an epistemological axiom and builds up from there. (And of course, that sounds very Cartesian, doesn’t it?). The problem is, Barth, in fact, does not proceed in this way at all–and never did. He does not start with a bedrock epistemological axiom from which all theological assertions stem, but rather deliberately refuses to build upon a philosophical prolegomena. In contradisitinction, Barth starts not with epistemology, but with the action of God in history as the “starting point” from which all theological knowledge comes. Even if Barth, as a modern, would accept that humans are incapax Dei, this is not to something known a priori but only a posteriori because God has revealed it to be so.

So in short, Rose’s reading of Barth tells us much more about Rose’s commitment than Barth’s. That is to say, Rose is apparently committed to the necessity of establishing a fundamental epistemological starting point for theology and that the particular starting point which he says Barth adopts is a starting point which Rose rejects. But in rejecting the incapax Dei principle, Rose necessarily commits to the opposite, capax Dei, which he calls the “classical synthesis of faith and reason” and thereby the fundamental epistemological starting point Christian theologians must assume in order not to fail. But does this not tell us much more about Rose’s epistemology and anthropology than Barth’s? And does not Rose’s essay falter because he fails to address Barth’s own explicitly stated starting point? Thus, in my mind, Rose’s essay could have been much more fruitful if he could have shown evidence why Barth’s commitment toDeus Dixit is ultimately the point at which Barth’s theology fails. But such an argument remains to be made.

Rose's ultimate critique of Barth then is that he is Protestant rather than Catholic, which is of course undeniably true. But that is not itself an objection to Barth as simply a description of the way in which Protestant and Catholic theology are different from one another. Of more interest, I think, is how Rose would respond to the critique leveled against "classical theology" by modernity. Based solely on his First Things article, the answer seems to be that he would prefer simply to ignore it. But that option is not open to him, particularly not if he wants to accuse theologians who choose to grapple with modernity of "failure."

The answer, I suspect, is not to be found in any form of Catholic theology that seeks to retreat to the theological synthesis of the Middle Ages, but rather in those that seek to bring that classical theological tradition forward into the present age, not by ignoring modernity, but by passing through it. Ultimately, and I'm fairly sure that this suggestion wouldn't be particularly palatable to Rose, the path has been laid for Catholic theology to do precisely this by Karl Rahner and others. Whether Rose chooses to walk that path, or whether he is content to simply snipe from the sidelines, is of course entirely up to him. But it seems strange that he would take as his target a theologian who is so thoroughly invulnerable to his own critique, while at the same time failing to subject his own theological presuppositions to the critique to which Barth is in many ways responding.

Found Theology: Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann

The beret: A classic sign of theological authority

Via Postbarthian.com comes a very interesting summation of the interaction between Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann. Interesting to me at least, since being a Protestant theologian, I am inescapably under the shadow of Karl Barth, but also because Moltmann is so much in the background of everything I do and write.

The general view, based on Barth's letter to Moltmann in 1964, is that Barth builds up Moltmann as a potential theological successor, only to shoot him down mercilessly. And the letter certainly reads that way. For example:

I have been looking for decades-I was looking even in the twenties-for the child of peace and promise, namely the man of the next generation who would not just accept or reject what I intended and did in theology but who would go beyond it positively in an independent conception, improving it at every point in a renewed form. I took up and studied your book with this expectation, and at beginning of my reading I seriously asked myself whether Jürgen Moltmann, who, as far as I recalled, was as yet unknown to me personally, might not be the man. ...

But, dear Dr. Moltmann, I do not find in your Theology of Hope what is really needed today to refine C.D. and my own theological thrust.

For Moltmann's part, he wrote a very gracious reply (as is generally his wont, I know from experience), and in his autobiography, comments on the exchange:

To me personally he wrote more critically, so that the young theologian wouldn't get a swelled head: 'To put it somewhat brutally: isn't your Theology of Hope just a baptized version of Herr Bloch's Principle of Hope?' I suspect that he had in fact never read a word of Bloch's, so the admission that follows is more important: 'You know that I also once had it in mind to strike out in this direction, but that I then decided not to touch it' (Briefe, 276). It was only later that I followed up this hint of Barth's about his youthful decision and came upon his love for Christoph Blumhardt, whom he had visited in Bad Boll in 1915. In his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1947; ET 1972), he called Blumhardt a 'theologian of hope' (German ed., 590), and his first commentary on Romans of 1919 is still full of Blumhardt's spirit of hope. In 1919, in an essay on Friedrich Naumannn and Christoph Blurnhardt in The Beginnings of Dialectic Theology (1962; ET 1968; German ed. vol. 1,37-49), he assigned Naumann to 'the past' and Blumhardt to 'the future' and extolled Blumhardt's hope: 'Hope for the visible intervention of God's sovereignty over the world, hope for deliverance from yesterday's condition of the world, hope for the whole of humanity, hope in God for the physical side of life ... Blumhardt will remain alive because his concern was the victory of the future over the past' (German ed., 49). Can a theology be made out of this? In 1920 Barth still had in mind a radically eschatological theology: 'A theology which wanted to dare to be eschatology would not just be a new theology; it would also be a new Christianity, indeed something essentially new, itself already part of the "Last Things", towering above the Reformation and all "religious" movements' (Die Theologie und die Kirche,1928, 25; cf. ET Theology and Church, 1962).

Barth presumably 'decided not to touch it' because in the end, like Franz Overbeck, he viewed such an eschatological theology as too radical, and because, on the other hand, Blumhardt was still very much impris-oned in the nineteenth century's faith in progress. In 1922 Barth's second commentary on Romans appeared, and lo and behold: Blumhardt has now been replaced by Kierkegaard, and the time-eternity paradox has superseded the dynamic dialectic of past-future. Blumhardt's dynamic forward-looking hope has fallen victim to the enveloping mantle of eternity in the moment of time, and Blumhardt's importunate expectation of Christ's future has been replaced by the contentedness of faith in the eternally bounteous God. Eternity is now supposed to encompass time from all sides—pre-temporally—con-temporally—post-temporally—but it is no longer to have any particular ties with the future of the God 'who will come'. My Theology of Hope had reminded Barth of this key turning point in his theological development in 1920-21. Hence this contradictory reaction.

Yup, Barth wrote me

Yet elsewhere, and to others, Barth priased Moltmann explicitly. For example, in a letter to Wolfhart Pannenberg:

And mark you, Dr. Pannenberg, I have read it-- as some weeks ago I read the Theology of Hope of Jürgen Moltmann--with the sincere curiosity whether I might be dealing at last with the child of peace and promise whose work would represent a genuine superior alternative to what I myself have attempted and undertaking in theology the last forty-five years.

It's worth noting that he lets down Pannenberg in a way similar to his dismissal of Moltmann, saying essentially, "I thought you might be my successor, but no." Also of note, his direct comparison of Moltmann to Pannenberg:

we shall be dealing with chapter five of Moltmann's Theology of Hope. So far I have found the book an interesting but unripe fruit, though much better than Pannenberg's Christology.

I will admit, that among those of us interested in the theology of hope, there tend to be two camps: Those who are more influenced by Moltmann, and those more influenced by Pannenberg. It's not strictly a Reformed/Lutheran divide, but that is certainly in the mix. So, I will cop to a little bit of rueful glee when I see Barth directly comparing the two and finding Moltmann superior.

Sad Pannenberg is sad

 Not that there is not a tremendous amount to praise in Pannenberg, but I can certainly see how it would be the case that Barth would prefer Moltmann. Douglas Meeks once described Moltmann to me as a "liberal Barthian," and I think you can see that element particularly in his earlier work, while Pannenberg was still very much hooked into Lutheran themes that diverged in particular from Barth occasionalism and rejection of natural theology.

There is much more to read at Postbarthian, and I strongly urge any who are interested in the subject to check it out, and many thanks to PB for putting it all together!

The Christian Case for Nietzsche

In preparation for Good Friday, it's useful to contemplate the meaning of the cross of Jesus Christ, as a spiritual matter, but also as a philosophical matter. The cross is a multivalent symbol, that contains within it a wealth of meaning, and yet, as Guiseppe Fornari argues in his new book, A God Torn to Pieces: The Case for Nietzsche, central to the message of the cross is something that Nietzsche understood and many, perhaps most, Christians have forgotten. "In the end," Fornari writes, "he was much closer to Christ than many who would claim to be Christians.”

