Our August Myths: The Legitimacy of Theology in a Secular Age (Part A)
At the height of the so-called “Occupy Wallstreet” movement, the Slovenian philosopher and social critic Slavoj Zizek, as is his way, gave two peculiar forms of advice to them, which we do well to begin with. The first: Now is not the time to fall in love with yourself; and the second: Don’t act, just think. What did he mean? The two pieces of advice are in a sense two sides of the same coin. Though unfortunately his advice went unheeded, the first—don’t fall in love with yourself—was essentially meant to bring to self-awareness the euphoria that comes from the dizziness of moments which appear to be standing upon a great precipice of potential change. Unheeded, Occupy Wallstreet’s navel-gazing devolved into a carnival.[i] The second is essentially a reversal of Karl Marx’s famous Thesis Eleven on Feuerbach. Instead of: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it,”[ii] Zizek now muses: “perhaps we attempted to change the world too quickly; what we need now is to interpret it again.”[iii]
These two
pieces of advice will guide us as we briefly examine the topic at hand: the
“legitimacy of theology in a secular age.”
All three terms are notoriously slippery, and so the humble goal of this
paper is to attempt to narrow each, and trace a path of thought through
them. Our approach is undoubtedly only one approach among many valid possible
ones—say Stanley Hauerwas’ ferocious attacks on political liberalism,[iv]
Bonhoeffer’s theology of sociality and “religionless Christianity,”[v] or
Liberation theology.[vi] While
our project here does not contradict them, it does take a slightly different
approach. Answers are, as I think we all
know, dependent upon the questions which generate them, and here we attempt in
a sense to dissolve the very question we initially pose about theology’s
legitimacy in a secular age by following recent scholarship which
problematizes, through historical genealogy, the august myth of discrete
difference between religion (or specifically, theology) and the secular. These are, in fact, invented categories. Far
from having to try and apply something called “theology” to a non-theological
arena called “the secular,” part of the point of this essay is to gesture to
the fact that this is the wrong question,
precisely because, as I hope to hint toward, just like God before the
Israelites theology is always-already ahead of us. It is not a matter of making theology
relevant, but of discerning the already employed theology and moving from
there.
“Legitimacy” [A]: The Problem of Meaning
and the Meta-Theological Dilemma
Don’t act, just think. In the upcoming months we will undoubtedly be
fortunate to witness here at the New Wine, New Wineskins Theology of Culture
seminar many thoughtful and robust presentations of theological responses and
interpretations to various cultural phenomena.
Though perhaps what will not necessarily
be addressed is the very legitimacy underpinning these presentations
themselves—that is to say, the very notion of a “theological solution,” in the
first place will, perhaps, go unexamined.
As Ingolf Dalferth puts it:
The argument so far has assumed
there are theological problems. But precisely this has been questioned. The problems which theology attempts to
solve—as Hegel, Freud, and logical empiricists have argued in their different
ways, are said either to be unintelligible and thus unsolvable, or, if they are
intelligible, they are not specifically theological and cannot be solved by
theology. Under the philosophical
microscope they turn out to be the result of conceptual confusion, or dissolve
into a set of historical, philosophical, psychological, and sociological
problems, which fall into the domain of these disciplines but do not require
any specifically theological treatment.
