Voice and Values, cont’d

What I really meant to say here, but lack the insight, ability, skill, and intelligence to do so poignantly is:

The great movement for independent thought instilled in the modern mind a desperate refusal of all knowledge that is not absolutely impersonal, and this implied in its turn a mechanical conception of man which was bound to deny man’s capacity for independent thought. Such objectivism must represent the public good in terms of welfare and power and set in motion thereby the self-destruction of freedom. For when open professions of the great moral passions animating a free society are discredited as specious or utopian, its dynamism will tend to be transformed into the hidden driving force of a political machine, which is then proclaimed as inherently right and granted absolute dominion of thought.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pg 214

The refusal to allow personal knowledge a voice within greater society will diminish the society over time. It rules out of court the entire realm of value propositions (posited, at least, by Christianity) based on the common welfare which is unquestionably right to do so and ought not be challenged.

Voice and Values

One thing I keep reading and hearing about is the separation of religion from politics. One fallacy I keep seeing is that “religion and politics” means the same as the separation of “church and state.” Historically this is purely untrue. The actual statement in the Constitution when applied to its historical context means something very different than the reification it gets today. It means that the structures of the church can in no way institutionally support, or validate the actions of the government. The head of Britain is the head of the Anglican church – this is the kind of thing the clause is actually talking about.

That being said – we’re constantly reinterpreting everything. I understand that, and it is a necessary element. But it is only valuable when you can still remember the original context and meaning (if you’re not doing that, you are a revolutionary – not one who stands in the tradition).

Why does this bother me? Because under that clause we are systematically removing the values and morality of religion from speaking about public life. There is a grand delusion that people have fallen into where only science or fact can talk about public life. Only objective data (which boil down to Kantian ethics) are useful at all for the public domain. In this way the project of modernity is still ticking right along.

The movement to ban the ability of churches, or people of faith, from acting on behalf of that faith in public is growing. In effect, the message of Christianity is being censored out of public life. At this point it is only Christianity. But as soon as an imam or rabbi says something people don’t like, they’ll be out too.

The hypocrisy of it all, for me, is that Christian theology is only one way of talking about meaning and value. Other religions perform the same task. Other philosophies, including the materialist, secular, scientific philosophy which is in dominance today is performing the exact same task. All these systems of value do it on radically different terms and premises. But they are all playing the same game. The hypocrisy is that one value system, which now has power, is ruling out of court the other value systems that have the ability to topple it. They’re not doing it by appealing to an argument, or that their system is “better”. They are merely doing it by mischaracterizing what is actually going on. They say they’re not playing the same game, but different games – and that religion game is outlawed from public life.

I’m not worried for a minute that they’ll “win” and something will happen to religion. Religion has been the primary mover of humanity and culture until the mid 1800′s in Europe, and the mid 1900′s in America. It is still the primary mover in Africa and South America. Asia is a little harder to diagnose. I’m just worried that we’ve stopped actually thinking about what is going on. Because should the tables of power turn, voices for value should not be arbitrarily silenced.

Talking and Listening

Fundamentalism cannot listen. And if you cannot listen you cannot speak. If you cannot listen you only speak about you, you cannot speak to someone else. You only speak at them. You leave no space inside yourself for them to exist and be considered. Fundamentalists derive their enemies of their humanity. So much for fundamentalist “humanists”.

It has become apparent to me over the last few years of writing this blog that the critical conversation is between the fundamentalists and the rest. It is the fundamentalist mindset that presents the greatest challenge, in my opinion, to open dialog between all parties
Naked Pastor

The preceding quote mentions polarization. Groups that only talk to themselves become further polarized. This is a sociological fact. Fundamentalists often define themselves by a small number of essential truths. The ultimate question is not whether these truths are “correct” or “true” – but rather to discover why it is these truths and not others which orient the group.

If someone cannot tell you why they have not performed the necessary self-reflection that is required. Such reflection is required in order to actually positively participate in a dialogue.

