1. Creation Out of Nothing isn’t Biblical, as in it isn’t in the Bible. If you read through the Bible you will not find the affirmation that God created the world out of nothing. It’s just not in there. In fact, even Biblical scholars who in the end want to affirm the doctrine for theological reasons will not point to the idea being present in the Bible. Just re-read Genesis 1 and ask yourself ‘where did the darkness and waters come from?’ They weren’t created but were there when God began to create.
2. Creation Out of Nothing isn’t a part of the Biblical Imagination. Not only is the doctrine absent in scripture but in the quite robust doctrine of Creation in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures you don’t even see an interest in the question itself. There is plenty of interest in the goodness of Creation, God’s on-going relationship with Creation, Creation’s role in God’s on-going mission, the Cosmic Christ’s relationship to Creation, Creation’s groaning and it’s worship of God but not an affirmation that it came from nothing. It seems odd to me to insist on a doctrinal nuance that isn’t in scripture or even asked. Sure you can hold it but if no author of scripture thought about asking, relax with the dogmatism.
3. Early Church Fathers didn’t sweat Creation out of ‘something.’ Both the Hellenistic tradition via Platonism and Judaism assumed that God created out of some unoriginate matter. Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria all explicitly affirm the doctrine. In one of his apologies to Greek philosophers Justin martyr insists that Plato stole the idea from Genesis! If Creation out of Nothing was necessary to preserve Monotheism or the Biblical doctrine of Creation then someone needs to call Justin.
4. Creation out of Nothing was a Theological Over Reaction to Gnostic Dualism. Creation out of Nothing developed as a response to Marcion’s insistence that the material world and its Creator were evil. Clearly insisting that everything came from a Good God eliminates Marcion’s dualism but it isn’t necessary to go that far. Both Plato and Genesis have no problem envisioning pre-existent matter as lacking qualities that God’s creativity comes to give shape. This idea wasn’t seen as a threat to God’s goodness at all. In fact one wonders that if the insistence of Creation out of Nothing doesn’t itself bring more problems than it solves – namely the problem of evil. If God’s creative activity isn’t a relational one all the way down then is God not in some way the author of evil?

Since the middle of the second century those theologians who came to be seen in retrospect as ‘orthodox’ unquestionably adhered to Creation out of Nothing as if it were a necessary doctrine from scripture and for the Christian faith. There are of course a bunch of theological ways around the problems created by the doctrine, like Augustine’s insistence that evil doesn’t actually exist or that 2 Maccabees 7:28 is the (inter-testimental) affirmation of the doctrine. My concern is that fear of Marcion has led the church to overrate the importance of the doctrine and continuing to do so isn’t necessary…or Biblical!

If anyone is interested in pursuing the Biblical doctrine of Creation check out Jon Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil. For the early church development of the doctrine see Gerhard May’s Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought. May actually affirms the doctrine but affirms the development I sketched briefly above. A brief summary of the theological side of the argument can be found by David Ray Griffin’s article “Creation out of Nothing, Creation out of Chaos, and the Problem of Evil” in Encountering Evil. All good Homebrewed Deacons will be familiar with John Caputo’s The Weakness of God and Catherine Keller’s The Face of the Deep.

I’d like to follow up on the claim of Žižek and others that the God revealed in Jesus is not a God of tidy prose logic but a God who celebrates reality’s “loose ends.” Last time I suggested that this lesson of so-called “Christian atheism” should dispossess us of the proverb that “everything happens for a reason,” a proverb that turns out to be more evasive of suffering than it is truly consoling.

This time I’d like to suggest that the appeal to a God of “reasons” is at work not only in common Christian responses to grief, but also in contemporary Christian objections to environmental ethics. One of the guiding questions here, then, is whether a shift away from the idea of a God who secures life’s “logic” can open us up to a properly ethical embrace of non-human nature.

Recently the Cornwall Alliance, a conservative Christian group, produced a DVD series urging their fellow Christians to object mightily to any agenda remotely smacking of environmentalism. Earth care, they argue in the videos, is fundamentally opposed to the Gospel of Christ, and the promotion of such care is a most insidious threat to our children, whose supple minds are especially susceptible to the temptations of idols. Not surprisingly, the Cornwall Alliance titled its series “Resisting the Green Dragon.”

Similar sentiments to those expressed in this series surfaced in a more broadly palatable form during Rick Santorum‘s recent campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. One of the things that made Santorum so attractive to evangelical Christians was the character of his opposition to government-enforced environmental protections. All the candidates shared this opposition, of course, but what Santorum added to the requisite I’ll-cut-all-government-agencies pitch was a theological justification. Barack Obama’s environmental policies, Santorum said, are not only fiscally unsound and politically overreaching, they are based on a “phony theology.”

