The Death of God as "Anti-Secret" (Small Book Excerpt)
[The following is a small excerpt from the book I am working on - Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: Being The Strange Tale of How the Warfare of Christianity and Science Was Written Backwards Into History. Given how early the writing process is, there is no guarantee this will make it into the book in its current form (in addition, the level of coherence will definitely vary). Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy! -Derrick]
There is perhaps no surer and straightforward evidence of
the marginalization of theology as a discipline than the somewhat humorous fact
of the distance that some who partake in “political theology” enforce between
those who unabashedly speak of God, and those who do not.
While it perhaps
seems straightforwardly evident that scholars who participate in “political
theology” would in fact consider themselves to be doing theology, this is not always the case: “Let’s get this straight.
Political theology is not the same as religion. Instead, we take it to name a
form of questioning that arises precisely when religion is no longer a dominant
explanatory or life mode.”[1]
What is at stake for these authors is not a “turn to religion” but rather “the
status of theology as operative fiction.”[2] Medievalist
Frederic Jameson makes a similar comment. “But if I am unable to believe in the
idea of belief, I certainly don’t want to disparage the idea of the priesthood,
an institution for which I have some admiration (and some of whose individual
members—the priests of liberation theology, for example—are genuine heroes).”[3] Commenting
on this very phenomenon, theologian William Cavanaugh notes that, “despite the
breakdown of the religious/secular dichotomy that political theology seems to
recognize, ‘religion’ nevertheless reappears as the Other from the past against
which political theology must guard.”[4]
Our working thesis is that the marginalization of theology is not due to the lack of explanatory power or "scientific" rigor. It is rather that theology appears useless to so many because the story of its uselessness is repeated again and again from the halls of academia to the cesspool of Youtube comment sections and Reddit, creating feedback upon the forms of knowledge it is attempting to describe. Thus while undoubtedly theology suffers from many self-inflicted wounds incurred by bad theology done quite loudly in the public eye, it is equally as true that good theology is rendered suspect a priori by an assured tale of theology's uselessness being repeated endlessly and then projected backward into history to create a story of mankind "come of age."
The same is true with the death of God, and the apparent feeling of His absence. For, if God
died in the twentieth century, it was not the unknown death that Friedrich
Nietzsche’s madman proclaimed in “Aphorism 125” of The Joyful Wisdom, where most of us simply do not realize God has
died—not even when a prescient man runs through the town square proclaiming this
truth in a delirium of panic:
God is dead! God remains dead. And we have killed Him! ….
The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed, has bled to
death under our knives: who will wipe this blood away from us? ... What then
are these churches now if not the sepulchers of God?[5]
Nor was
God’s death (if, indeed, He has died—can we now still hear his screams?) like
the couriers in Franz Kafka’s forty-seventh “Meditation”—galloping through the
world calling out messages that no longer hold sense (where there are no more
kings to whom their oaths bind, though they still seek to fulfill them). Nor is
it as Kafka’s similarly harrowing Imperial
Message portrays, in which a dying
Emperor (that is, God) sends a message “to you [yes, YOU] alone”; yet, because
of the infinite reaches and crowds of the world, its delayed arrival swells
into eternity.
The
Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his deathbed, to you alone,
his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow, which has taken refuge at the furthest
distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his
bed and whispered the message in his ear. He thought it was so important that
he had the herald speak it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of verbal
message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those
witnessing his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and all
the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high
soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The
messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out
and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance,
he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards
easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are
infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you
would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of
that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the
private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And
if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight
his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been
achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the
courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again,
through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for
thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that
can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is
still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his
way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you
sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.[6]
This is
Sören Kierkegaard where the either/or of the aesthetic (personal) and the
ethical (public) remain always about to be resolved (but ultimately held in a
perpetual deferral and suspension).[7]
Here there is no, “teleological suspension of the ethical,” just suspension. In
these tales God has died, but the message is obscure, staggered, belated and an
informed decision is impossible. Like Godot, it may still come tomorrow, or it
may not. Neither is more logical than the other, and we have no ability to
choose. We remain imprisoned within a Holy Saturday that has no Easter.