A Space Inside Myself

A couple of weeks ago the dean invited some students to talk with her about the department and where things ought to be heading. It was a great time to get to know the dean and her plans for the department. Yet one thing kept creeping back in, the inability to actually host a true dialogue. Honest listening does not happen, even in a theology department. I was struck by this interview where Jacob Needleman talks about the failure of contemporary public space to accommodate any discussion let alone one on religious lines

And people cannot listen to each other. When we’re talking, you and I, mostly when I’m talking and trying to listen to someone I maybe hear—if I’m lucky—one-third of what they say. Mostly I hear my own thoughts, and when I try to write down what they’ve said I mix it with my own thoughts. But there is a discipline which one can obtain. It’s not that hard. It’s to step back from one’s own opinions, make a space in myself and let you in. I don’t have to agree with you but I have to let you in, so that you are heard. I hear you. And you let me in. And that way something very beautiful can appear; I can still disagree completely with you, but I don’t deny your humanity. found here

This is something I have failed to accomplish time and time again. The more and more it happens it has become easier to recognize and correct. You have to be looking for it of course, but it can be done. We all need to learn to listen and to give everyone the humanity they already possess. This is the only way we are going to learn anything.

DH and Memory

James McGrath shows his displeasure with the Documentary Hypothesis. I wonder how many will come out of the woodwork with an agreement. Here is what I said:

I agree that the Documentary Hypothesis seems far too “ideal” to be true. The degree of reliance on the written word in the 19th century just doesn’t exist the ancient world. The pesky evidence needs to be accounted for: if they weren’t copying, are you positing that the memory of the words/construction was *that* widespread and in agreement? Is that consistent with ancient writing and storytelling? Furthermore, if the early memories were retold in such precise forms how then did we get four different gospels and what implications does that have for their relationship?

Voice of the Church

The unrest that the modern situation poses to the church is decidedly secondary — at best — to the unrest that lies at the heart of the church itself. The church is unsettled, unstable precisely because it bears witness to the triune God present through Christ in the Spirit. The crucified Christ is not a stable center, but a transcendent voice that cannot be domesticated by the church into their own possessed message.
Inhabitio Dei

What implications might this have for an understanding that the Spirit works with the Church, giving her authority? Does this qualify, permanently that authority? To what extant must one find oneself in continuity with the Church, and to what extant can one break fellowship with the Church? All these questions are on my mind, as today I sat down to hear progress on ecumenical Christian dialogue between the United Methodists and Catholic Church.

I would agree that the Church cannot domesticate this message, but the tone of the writing (at least to me) implies that each and every church has domesticated this message. Thus failing to live up to their calling. And again, what implications does this have for the statements of the previous paragraph? Apparently I’m falling behind in theology. Too much historical studies for me.

All of these questions aren’t meant at all to detract from the ridiculous, and truthful, statement that the present evangelical woe has entirely taken hold.

Recent Thoughts

Lately I’ve been reading a bit of Luther, and plenty of well written articles about conversations between Catholics and Protestants. Yea, it is quite a bit to read.

To be sure, both approaches to ecclesiology and Scripture aren’t congruent with one another. Coming from a theological ghetto, this is a compass by which I may judge the night sky that is Christendom. Cross’s comments concerning the liturgy match my own thoughts. It is almost scary. I find much of the Anglo-Catholic praxis, ecclesiology, and liturgy persuasive. That said, I still have reservations I am working through.

My largest reservation is, what I perceive to be, a massive redefinition of power by Jesus in his passion and crucifixion. That said, the papacy throughout history has seemed to work according to the ways of the worldly institutions. I am supremely impressed with Rowan William’s refusal to wield any power he might have as a worldly leader might. I will be the first to agree that most leaders will abuse power, and that is a shame and should be resisted. However, it is another thing to create such an inappropriate power through canon law.