Immediately Santorum came under fire for intimating that Obama is not really a Christian, and thus appearing to support those unfounded but still-popular claims that he is a secret Muslim. This, Santorum assured us, was far from his intention, whether such a suggestion played well with his base or not (it did). What he really meant, as he told CBS News the next morning, was that Obama doesn’t seem to have a Biblical understanding of human beings’ unique status in the universe. He meant that Obama’s policies don’t appear to respect the Biblical idea that human beings have “dominion” over the rest of creation.

What dominion means, Santorum stated confidently, is that human beings ought never to be “subservient” to non-human nature. In other words, in the (commonplace) event of a conflict between human economic goals and the continued thriving of non-human ecosystems (read: Alberta tar sands), the Bible says human considerations always hold the trump card. On this understanding, to “care” for the environment apart from the weighing of potential human costs and benefits is to subscribe to a “phony theology.”

On the surface, the shared concern in these examples of Christian resistance to environmentalism is that of avoiding idolatry (worshipping the creature instead of the creator). Yet their common effect is the aggrandizement of the human, to the point where their appeals to “dominion” seem out of step with any lordship discernibly modeled on Christ, who was among us “as one who serves.” What is at the root of this need to be so emphatic about human dominion that one all but ignores concrete Biblical models of authority? Is it possible that we try to assert a monarchical dominion over non-human nature because we have discovered something true but also troubling about creation? Have we perhaps discovered that creation is less tidily explicable than the human need for reasons can handle? By extension, do we dominate the non-human other because it’s our Biblically-justified, “God-given right,” or because we don’t like the idea that meeting God in his good creation might require developing a love for wilderness of all kinds?

Consider what Annie Dillard writes, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, about what the “second book” of revelation (nature) reveals about its maker:

The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz. (139)

The question is, do we love pizzazz? Is the world’s wild freedom, its extravagant perpetuation of the new, is all this given to us that we might “master” it? Does living up to our dominion mean straightening nature’s tangles, turning an apparently personal, albeit wild, power into something humanly profitable?

Francis Bacon certainly thought so. He justified the violence of his new scientific method by appealing to his contemporaries’ interest in dominion, rooted in fear of nature’s extravagance and “femininity” (which for patriarchy amount to the same thing):

For like as a man’s disposition is never well known or proved till he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed shapes till he was straitened and held fast, so nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art than when left to herself. (Bacon, “De Dignitate,” Works vol. 4, 298.)

In other words, if you want to relate to non-human nature in the way God intended, you cannot respect its (chaotic) agency, but must transform it, even violently, into an instrument of the human will. Thus do boreal forests become “oil reserves.”

Is there a warranted Christian response to the discovery that non-human nature is characterized more by extravagance than by efficiency which is not so Baconian? In other words, does Christianity encourage us toward a more sympathetic relationship with nature’s wildness than the fear which leads to oppressive dominion?

In Ecology at the Heart of Faith, Catholic theologian Denis Edwards offers a helpful summary of how Christian conceptions of the Holy Spirit have always pushed in the direction of hospitality toward creation’s extravagance, instead of fear of the same. The Spirit of God is depicted in the Bible as the life-giving breath which animates all creatures. Thus Edwards suggests that in the ongoing process of creation, the Spirit is the agent of the radical newness (the baffling pizzazz) that we can see all around us in an emergent universe. God as Trinity so loves communion among differences that in the person of the Spirit he creates ever more surprising differences to mediate in what amounts to a wildly extravagant love.

It seems appropriate, then, that in the Bible the Spirit is not given a human face: “the Biblical images for the Spirit tend to come from the natural world. . . . These images preserve the otherness of the Spirit of God and resist the human tendency to domesticate the Spirit” (45). And yet, Edwards goes on, this refusal of domestication, this critique of anthropocentrism, does not make God as Spirit remote, for “it points to the otherness of nonhuman creatures as a place of God.” The breath of God in the world is a wild wind, and yet this ought not to lead us to fearful tactics of domination, but instead “to a new respect for what is wild and beyond human domestication” (46).

The imperative resulting from this view seems to be this: don’t imagine you can love or serve only where you see a human face, or that you forsake your properly human role when you transgress that boundary. For the Trinitarian God’s creative love does not wish to establish you as a static sovereign, safe within your border as “human” against the “non-human.” Instead, the Spirit’s love seeks to form you according to the model of “ecstatic” personhood that is the very life of God. To prefer self-possessed anthropocentrism is to reject the personhood/life at the core of reality. If we seek our true dominion, if we seek to model the only truly “authoritative” form of life in the universe, then we must seek to be initiated into this way of personhood; we must seek to be inspired to hospitality rather than fear by the excesses of creaturely difference. This would not mean inviting tigers into our homes, but it should mean resisting political decisions whose preservation of human “benefits” at the expense of non-human nature is really to our detriment as persons being formed by the wildly hospitable Spirit.

Justin D. Klassen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the
author of the recent book, The Paradox of Hope: Theology and the Problem of Nihilism (Cascade, 2011), and co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Charles Taylor’s account of modern secularity. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Melissa, their two daughters, Clara and Gracie, and their dog, Eloise.