What traditionally has been taken to be a theological problem really is
an unanalyzed complex of spurious and/or non-theological problems. It follows that theology can be reduced
without loss to science and philosophy, and, therefore, no longer claim to be
an autonomous and intellectually respectable discipline.[vii]
Dalferth is
not alone in noticing this particular (and perhaps particularly odd)
aporia. What he calls the “reductionist
argument,” Neil MacDonald has called the “meta-theological dilemma,” a quandary
posed by the friend of Nietzsche,
Church historian turned atheist Franz Overbeck: “every truth formerly cited as
an example of theology was in actual fact either meaningless, or a function of,
and hence reducible to, a truth of non-theology (natural philosophy, physics,
history, anthropology, etc);…one either did non-theology, or nothing.”[viii]
Similarly, Kevin Vanhoozer can put this task to theologians in a fairly
terse challenge: “theology has little that is distinct to offer either the
church or the academy if it is able to say nothing reasonable about God or to
make only arbitrary judgments about what is said or done in God’s name.”[ix] Hence
here, “Don’t act, just think,” is not a call to stop serving and witnessing
(quite the opposite!); it is,
however, an attempt to pry open a moment of analysis to ask just what it is
exactly that we are doing, for as Jürgen Moltmann so rightfully put it: “the
theologian is a strange creature.”[x] We must take inventory precisely of that
strangeness or fall into
the inherent irony that is the veritable cottage industry of presenting
Christianity as “relevant,” who, I
would argue—best of intentions notwithstanding—often mistake and misdiagnose
the situation because, in the words of D. Stephen Long, “Theology is often
always already too relevant, and so
redundant.”[xi]
In taking such an inventory of our
strangeness, as theologians and Christians, we should precisely not, therefore, return to the Modernist
strategy of attempting to ground the theological enterprise on one or another
supposedly “neutral” and “universal,” epistemology.[xii]
Here we would merely reconstruct, rather than question, the basic logic which
caused “the secular” to arise as a problem for theology in the first
place. The upshot of this is that when I
ask “what is the legitimacy of theology in a secular age,” I am not asking about the antecedent
conditions which allow Christianity to be true; “Don’t act, just think,” as
such is a call to once again interpret the
signs of the times (Mt. 16:2). As
such I align myself with a basic pattern of traditional inquiry usually labeled
under the phrase “faith seeking understanding.”[xiii] Hence for any who are perhaps perplexed by
the very question of theology’s legitimacy, and want to answer “the gospel is the legitimacy of theology” or
“Christ” or “God” are the legitimacy of theology in a secular age—I agree, and
we do well to heed Robert Jenson’s words here (which in their own way echo the
basic problem of legitimacy this paper addresses):
Since Jesus is Jesus, and not, for
example, Caesar, and Israel is Israel and not, for example, America, the gospel
is a particular, specific, distinguishable narrative. Not every good word is the gospel, only good
and accurate words about Jesus-in-Israel.
Therefore also not every good man is a believer; not every beneficial
religious fellowship is the church; and not every good work is the mission of
the church. There sometimes appears in the institutionalized church a strange blend
of unbelief and arrogance which, no longer having any special thing of its own
to say in the world makes up by claiming everyone else’s good words as ‘really’
its gospel. [Emphasis added] What is
said in church may be a bit of sociological analysis, or religious wisdom, of
Zen existence jarring, or ‘honest encounter’—the possibilities are
endless. That these words are not the
gospel does not mean that they are not good.
There are many things that need to be said in the world; if the gospel
is true it is one of them—and only one.
How the gospel is related to other good words will concern us throughout
this book [Story and Promise]…[xiv]
The question of legitimacy (what I
entitle “legitimacy A”) is, therefore, not a question of truth, but rather the
question of “how the gospel is related to other good words.” Our basic strategy, which will
be outlined later in the paper, cannot be “relevance” per se but must step back, behind the very binary of
relevance/irrelevance to inquire into the depth structure of their historical
being regarding their conceptual and practical origins within the
theology/secular divide, in order to deconstruct them.
Legitimacy [B]
And
secondly, “do not fall in love with yourselves,” as advice, manifests
legitimacy in a different way: namely, what right
do we as Christians have to speak in the public realm? Our history as the church, when told, is
often one laced both with a systematic connection to the perpetuation of
religious violence, and the repression of knowledge (often conveniently labeled
under the single heading of “science.”)
Thus if our first question of Legitimacy (“Legitimacy A”) had to do with
meaning, here, “Legitimacy B” has
more to do with credibility of character.
As the adage goes: the greatest source of atheism is not theory, but
practice, namely the hypocrisy of the ecclesia—Christians
behaving badly.[xv] This is not merely that our theoretical
claims to a redeemed relationship with the creator are tarnished, though this
is true.[xvi]
While there is a necessary movement of what we could call “discipleship,”—namely
the process of overcoming the perennial miseducation regarding such things as
the so-called “war of science and Christianity,” and overcoming the quite
authentic incredulity that comes with Christians saying one thing while doing another,
we must also—and it can be put no blunter than Ephraim Radner has
recently—“seek to identify the church…as killer, if we are to understand the
nature of ecclesial existence properly.”[xvii]
Identify, so as to repent, and perhaps begin to amend; but also to help
identify our own unspoken and perhaps unrecognized complicity in systemic
structures of violence and power. Indeed
though we will maintain that “the secular” is secretly theological, and
historically dependent upon Christian themes it attempts to make its own, this
is often precisely because of the
failure of the church, and the resultant theological fragmentation. In the words of G.K. Chesterton: “The world
is full of the old Christian virtues, gone mad.