As Adam Erikson summarizes at Sojourners, Fornari's analysis is rooted in the recognition that Nietzsche understood the significance of the cross in a way most Christians have not. He saw in Christ's cry on the cross -- "Father forgive them, they don't know what they are doing!" -- a message of universal forgiveness, a message that Nietzsche rejected:

Nietzsche’s problem wasn’t his analysis that “we have killed God.” Good Friday proves him right. His problem was that he rejected the alternative of universal forgiveness that Jesus offered from the cross. Jesus’ universal forgiveness seeks to transform us from being murders into being forgivers.

And that’s where Nietzsche consciously rejected Christ, and that’s where many Christians don’t know Christ. To know Christ is to know that in his life, death, and resurrection Christ freely offers forgiveness to all – even to those who have become “murderers of all murderers.”

For Nietzsche, Jesus’ attempt to end sacrificial violence was foolish because he believed that humans need sacrificial violence to survive. To show this he compared the death of Jesus to many ancient sacrificial myths and discovered that they are structurally similar. The god is murdered by an angry mob that is united in their violence against a divine victim. After the mob murdered their victim order was restored. The only difference between the murder of Jesus and the murder of the mythical gods is in interpretation.

The cross then, as Rene Girard argues, is the end of sacrifice. Nietzsche could see that, and yet he believed we still needed sacrifice. Many Christians today fail to see what Nietzsche could, they don't believe that the cross was the end of sacrifice, since they are still engaged in the sacrificial regime that Christ came to end. Universal forgivenss is an abstraction to a great many Christians, and certainly not something that God would endorse. They need God's wrath and God's judgement to make their own righteous self-conception appear valid.  Erikson continues:

Nietzsche consciously chose the way of Dionysus, and the way of violence drove him mad* because he couldn’t accept the forgiveness of Christ in his own life. And yet by clearly seeing the alternative between Dionysus and the “Crucified,” Nietzsche was closer to Christ than many who profess to be Christian. Many Christians are far from Christ because while they profess Christ, they actually believe in Dionysus; they actually believe in a god who justifies their violence rather than leads them in the way of forgive.

And the Christian world is going mad because we don’t believe in Christ who leads us to love and forgive all, including our enemies.

So, as we move through Maundy Thursday into Good friday, let us lift up Christ's prayer of universal forgiveness and pray for the reconciliation of all. But let us also be aware that the spectre of Nietzsche looms behind our protestations of self-righteousness. Until we can break the systems of sacrifice in our own lives, and cease projecting them onto the cross of Christ, we will continue to be closet Dionysians, while understanding both Christ and Dionysius far less profoundly than Nietzsche did.

*To be clear here: Erikson plays with a common Nietzsche myth: That his philosophy drove him insane. It did not. Syphillus drove him insane.

Don't Talk About the Oligarchy

 

A new academic study of the relationship between economics and politics in the United States comes to an interesting conclusion, one that I think scans with what many of us have intuited for a long time about American society, but that runs counter to our democratic ideological presuppositions. In short, the study argues, we are not a democracy at all, but an oligarchy.

As summarized in the abstract, their "analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence." In other words, the super-rich and the institutions dedicated to serving their interests have a much greater effect on U.S. policy than the opinions and actions of ordinary people.

And this is precisely the kind of conclusion one would reach by watching the news for the past five years. During this period, the Tea Party, which is a total sham of a political movement, orchestrated, financed and inspired by the ideological preferences of the super rich, like the Koch brothers, and their mouth-pieces, like Rick Santelli, has been effective at preventing any genuine social reform or the achievement of any substantial redistribution of wealth and power in the United States. Even their great failure -- preventing Obama's health reform act -- was the failure to prevent an act that really ultimately solidified the control of health care by private insurance companies, to the benefit of their bottom lines.

Meanwhile, Occupy, which was a genuinely grassroots movement, suffered both from it's own self-destructive tendencies and the organized attempts to repress it by governments and media organizations. And while I lay the blame for Occupy's failure mostly at the feet of its organizers, it's also true that Occupy groups that sprouted up in other countries with a deeper tradition of social protest and a more representative set of governing structures, were at least moderately more effective at achieving serious reforms.