Secondly, I have no way to determine what the line between an acceptable and unacceptable accretion is. There doesn’t appear to be a defining line within Catholicism either. It appears to an outsider that whatever opinion gains sway in the magisterium will become canon law. Were these new opinions (it doesn’t appear that much new in the way of law or councils has occurred) considered in terms of ecclesiastical unity? It doesn’t appear so to an outsider. Protestantism, perhaps narrowly, has defined that line. Anglican’s seem to hold to two principles regarding the question of orthodox; “always, everywhere, everyone”, and “all may, none must, some should”. That puts both questions of additions to the definition of orthodox belief, and giving ecumenical thought on the table. Though it does not solve them conclusively – and even that might be a good thing. And I am aware that the first principle was first uttered against Augustine’s theology.

Still working on all this. It is fun, and tough.

Is Everything a Nail?

So, an aquantaince shared a PDF written by a certain Charles Dickenson in 2007 titled A Proposed “Paradigm Shift” in Christology. The thrust of the argument is to offer historical Jesus methodology as a way to understand Christology, since all previous methods of understanding Jesus and trinitarian ideas have always had their problems. I think this basic thesis suffers on two points. First, we should be careful to think that we can propositionally, without problems, understand either God, or Jesus (regardless of whether it is the historical Jesus or the Jesus of faith, or even if those distinctions are proper). Second, that a historical methodology is applicable to a resurrected and exalted Jesus. All arguments concerning resurrection aside – everyone is in agreement that a crucified messiah-claimant does not start a Jewish offshoot group. To work based on a method that aims to get behind the proclamation of the early Church is precisely to set aside the Christological question as it has come down to us today. On to pointed reflection, I only aim to talk about the interesting points, not offer a full review, so this is going to be choppy.

It seems to me that making a Christological problem out of the crucifixion of the incarnate Jesus Christ by linking it to the Death of God movements put forth by Nietszche is an incredible non-sequitur. The language borrowed has no bearing whatsoever on the concepts behind the train of thought.

It is true that the conclusions of the early Church created problems – they experience these problems. I would sense that any talk of God that did not create problems to be entirely vacuous, making no claims of interest whatsoever. Let us not suppose any construction of God – as they are all constructions – will be without fault. Rather one ought to recognize that our constructions are mere devices, whether those devices be around another individual you know, or around God. Both constructions are faulty, but they are necessary. The better question is not “are there problems with the construction?”, but “is the construction effective?”. Dickinson answers in the negative, as is fair to do.

I find that the true issue at stake here is a failure to grasp the larger picture of the task of theology, and perhaps the nature of truth and worldview.

…only sharpens the question whether they do not presuppose conceptions of divinity and humanity which must now be abandoned as ultimately mythological.

To claim that the very worldview of the Greek Fathers is mythological, seems to me, to be incorrect. At this point, I wonder if I am in possession of a hammer – and consequently see everything as a nail – because the viewpoint that appears to be presupposed is that our Enlightenment, or even post-Enlightenment, worldview is inherently better than the Greek Fathers worldview. Granted they are both different, but if Naugle’s Worldview is correct, worldviews are neither inherently “better” than another. To resort to calling their view ‘mythological’, while ours is depicted as truer is inherently false based on the very function of ‘worldview’. Let it be known that our own worldview is also mythological – just on different terms and it different ways.

Rather, we ought to recognize (again Naugle) that truth is contextual. The truths of (however much is contained in) the early Church belong to the presuppositions, and questions of the early Church. Their answers that they claimed as truth are for themselves. What one ought to recognize is the referent to which those answers point, what considerations in light of their presuppositions did they make, why, and what could they not do? I find more and more that I am persuaded by this maximalist approach:

Third, there is the principle of what may be infelicitously called
Christological maximalism: every possible importance is to be ascribed to Jesus
that is not inconsistent with the first rules. This last rules, it may be noted,
follows from the central Christian conviction that Jesus Christ is the highest
possible clue (though an often dim and ambiguous one to creaturely and sinful
eyes) within the space-time world of human experience to God, i.e., to what is of
maximal importance. Lindbeck

That is to say, if Christ is the perfect depiction of God to us, and the perfect depiction of us Godward, on what appropriate grounds ought anything be denied him? And surely this is absolutely a referent which both the NT and the Greek Fathers point at. This is not to say, however, that everything we accord him must be perfectly congruous as we shift between each of these perspectives. If there is a consistent mistake made, it is one of harmonization, smoothing out the edges for our own mental well-being. Again, truth is contextual. The perspective approached determines the validity. When bringing together perspectives there is no reason they wouldn’t conflict! This is a very human truth, and we are human. The creation of a pure, clean, objective, rational, and paradox-free truth is a hoax. We do not experience that in our lives lived. Why do we create another world in which we apply this strange principle to?