The virtues have gone mad…because they are wandering alone.”[xviii]
[i] Many would press this point further by noting
“devolved” cannot be applied since it was never a cohesive movement in the
first place. Yet C.f. Daniel Bell, Economies of Desire: Christianity and
Capitalism in a Postmodern World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 34ff
who follows Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of political “multitude”
as a fundamental display of “micropolitics.”
[ii] Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Including
Theses on Feuerbach) (New York: Prometheus, 1994), 574.
[iii] “Don’t Act, Just Think,” (August 28, 2012) Accessed
1:00 p.m. Sept. 7, 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgR6uaVqWsQ
[iv] For a good, though critical, introduction to Hauerwas,
c.f. Nate Kerr, Christ, History, and
Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene: Wipf and Stock,
2009), 93-127.
[v] C.f. Clifford J. Green, Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s
Publishing, 1999).
[vi] Gustavo Gutiérrez, A
Theology of Liberation (New York: Orbis, 1998).
[vii] Ingolf Dalferth, Theology
and Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 13.
[viii]
Neil B. MacDonald Karl Barth and the Strange New World Within
the Bible: Barth, Wittgenstein, and the Meta-Dilemmas of the Enlightenment
(Georgia: Paternoster Press, 2000), 13.
[ix] Kevin Vanhoozer, Remythologizing
Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 188.
[x] Jürgen Moltmann, “Christian Theology and its Problems
Today,” in The Experiment Hope trans.
M.Douglas Meeks (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 1.
[xi] D. Stephen Long, Speaking
of God: Theology, Language, and Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing,
2003), 23.
[xii] Of course in presenting a theme, there is nothing
unusual about postponing the actual treatment in favor of a few preliminary
remarks about the theme itself, and its mode and method of presentation. In our presentation, we are, of course, in
the midst of just such a practice right now. Throat-clearing is necessary, and
remains so. However the
“throat-clearing” moment of theology in both prolegomena and fundamental
theology since the 16th century began to systematize itself in such
a way that it was thought the prolegomena must “enable the enterprise [of
theology], that the axioms and warrants needed to set specifically theological
cognition in motion must be antecedently established.” (Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology Vol. I: The Triune God (New York: Oxford Press,
1997), 3). The problem is that “If
theological prolegomena lay down conceptual conditions of Christian teaching
that are not themselves Christian teaching, that are more than aformal demand
for coherence and argumentative responsibility, and that in the Western world
are therefore theologoumena of Mediterranean paganism, the prolegomena sooner
or later turns against the legomena.”
(Ibid., 9).
[xiii]
For a clear overview, c.f. Paul Helm, Faith & Understanding (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 1997) in which he presents the “faith seeking
understanding” paradigm in a general overview, and then goes through several
case studies including (of course) Augustine, Anselm, Jonathan Edwards, and
John Calvin.
[xiv] Robert Jenson, Story
and Promise: A Brief Theology of the Gospel About Jesus (New Jersey: Sigler
Press, 1989), 4.
[xv] McGrath, Twilight
of Atheism, in a sense bears this out from a historical perspective.
[xvi] George Lindbeck’s famous illustration of the Crusader
applies here: “The Crusader’s battle cry, [Christ is Lord], for example, is
false when used to authorize cleaving the skull of an infidel (even though the same words in other contexts may be a
true utterance.” (George Lindbeck, The
Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville:
Westminster John-Knox, 1984), 64). And the reason for this is the often
overlooked “intrasystematic” aspect of truth: “Utterances are
intrasystematically true when they cohere with the total relevant context,
which, in the case of religion, when viewed in cultural-linguistic terms, is
not only other utterances, but other forms
of life.” (Ibid) As such our
statements regarding God, and indeed Christianity, become false “when their use in any given instance is inconsistent with
what the pattern as a whole affirms of God’s being and will.” (Ibid).
Though of course objectively speaking
God remains Lord no matter our skullduggery; this here is a question of how
statements represent that reality.
[xvii]
Ephraim Radner, A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church (Texas:
Baylor University Press, 2012), 20.
[xviii]
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 26.
Comments