And this brings me back to Thomas Piketty, whom I mentioned yesterday, and his book Capital in the 21st Century. Another article about the book  discusses  the political and economic salience of the message occupy was promoting:

Piketty's thesis, supported by his extensive research, is that financial inequality in the 21st century is on the rise, and accelerating at a very dangerous pace. For one thing, this changes the way we look at the past. We already knew that the end of capitalism predicted by Marx never happened – and that even by the time of the Russian revolution of 1917, wages across the rest of Europe were already on the rise. We also knew that Russia was anyway the most undeveloped country in Europe and it was for this reason that communism took root there. Piketty goes on to point out, however, that only the varying crises of the 20th century – mainly two world wars – prevented the steady growth of wealth by temporarily and artificially levelling out inequality. Contrary to our perceived perception of the 20th century as an age in which inequality was eroded, in real terms it was always on the rise.

In the 21st century, this is not only the case in the so-called "rich" countries – the US, the UK and western Europe – but also in Russia, China and other countries which are emerging from a phase of development. The real danger is that if this process is not arrested, poverty will increase at the same rate and, Piketty argues, we may well find that the 21st century will be a century of greater inequality, and therefore greater social discord, than the 19th century.

The question that governments need to begin contemplating is whether continuing to serve the interests of wealthy elites at the expense of the population at large is worth the increased instability that will, sooner or later, erupt into another mass protest movement, uncontrolled and potentially uncontrollable by political, economic, and media elites.

For those of us who value liberal structures and institutions, the possibility of such mass disruption should be of great concern, because there is no guarantee that it will result in a more equal, just and representative society. It could just as easily result in a prolonged era of social strife, violence, and and repression. This isn't the first time we've been to this dance, and we've got lots of examples of how this can play out. The fact that the United States transitioned from the social upheaval of the 1930s into a relatively just and stable set of economic norms in the post World War II era is no insurance that it will do so again.

If we value the peace and stability of democratic societies then, we'd better start thinking seriously about what it would mean to create a more genuinely representative and equal society now, before there is blood in the streets.

Faculty Blues

Recognizing as I do how enormously fortunate I am to have the position that I have, and how it is becoming increasingly difficult to actually make a career as a full-time academic, I feel a responsibility to publicize the recent rash of stories about the woes many faculty, particularly adjunct faculty, are facing.

First, there's this story about professors being forced into homelessness:

… one adjunct is about to move into a sister’s basement. Another, a Ph.D. in African-American Studies, is living in a homeless shelter in Philadelphia that is supposed to be for recovering drug addicts. She is subject to a curfew and to disciplinary action, as if she, too, was a drug addict. Her only crime was to study for over a decade to earn a Ph.D., and to teach for poverty wages. The third adjunct, whose case is the direst right now, is an artist and educator living in California, who will be homeless as of August 15. Even worse, he now faces the possibility of losing his life’s work. Most of his paintings and artwork, 30 years worth of work, is stored in a facility that will not give him access because he is several months behind in rent. They have not discarded or destroyed the artwork yet, but that is becoming a real possibility as the month comes to a close.

Then this story of an adjunct so demoralized by the part-time life he is contemplating quitting altogether:

I wonder if I should work so hard to stay. My older son is the same age as my Ph.D., and he’s grown from a blob to a little person who can tell you about the moons of Jupiter. Is it time to trade my hopes for his? To give up on the work of my adult life and just find a way to give my family some security? If I could do it all again, it would be madness to say that I would take the same path. But now, another year will pass, with no promise of success. And I wonder, channeling John Kerry but with lower moral stakes: How do you ask a year to be the last one to die for a mistake?

Last week, for the first time in a decade, I did apply for some jobs outside academe. But starting a new profession requires years of dues-paying that I have already done as an historian and nowhere else. And fundamentally, this is the job I should be doing; the one that I have long wanted to do—and still want to do. It would seem natural to quit after years of poorly explained rejection. But my work as a scholar is respected. My work as a teacher is valued—if not institutionally, then at least by my students. These are my strengths; and it is precisely in doing this combination of tasks that I believe I can make the greatest contribution. The academic job market has taken so much from me over the past years; I don’t want to let it take away my career as well.

And then, as if to add insult to injury, this story of a candidate who was offered a job, only to have it completely recinded when she tried to negotiate:

According to the widely read blog the Philosophy Smoker, a job candidate identified as “W” recently received an offer for a tenure-track position at Nazareth College, a small liberal-arts school near Rochester, N.Y. Like many recipients of job offers, W viewed the original bid as the opening move in a series of negotiations, and thus submitted the following counteroffer, after informing the department—with whom she says she had been in friendly contact—that she was about to switch into “negotiation mode” ...