The
intricate and hard fought early-Christian reasoning linking God and His works
in creation bear here a sort of ironic, unthought afterlife.[8]
“The dead God has found a kind of impressive revenge in this work” writes Maurice
Blanchot. “For [God’s] death does not deprive him of his power …; dead, he is
even more terrible, more invulnerable …” precisely because as dead, he can
never be defeated, having been fully converted into his endless array of
functionaries, blindly executing their marching orders.[9]
Here modern atheism inverts Pascal’s famous wager,[10]
which becomes a sort of pathological bind to act etsi Deus daretur — “as if God exists.”
Georgio
Agamben utilizes here the traditional Christian image of the “empty throne”[11]
to describe providence on this Kafka-like model:
The aporia that
marks like a thin crack the wonderful order of the medieval cosmos now begins
to become more visible. Things are ordered insofar as they have a specific
relation among themselves, but this relation is nothing other than the
expression of their relation to the divine end.
And vice versa, things are ordered insofar as they have a certain
relation to God, but this relation expresses itself only by means of the
reciprocal relation of things. The only
content of the transcendent order is the immanent order, but the meaning of the
immanent order is nothing other than the relation to the transcendent end. ‘Ordo ad finem’ and ‘ordo ad invicem’ refer back to one another and found themselves
on one another. The perfect
theocentric edifice of medieval ontology is based on this circle, and does not
have any consistence outside of it. The
Christian God is this circle, in which the two orders continuously penetrate
one another. … From this follows the contradiction, noticed by scholars,
according to which Thomas at times founds the order of the world on the unity
of God, and at times the unity of God in the immanent order of creatures.[12]
It is,
therefore, not a secret of which we speak. Rather, it seems that if God died
for the 20th century, it was only insofar as it was in front of an
audience. We mean something stronger by this than the mere fact that the death
of God seems widely known, or perceived, such as the great sadness of his time
that the philosopher Hegel sensed. We are claiming, rather, that “The Death of
God” is what we will term an “anti-secret”: the death of God is only insofar as
it is publically displayed, performed, memorialized; over, and over again.
Of course there could be a society without any sense of that
they do not believe in the God of Abraham. There are many such today. But the
intervening issue is whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some
religious view which is being negated ... If so, it would be different from our
present world in one crucial respect. Unbelief for great numbers of
contemporary unbelievers is understood as an achievement of rationality. It
cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It is a condition that
cannot be only described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect
tense: a condition of 'having overcome' the irrationality of belief [in a
specifically defined God]...[13]
As
such, “The Death of God” functions in much the same way that Jason
Josephson-Storm brilliantly argues that the related “myth of disenchantment” is
an “anti-myth”:[14]
namely as a story, it pretends to be descriptive—it is a myth in search of
history. And yet, the “death of God” much like the “myth of disenchantment,” is
a reflexive tale, an attempt to establish the very thing it presents as fact.[15]
This also resonates with Christian Smith’s recent portrayal of sociology.[16]
As Terry Eagleton argues, efforts to do away with God more often than not
result in merely replacing Him with a proxy, some ersatz phenomenon functioning
as a viceroy for the Almighty, although often under the auspices of being
godless.[17]
“Anti-secret” does not, therefore, just trace the history of ideas, but
reflexively how “information gathering can … reckon with the effect of information gathering on a
system.”[18]
In fact, the “Death of God” is one such trope that Josephson-Storm analyzes at
length.[19]
“Anti-Secret” is not as such just an awkward neologism for what is in fact,
“well known.” It is rather an awkward neologism attempting to describe a
phenomenon that is supposedly only the property of those who have been
intellectually initiated, and yet paradoxically only exists as it is
performed—that is, publically displayed or pronounced over and over again. “Although
it is applied to different time periods, from the birth of Greek philosophy to
the Renaissance to the scientific revolution to the Enlightenment, its outline
is nearly always the same: that at a particular moment the darkness of
superstition and myth, religion began to give away to modern light, exchanging
traditional unreason for technology and rationality.”[20]
The
message of God’s death feeds back into the system; the supposed eternal and
infinite uselessness of Christianity and theology are proclaimed, and so then
step-by-step undone, deleted, obscured—they vanish from the historical record.
Take for example the supposed overcoming of theology’s notion of the creation
and sustenance of the world by evolutionary theory. Its life depends upon the
strength of the many vignettes held up like Icons of the Eastern Orthodox
church—that is, pictorial representations of an event within a canonical
narrative (each of which we will turn to in more detail later).