It is at this point if I wonder I am missing the forest for the trees. Is the de-mythologization program exactly what I’ve pointed out? Going behind the worldview and finding the referent? On one level I think I am saying the same thing. However, whenever I’ve seen it executed, no care is taken to our own presuppositions as being equally mythologized as where we’ve gotten this new piece of data from.

So likewise for us today: the very fact that ancient world-views allowed for and even expected the divine to incarnate itself in a human being, but that we today no longer share those world-views, makes it
more probable for us that ancient stories of such incarnations are products of those world-views than of anything that actually happened.

First, the issue is that the Jewish world-view in no way whatsoever allowed or expected YHWH to incarnate himself. This is the standard history of religions approach without taking any sensitivity to the context in question. That is the large origins question that needs answering, in Hurtado’s words “How On Earth Did Jesus Become God?” in the first century according to Jews! Furthermore every formulation comes directly out of one’s worldview and resulting experiences. Those experiences recount things that are perceived to have actually happened. I don’t have to understand the reasons behind the east coast blackout during the summer of 2002 I was caught in, but I experience it and it created a formative experience. The incredible interdependence of our society is just a part of my worldview – and it might not be shared by another reader in another time and place, yet that experience does in fact state that something happened.

I have read Wright’s first three volumes, and am a supporter of his approach in general. What I don’t think my acquaintance realizes is what this actually entails. He supposes that such an approach a priori vindicates his own theological stance, before he has even handled the evidence, over and against the orthodox opinion. As for Dickenson’s essay, I am not sure why, in his estimation the third quest should offer him better prospects for a problem-free Christology.

Sex and Identity

An interesting little conversation took place a while ago. I am certainly late to posting on this, in fact it has been sitting around as a draft for a while. I am certainly in no place to make a judgment, rather I aim to recount all of it and gather facts. Certainly this issue has been perplexing the Church for several years now, specifically the Lutheran and Anglican denominations. There are certainly issues worth highlighting.

“If Christ [i.e. not Freud] is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness” – since Jesus himself did not participate in any of these experiences.

The quote within the quote there is the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. And it is an incontrovertible fact. Any Christocentric approach of anthropology must take this line. One can always cease to be Christocentric anthropologically, and I imagine that some have, but one is left to argue why that understanding should be preferred over the authentic and perfect humanity of Christ. I think Barth is right to underscore that our sexuality is a part of our identity, you would have an uphill battle in our times to prove otherwise. Perhaps he was mistaken to imagine that is it the pinnacle or underlying issue of our humanity.

Foucault’s argument shows that we are obsessed not with sex itself (as a physical act), but with “the truth of sex” – with the idea that sex is a revelation of truth.

For myself I find this to be true. The temptation of the act lies not so much in the act itself, but what beyond the act is signified. If sex, and sexuality, is just a red herring for us where might we look?

For one thing, I think Christians ought to take much more seriously the category of friendship, while thinking a good deal more critically about the unbridled theologisation of marriage and the so-called “family unit”

I find the overall statement of the Gospel, as evidenced in the New Testament to be specifically a new family. As I’ve become more keen, thanks to some training, to pick out the civil religion instituted as a part of the United States, I wonder just how much this idea of the family unit is tainted. Surely the thrust of the Gospel message is an entirely new community. More than a single family living detached from every other single family. This intense level of friendship is hard to sustain – that I am sure, on very few occasions I’ve tried.

Marriage, he contends, offers an expression of love and sexuality not realisable in any other human relationship, but it is no more human than any other human task or relationship.

