What do you get when you put two of the world’s top philosophical theologians, a prestigious university President, and me in a room with a camera? A fun conversation.
At the American Academy of Religion I was able to join LeRon Shults, Philip Clayton, and Stephen Knapp for a discussion about how theology finds traction in the world. Other than being slightly out of place being paired with these three theological super stars, I believe something happened that was worth sharing. Enjoy!
Let me play John Lennon here. Imagine.
Imagine that what is right and wrong, good and evil, is transparent to human reason. Imagine, too, that we can distinguish between apparent and real goods and lesser and higher goods and then reason our way from an is to an ought without religion. Imagine that, except for a few very complex moral realities, we mostly enjoy a consensus about life’s deepest values and have already articulated them in such documents as the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and codified them in such documents as The US Constitution & the Bill of Rights and the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Imagine that, with such a moral consensus, politics was the art of the possible and dealt more so with practical solutions and prudential judgment, even on matters of war and peace, but especially with regard to keeping everyone healthy, optimally educating everyone and striving for full employment.
Imagine, too, that rather than having Republicans and Democrats, with such practical biases as so often morph into ideological absolutes, we would have, instead, the Tenders of the Golden Goose (because they are experts in keeping geese healthy, geese like business & industry & individual taxpayers) and Distributors of the Golden Eggs (because they were experts in delivery of essential products and services). Imagine, too, that all the Goose Tenders & Egg Distributors were all astute enough to know not to stress the Goose and fair-minded enough to optimally distribute the eggs. Imagine, too, that rather than having Conservatives and Liberals, we would have Settlers and Pioneers, folks that were gifted with such charisms as, on one hand, boundary establishment & defense, on the other hand, boundary negotiation and transcendence.
Now, what in the world would religion have to do if it were not otherwise preoccupied with moral and practical realities, much less encroaching on such empirical realities as fall under the purview of science.
There is no question that as one’s axis of interpretation, or axiology, an interpretive religion would transvalue our cosmological pursuits, those being descriptive science, normative philosophy and evaluative culture. Our cosmology serves the end of socializing humans, making us able to function in society, meeting one another’s needs. It deals with empirical, rational, moral and practical realities, as Merton would say, first taking us through the process of humanization, then through socialization. The problem is that our religious institutions have become more so instruments of socialization and less so of transformation.
Religion gains its traction, then, not primarily or directly through the means of socialization and political institutionalization of services and political coercion. Religion gains its traction by fostering transformation, or Merton’s True-Self-realization, or the Ignatian contemplation to attain love, or the Buddhist awakening to our solidarity that compassion might naturally ensue. Religion is a risk-taking adventure whereby we amplify the risks involved in our cosmological pursuits of truth, beauty & goodness into the axiological pursuits of faith, hope & love toward the end of augmenting all human value-realizations. But religion has been domesticated into one more social institution alongside others. The sense of adventure has been lost and the risk-taking aspects have been tamed. It’s become a vehicle of respectability and social amenity when it should be, instead, instilling passion and shaping of desires. We need to honestly ask ourselves: What if science, morality and politics were already in good hands, then what value-added contribution would religion be expected to make? And we need to get on with THAT!
The question then becomes, what if I told you that reality, at bottom, was friendly and that Someone loves you and has dreams for you beyond your own wildest imaginings? How would you respond to that Good News? That you are BE-LOVED! And what if we did all we could to sacrifice ourselves in kenotic, self-emptying for this person, these people, with whom we are sharing this Good News?
There ain’t no Religious Right and Religious Left. Those are nominal socio-political realities cloaked in the garment of so-called religion. We need to emulate Ghandi and Martin Luther King and do an end-around all of these institutions with their sick identity structures trying to suck us into some machine on their own terms. In the end, it can change who’s in Congress and so on, but that would be a by-product not the designed end-product.
The Spirit moves when He wills, where She wills, how they will — and is ineluctably unobtrusive even if utterly efficacious, subtle but powerful, triumphing without coercion. Non-violent civil disobedience and other tools of the trade are out of vogue. WHY? We’ve got viral memes and blogs to publish treatises. Why not?
I’m engaging in provocative hyperbole and could play devil’s advocate with much of this. But I want to offer some food for thought. Thanks SO much for these thoughtful discussions.