However, instead of coming back with a severely tempered counter-counter (“$57k, maternity, and LOL”), or even a “Take it or leave it, bub,” Nazareth allegedly rescinded the entire offer:

Thank you for your email. The search committee discussed your provisions. They were also reviewed by the Dean and the VPAA. It was determined that on the whole these provisions indicate an interest in teaching at a research university and not at a college, like ours, that is both teaching and student centered. Thus, the institution has decided to withdraw its offer of employment to you. 

Thank you very much for your interest in Nazareth College. We wish you the best in finding a suitable position.

All of this is, quite frankly, completely outrageous. The devaluing of the work of people who have spent, in many cases, over a decade pursuing advanced degrees, only to watch the academic job market shrink to a tiny nub of what it once was, is an offense not only to academics as workers, but also to the entire intellectual premise of the university, which is that it is, at its best, a community of scholars who come together for the sake of advancing knowledge. To treat an increasingly large proportion of that community as utterly disposable and interchangable damages both the teaching mission of the unversities that behave in this way, as well as the research agenda that universities exist to support, since the instability and lack of academic freedom (not to mention the work loads) that come with perpetual adjunct purgatory undermine the project of scholarly research.

 

And the fact that this is happening at the same time that administrative staffs are exploding, and the self-justifying cant that insists that the ten-gazzilionth administrator in a university is absolutely crucial, while the new faculty hire is utterly disposable, are in themselves cause for deep skepticism about the future of higher education in the United States.

Teaching Religion vs. Teaching About Religion

In The Atlantic Marshall Poe argues that American universities have to do more to teach students religion, which which he means not just teaching them about religion, but also teaching them how to engage in religious practice:

I think religion should be taught in college. I’m not talking about “religious studies,” that is, the study of the phenomenon of religion. I’m talking about having imams, priests, pastors, rabbis, and other clerics teach the practice of their faiths. In college classrooms. To college students. For credit. I think religion should be taught in college because I believe it can help save floundering undergraduates. I’m not talking about “saving” them in Christian sense. I’m talking about teaching them how to live so they do not have to suffer an endless stream of miseries.

If you had asked me when I was a professor whether universities should teach religious practice in order to help undergraduates navigate life, I would have said you were crazy. First, I would have said my students were pretty well adjusted, so they didn’t needed to be saved. Second, I would have said that even if they were in trouble, religion couldn’t help them. Third, I would have said that even if they were in trouble and religion could help them, religion wasn’t real knowledge and couldn’t, therefore, be part of a university curriculum. And fourth, I would have said that even if undergraduates needed saving, religion could save them, and religion could be part of the curriculum, the separation of church and state made teaching religion in public universities impossible.

You may have all of these reservations as well. But I don’t think you should, and I’m going to tell you why.

And he goes on to do just that. And as I read his piece, I have to admit, I was of at least two, and probably several minds. After all, I am a professor of religion. I teach religion quite literally all. the. time. What's more, I'm an ethicist, and the nature of religious ethics is such that a lot of what I am doing in class is teaching about what Poe calls "religious practice." So, on the one hand, what he's suggesting seems perfectly reasonable to me.

What's more, I have the privilege of having spent pretty much my entire academic career in private, religiously-oriented colleges. Apart from my undergraduate experiences at a state university, I attended two seminaries (Andover Newton and Princeton Theological Seminary), and then taught at three universities, one (very) nominally Presbyterian and two Catholic. So in a sense, the main objection that Poe has to tackle -- that teaching religion at a state school would violate the separation of church and state -- has almost never really been an issue for me, at least institutionally.

Further, I am a believing and practicing Christian (practicing in the sense that I still haven't gotten it right, so I have to keep working on it). So I should be on board with this, right?

And yet, the way that Poe frames it leaves me slightly queasy as an academic. The key problem, it seems to me, is that it conflates what students may legitimately need from their university experience, and what it is appropriate to inculcate in them in a classroom setting. A "religious practice" in the sense that Poe seems to mean, while perhaps not strictly a form of religious indoctrination, certainly stands in substantial tension with the discipline of critical inquiry that is at the heart of the academic enterprise. The teaching of the humanities, and particularly in disciplines such as religion, rests not on teaching students a particular set of practices, as might be done in an accounting or chemistry class, but teaching students how to deploy the more general practice of critical thinking in the context of a particular body of knowledge, in my case, Christian theology and ethics.