Imagine holding marriage and friendship on the same level of humanness? I’ve never conceived of them that way. I ought to and see what comes of it. Again, if we’re to have a Christocentric approach, what is the epitome of humanity? Self-giving, self-sacrificial love with a goal of God’s will being done in the world. What does that look like in a friendship, in a marriage, in a community of faith? That ought to be what we look towards when we ask ourselves these kinds of questions, is it not?

It may, through the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit be commandeered and become in many and sundry ways a parable of the kingdom, just as many of the trivial aspects of human life are open to God’s interruption and transfiguration. But, insofar as the meaning of authentic human existence, sexuality tells us nothing. Not if we really believe that Jesus defines for us what it means to be be human. And, further to this point, only when we allow sex to be truly and wonderfully insignificant, to be trivial, will it be able to be received as a gift rather than gulpingly grasped in an idolatrous fit of fetishizing.

Terry Eagleton

All these good theological posts are making me doubt if NT is where I want to be. Ok, not really. But they are where the rubber meets the road, and are all points where the NT will inform our faith. That is why I want to study the NT. And this new atheism “movement”, if it should be called anything more than a stumbling forward powered by vitriol, continues to make press.

This is the second atheist philosopher I’ve now seen go public with a rather extensive critique of the Four Horsemen. On to the juicy tidbits, all the emphasis is mine.

NS: You’re a literary scholar, and you’re talking about religion. Is religion literature? Are you proposing that religion become a resource for politics to draw from in the same way as any other literary canon might be?


TE: No, not at all. I think the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way of diffusing its radical content. It’s actually a way of evading certain rather unpleasant realities that it insists on confronting us with. One of the things that happened in the 19th century was that culture—literary and other kinds of culture—tried to stand in for religion, and there was a lot of talk about religion as poetry and religion as myth. That was an attempt to shy away from some of the more uncomfortable challenges of religion when taken rather more seriously.

NS: Though of course the Christianity you present doesn’t sound like a lot of the Christianity one hears in the public sphere, especially in the United States.


TE: I think partly that’s because a lot the authentic meanings of the New Testament have become ideologized or mythologized away. Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament—the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois—all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version.

NS: You say he emphasizes a “propositional” account of religious faith above a “performative” one. But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?


TE: All performatives imply propositions. There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on. The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance. Somebody who didn’t grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted. These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.

I think these three strands speak towards a single truth about what has happened. Religious literacy is at an all-time low. Very few are in a position to understand just what they are reading. It is not their fault. Things have changed. Largely the Church was ill-equipped to deal with fostering a religious literacy. And universities have long since been places where that occurred as well. To study the literary qualities of the religious texts can certainly cause one to gloss over their potential impact. You end up looking for something else. Platitudes get substituted in. You can’t eat a whole meal of platitudes however. They are the sugary bon-bons, the mint on your pillow, after you’ve eaten a full meal at the table. It is therefore easy to call on propositions as the markers. Especially in an increasingly scientific age where modernism has run its course.

Both the civil religion, I would suggest the “dollar-worshipping culture” above, and a great deal of evangelicals and fundamentalists have all grabbed onto the proposition arguments offered by modernism. And, at least in my view, the modernist agenda has fallen flat. It is all but canned on the philosophical front. That would certainly create a vicious circle in which religious literacy becomes worse and worse. Only a “performative” view, to use Eagleton’s term, such as Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, among others, seem to be able to “get” what they are reading. Perhaps their sacramental liturgy has kept this literacy, this performance, alive. Though to be sure, not all of them are on the same page, which makes their examples hard to follow. I know for myself I am looking for a high liturgy tradition that values this emphasis on performance. Hopefully those who are religiously literate are able to move in these directions to open people’s eyes.

And just to close with one stinger.

NS: When you talk about it being beyond choice—I’ve been interested to see how Richard Dawkins calls himself a “post-Christian atheist” and talks about celebrating Christmas.


TE: I think, actually, he’s a pre-Christian atheist, because he never understood what Christianity is about in the first place!

[HT: Inhabitio Dei]