The point for
now is that the clash of creation and evolution reads like a stage-play
precisely because it is and has
always been one. The theatrical performance supposedly displayed between the
“trouncing” by “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley of the Bishop Samuel
Wilberforce: “In these scenarios, Huxley and Wilberforce are not so much
personalities as the warring embodiments of rival moralities, Huxley, the
archangel Michael of enlightenment knowledge, and the disinterested pursuit of
truth; Wilberforce, the dark defender of the failing forces of authority,
bigotry, and superstition.”[21] As John Lienhard put it, it was “the first
major battle in a long war.”[22]
Indeed it is, as an image, one of the cornerstones of the “perennial warfare of
science and Christianity,” the rock upon which their church is built. It is a
story repeated so often, a recent scholarly exposé of its ludicrously mindless
repetition was given the title “1859 and All That.”[23]
The implication of this story, as George Marsden reminds us, is that “Darwinism
brought the decisive culmination in a long-standing struggle between modernity
and prescientific religious faith.”[24]
And this continues into the Scopes Trial: “One of the reasons the Scopes trial
was so significant was precisely because it was a good show.”[25]
Indeed, the trial attracted “hucksters and proselytizers” who formed a carnival
of religion and evolution informing reception of the trial.[26]
It was not just that this cloud of clownish witness skewed some sober reality,
but also that the actors of the trial themselves understood this moment as a
sacramental occasion, or what scripture calls a kairos: “The Scopes Trial took place because several of its
participants connived to ensure it would happen.”[27]
[1]
Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Introduction,” Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 1.
[2] Ibid., 5.
[3]
Frederic Jameson, “On the Medieval” in The
Legitimacy of the Middle Ages , 243.
[4]
William Cavanaugh, “The Mystical And The Real: Putting Theology Back Into
Political Theology,” in William Cavanaugh, Field
Hospital: The Church’s Engagement With A Wounded Word (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 2016), 99-121, quote at 100.
[6] Ibid.,181.; Franz Kafka, The
Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books,
1972), 265.
[7]
Sören Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment
of Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).
[8] Jon Robertson, Christ as Mediator: A Study in the
Theologies of Eusebius of Caesarea, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Athanasius of
Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michel René Barnes, The Power of God: Dunamiß in Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology (New
York: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016); David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the
Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and
Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian
Encounter With Hellenism (New Haven: Yale, 1993).
[9] Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire trans. Charlotte
Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 7.
[10] Blaise Pascal, Penseés trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (New
York: Penguin Books, 1995), 83f.
[11] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological
Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2011), 243ff.
[12] Ibid., 87.
[13]
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 269.
[14] Jason Å. Josephson Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic,
Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2017), 64.
[15] Ibid., 11-13.
[16] Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014).
[17] Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2014).
[18] Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment, 11. Italics
in the original text.
[19] Ibid., 63-94.
[20] Ibid., 65.
[21] Sheridan Gilley, “The
Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconsideration,” in Religion and Humanism, ed. Keith Robbins, Studies in Church History 17 (Oxford, Blackwell, 1981): 325-340,
quote at 325.
[22] Quoted in David N. Livingstone,
“Myth 17: That Huxley Defeated Wilberforce in Their Debate Over Evolution and
Religion,” in Ronald Numbers, ed., Galileo
Goes to Jail, And Other Myths About Science and Religion (Harvard: Harvard
University Press, 2009), 152.
[23] James R. Moore, “1859 And All
That: Remaking the Story of Evolution and Religion,” in Roger G. Chapman and
Cleveland T. Duval, eds., Charles Darwin,
1809-1882: A Centennial Commemorative (Wellington: Nova Pacifica, 1982),
167-194.
[24]
George Marsden, Understanding
Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing,
1990), 135-136.
[25]
Michael Lienesch, In The Beginning:
Fundamentalism, The Scopes Trial, And the Making of an Antievolution Movement (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007), 141.
[26]
Edward J. Larson, Summer For The Gods:
The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New
York: Basic Books, 2006), 139-144.
[27]
Adam Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes
Trial, Textbooks, And The Anti-Evolution Movement In American Schools (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015), 91.
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