What Poe is describing is certainly appropriate in the context of extra- or co-curricular activities, such as those performed by campus ministries or student organizations. But the classroom ought to be a space to challenge and widen the perspective offered by religious traditions and practices. To describe them in order to scrutinize them, and what Poe seems to be proposing, while not necessarily inimical to that, certainly makes that task more problematic if, as he argues, our task is less to help students discern their own path through life than to provide them with one already made.

Why You -- Yes You! -- Should Study Theology

I've been doing theology, in one way or another, for over 20 years, and for many people I interact with, even religious people, that seems a very strange thing to study. So I'm gratified to see that Tara Burton, in The Atlantic, makes the case for why theological study is valuable, even for those who do not believe in God:

The BA I did at Oxford was a completely secular program, attracting students from all over the religious spectrum. My classmates included a would-be priest who ended up an atheist, as well as a militant atheist now considering the priesthood. During my time there, I investigated Ancient Near Eastern building patterns to theorize about the age of a settlement; compared passages of the gospels (in the original Greek) to analogous passages in the Jewish wisdom literature of the 1st century BC; examined the structure of a 14th-century Byzantine liturgy; and read The Brothers Karamazov as part of a unit on Christian existentialism. As Oxford's Dr. William Wood, a University Lecturer in Philosophical Theology and my former tutor, puts it: “theology is the closest thing we have at the moment to the kind of general study of all aspects of human culture that was once very common, but is now quite rare.” A good theologian, he says, “has to be a historian, a philosopher, a linguist, a skillful interpreter of texts both ancient and modern, and probably many other things besides.” In many ways, a course in theology is an ideal synthesis of all other liberal arts: no longer, perhaps, “Queen of the Sciences,” but at least, as Wood terms it, “Queen of the Humanities.”

Yet, for me, the value of theology lies not merely in the breadth of skills it taught, but in the opportunity it presented to explore a given historical mindset in greater depth. I learned to read the Bible in both Greek and Hebrew, to analyze the minutiae of language that allows us to distinguish “person” from “nature,” “substance” from “essence.” I read “orthodox” and “heretical” accounts alike of the nature of the Godhead, and learned about the convoluted and often arbitrary historical processes that delineated the two.

Alana Massey at Religion Dispatches adds to Burton's point by noting that the study of religion is useful not only for understanding the historical processes that affected the world we live in today, but in actually understanding the lived religion of most of the people in the world"

“God will provide,” may seem like an empty, refrigerator-magnet platitude to the non-devout but it is a theological truth to adherents of the Prosperity Gospel in Nigeria. When a majorityof Muslims worldwide believe that poverty and wealth are predestined in accordance with theHadith of Gabriel, there are significant limitations on how effective it will be to upsell bootstrapping in business, education, and politics. Dissecting the Exodus story might be an interesting academic exercise for scholars of ancient Judaism but it is a very real reflection of the escape from political oppression to the approximately 100 million Christians just beginning to worship freely in China.

That motivating theologies aren’t being articulated in academic terms isn’t an indicator that they are not being understood with depth and rigor by those that believe.

One could multiply examples in addition to those offered by Massey, but the underlying point remains the same: To understand the people of the world, one needs to understand their religious outlook. In the absence of such understanding, or worse, in the presence of an attitude that treats all such worldviews as irrational and dangerous (cf. Dawkins, Richard), one will neither understand the motivations of the majority of hte world's people, nor be able to work effectively toward solutions to many of the besetting moral and politicla problems facing the world. One needn't agree with a worldview in order to understand it, but if one refuses to attempt to genuinely understand, than agreement on a wide variety of issues, beyond those of religion, will be much more difficult.

I'd add one another thing: The kind of modernist scorn that Dawkins and others direct toward people who take religion, either their own or others', seriously enough to attempt to understand it from the inside, represents a sort of privilaged condescension which is easy to rest upon when one lives a comfortable life in a privilaged society, and the idea of some form of universal justice or divine providence seems quaint at best. But, when one suffers under the yoke of injustice and oppression, with the knowledge that one will likely die without ever seeing justice, or feeling redemption, or sensing grace of any kind, even of the most earthly sort, the kind of comfort offered by the neo-atheists is cold comfort indeed. And again, one should be able to recognize that this is the case, even if one does not, in the end, agree with the underlying religious worldview that motivates such beliefs.

 

Slavoj Žižek, Christian Atheism, and the Death of God

Tony Jones has been hosting a symposium of sorts on the thought of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who has been attracting a bit of attention recently due to his increasing influence on some progressive Christian theologians like Peter Rollins and others. Because Tony was, um, otherwise occupied, he decided to turn his blog over to a discussion of Žižek's thought, which has been both informative and provocative.

First Zane Schertz offers a primer in Žižek's approach in the first posting. Here's the core of his argument (all emphasis in the original):

Zizek states that religious belief is an objectively functional illusion. For an example, he cites Christmas and Santa Claus. We all realize that Santa doesn’t exist, it’s a mere illusion, and yet we haven’t discarded the belief. Why? Because it functions objectively as an illusion that signifies our worldview of the holiday. Another example is the ancient Greeks and mythology. Zizek claims the ancient Greeks were not idiots. They knew on top of Mt. Olympus they wouldn’t find Gods, yet it remained an illusion which functioned objectively in their worldview. ...

Now Zizek says, and I agree, that only by willing the death of God [Christian atheism] can we live fully as Christians. So to break it down, Z is saying, when we believe in the illusion of the transcendent/omnipresent God who pulls the strings ‘deus ex machina’ we cannot function as true Christians because we’re too busy keeping the illusion of Santa real. ...

The idea is that God [abstract] engages the world in all it’s profanity through the Incarnation of Christ. We are the profane [negative] and stand in complete contradiction to the Spirit/Divine. At the cross we find the death of Christ which is also the death of God. Now through the death of God we find the end of transcendence. The God who was once [out there] is now [right here]. This is ultimately the [concrete] in the dialectic. So what we find is not a bodily resurrection back into transcendence, but instead the complete self emptying of this transcendence into immanence. There is nothing pulling the strings in our life, so now we as humans must face the responsibility of our actions/in actions. The immanence creates a forward movement into our modern world. Now theology is no longer a static discussion based on rituals and dogmas, but instead we find a religionless Christianity that engages our modern world.

This is crucial, because now Christianity isn’t about life after death, but about life before you die. For Zizek the message of Christ was apocalyptic at its core. For us to find meaning and live as fully human we must rupture the structures that shape and skew our ideologies. With that comes true freedom from not only the state, but from religion itself.

This is, as I said, both fascinating and provocative. For my part, I've long been intrigued by the idea of "religionless Christianity" in the sense in which Bonhoeffer seems to have meant it (which is quite different from what Žižek seems to mean). Here's what Bonhoeffer wrote in his Letters and Papers from Prison:

And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [translation: "as if there were no God"]. And this is just what we do recognize--before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.

Out of such a recognition, he writes, may be the creation of a new way of being Christian in the world, in which even the language we use to describe it may be fundamentally changed. As he writes:

"It will be a new language, perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming—as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace with men and the coming of his kingdom… Till then the Christian cause will be a silent and hidden affair, but there will be those who pray and do right and wait for God’s own time.”

Key, as I read it, to Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" is the idea that the language of Christianity needs to change to accomodate God's mode of being-in-the-world in light of the failure of traditional theological and moral categories to provide resources to describe and respond to the reality of fascism, world war, and genocide. The failure of that language calls for a new language that can give a new way of living that may finally be consistent with the call of the Gospel.

There is overlap in this view with what Žižek seems to be arguing (though with Žižek, you can really never be completely sure). And, as Schertz notes, much of this is rooted in a very deep reading of Hegelian philosophy coupled with Lacanian psychoanalysis. On top of all of that, Žižek seems to take a perverse pleasure in being obscure and elusive (as well as allusive). Yet, for him, unlike Bonhoeffer, God seems to ultimately be a way of symbolically expressing a particular relationship with the world, rather than the transcendent reality that gives being and meaning to existence. In other words, Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" is predicated on the idea that there is a God to whom we are accountable whereas in the "Christian atheism" of Žižek, the point is that the symbol of a transcendent God is ultimately emptied of meaning on the cross, and thus must be abandoned in order to effectively follow the way of Jesus Christ into the world, rather than the way of Christianity out of it.

In response to the initial post, Nathan Duffy writes in order to ensure that we know that, really, Žižek doesn't believe in God at all. Apparently he felt there was some unclarity on the issue. He writes:

Žižek doesn’t believe any of that, though. He’s not so much a heretic as an outright unbeliever who occasionally uses the Christian story as a kind of plaything. He would tell you as much. His theorizing uses the constituent elements of the Gospel as, perhaps, a lens through which to view and analyze history and the human condition, but he doesn’t believe any of it. It’s no more than a useful metaphor, and just one among many that he employs.

The title of ‘Christian atheist’ that he has ascribed to himself, and which Zane references, is just one of his fun, ironic little juxtapositions. There’s nothing slightly Christian about it. It would be interesting if he attempted to hold the two poles of Christianity and atheism, and go between them per standard dialectical protocol, which I suspect is what this title ‘Christian atheist’ is trying to suggest is happening. It would still be an ultimately frivolous and useless project, of course, but at least then the ‘Christian atheist’ title would be somewhat fitting. As is, it’s just false, even in the paradoxical way he wants to mean. An atheist using Christian concepts and terminology for anti-Christian ends is just atheism, if not something worse.

It is hard, I must say, to know what to make of Duffy's response. It was clear from the initial post, at lesat to me, that Žižek doesn't believe in any kind of literal God who exists or ever has existed. It's quite clear that he understands the term wholly symbolically and anthropologically, as indeed one might expect from a philosopher who partakes quite abundantly from both Freud and Marx. In his post Duffy seems somewhat alarmed that someone might misunderstand this. Duffy also wants to make sure that we understand that Žižek frequently engages in a form of playful blasphemy and engages in "false teaching."

But the usefulness from my perspective, of Žižek to Christians who may continue to believe in the existence of God, even as they allow themselves to be provoked by his ideas (or at least his rhetoric) is precisely that he challenges us to take seriously the negative dimension of Christian theology. To speak of "Christian atheism," to me, is to engage in a form of via negativa, which accentuates what God is not in order to illuminate what God is. To focus on the negative space of God's absence allows us to think more clearly about what it is we affirm about God, and whether those affirmations are as valid as we may suppose. Negative theology reminds us of what Žižek frequently calls the "abyssal" dimension of thought, the way in which the contemplation of the thing can take us to depths that are both difficult to contemplate and ultimately unreachable by the conceptual patterns to which we adhere.

Far too often, we treat the word "God" as though it referred to an object that we were capable of of comprehending. Žižek's insistance that the symbol is emptied of meaning in the cross reminds us of that fact. Whatever God may be, God is not what we expect. Jesus Christ as the incarnation of the God is not a way of boxing the God-concept into a particular flesh-and-blood form, but of reminding us that God's being and action violate our prior expectation of what God is and does.

What I think is unfortunate about Duffy's response is that he falls into the trap of thinking that Žižek's provocations are, by virtue of being provocative, something harmful or dangerous to Christians, rather than a reminder that God is always more than we believe God to be.

"My work really means just the opposite of what everyone thinks"

 

Mike Morrell has a post up about Thomas J. J. Altizer's "Death of God" theology as seen throgh the lens of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizik. It's fascinating to read and to watch Zizik's analysis (Zizik is always fascinating to watch perform). I was struk particularly by Altizer's assessment of his project, saying that it means "the opposite of what everyone thinks."

Unfortunately, the Emory Magazine article in which the quote is contained doesn't offer much further elaboration on the nature of the "opposite" character of Altizer's theology, but it does offer a useful primer on the "Death of God" theology moment in the 1960s, along with this helpful summary:

On a most basic level, Altizer studies God not as a separate presence but as a historical force that has been transformed by death. This God began giving himself to the world at its creation and ultimately died through Jesus Christ, whose earthly demise in turn poured the spirit of God into the world. Altizer calls for a dialectical form of faith that acknowledges the coincidence of opposites: through God’s death, the sacred becomes profane, and vice versa; one cannot exist without the other. Only in modernity, Altizer believes, can we fully realize the paradox of the death of God—that the very absence of God signifies God’s presence in all things.

This is clearly very different from Moltmann's approach in The Crucified God, which continues to rely on more traditional theological categories, but it is a useful reminder that there is often a difference between what is said and what is meant, particularly when what is said is framed in highly abstruse theological and philosophical language.

That said, clearly the core of this is the idea of the via negativa, the idea of encountering God in the midst of negation, which in our very positively oriented society, is always an important qualification.

We think we can know God, but ultimately any God worth knowing must be by definition beyond our capacity to truly know. That paradox stands at the heart of all things Christian.

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