This is straight up, real deal, John Cobb at his best.  John has written one of the best Christologies, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, and is here to unpack a bit of it for you.

Deacon Dan, thanks for the call.  Here’s John Cobb talking about Process and Prayer & here’s the Theology Nerd Throwdown episode on prayer.

Don’t forget to check out the first session from the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here and the Question & Answer session that followed this podcast.

John Cobb has been on the podcast a number of times; Prayer and Process, and the special 101st episode, earth day, and Incarnation-cast. Tom Oord visited on two previous occasions; The Open-Relational Gospel and the Science of Love!

Want more Process theology? Check out my video bibliography here! Tom Oord is a sweet blogger. Cobb will answer your questions.

Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out! The iTunes subscription is below.

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Don’t forget to check out the first session from the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here.

John Cobb has been on the podcast a number of times; Prayer and Process, and the special 101st episode, earth day, and Incarnation-cast.  Tom Oord visited on two previous occasions; The Open-Relational Gospel and the Science of Love!

Want more Process theology?  Check out my video bibliography here! Tom Oord is a sweet blogger.  Cobb will answer your questions.

Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out!  The iTunes subscription is below.

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK.We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 20 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

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This is the FIRST TNT episode NOT in the Homebrewed Podcast Feed!  Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out!  The iTunes subscription is below.

Jack is Back… and this time we are discussing radical theology!  John Jack Caputo is a living legend and top notch philosopher of religion.  He comes with faith of Derrida and the Catholic mystical deferral.  Today you get to experience a live 3-D event, “Christianity UnCorked.”

This episode is sponsored by Dr. Laurel Schneider.  Thank You Laurel!  We appreciate the support!  If you missed Laurel’s visit to the podcast go check it out NOW!

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Both Caputo’s first,  second, and third visit rocked the podcast. Then we shared his main-stage fun from Soularize and the 3D event with Philip Clayton, Jay Bakker, and Peter Rollins.  Even more exciting are these class lectures Caputo is sharing here at HBC.  These lectures are free theological cat nip for theology nerds. Enjoy.

Here’s Elizabeth Johnson’s 1st and 2nd visit to the podcast.  She is the Catholic theologian Jack mentions as the one who got in trouble for attempting to counter the patriarchy in Classical theology.

 This is the LAST TNT episode in the Homebrewed Podcast Feed!  Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like next week’s episode with John Caputo!  The iTunes subscription is below.

Why are people leaving Church?  Rachel Held Evans blogged it, Bo shared it, and now we discuss it.  Andrew Sullivan’s post that got the conversation started ‘Christianity in Crisis.’  In this conversation Tripp discusses three good reasons people are leaving the church

1. Majoring in the Minors
2. Lack of Intellectual Integrity
3. Lack of Ethical Integrity

and then questions the impact of age programed ministry through college on the decline of the church.  Why does Tripp have gay friends at Acts 29 churches?

Then we move on to discussing Jesus and his disciples packing heat.  Bo previously blogged all the verses where Jesus mentions swords and then he ‘Walter Wink’s it’ by discussing turn the other cheek. Tripp then wonders about metaphysical violence and Process philosophy.  We concluded by getting a little sermonic about the Biblical logic for universalism!

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She is the author of Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Innovations: African American Religious Thought), The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence, and a contributor to the new Creating Women’s Theology: A Movement Engaging Process Thought.

There are a couple videos from the EVTC from Monica.  She discusses Life After Death & Creative Transformation.  Check them out and share them!

You can follow her blog and all the other media projects that she does at http://monicaacoleman.com/.

She is indeed a master tweeter and Patheos Progressive Christian Blogger.

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Laurel Schneider is Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Culture at the Chicago School of Theology.  If you are wise you have surely gotten yourself a copy of Laurel’s edited volume Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation since both Catherine Keller and John Thatamanil have discussed it on previous episodes.  Now you just got check out Laurel’s Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity.

Check out Lauerl’s “It Gets Better” video here.

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Prof. Paul Capetz & Deacon Stephen Keating join Bo and I in the Homebrewed Christianity HQ in Redondo Beach on a rainy St. Patrick’s Day morning for a podcast.  We had a blast! You will enjoy this podcast…if you are into philosophy, history, political ranting, Tillich’s theology or existentialism hitting the pews then this is the podcast for you.

Paul is an amazing historical theologian, Presbyterian minister, my favorite Calvinist, and dear friend.  He was on the podcast for Calvin’s 500th birthday, joined John Cobb for our special 101st episode, and explained how a Calvinist gets pumped about Process Theology.

AMAZING BOOK for $6.72 on KINDLE!!!

THANK YOU…”Secret Deacon” who had JR Cigars deliver some yummy sticks to me.  That was awesome.  I love it when the Deacons call in and I love it when they donate on PayPal but this ‘secret deacon’ invented a new form of encouragement – mailing me GOOD cigars.  To whomever sent them THANKS A MILLION!

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Join Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Bernice Powell Jackson, Myself, & others as we explore the connection of ecology, incarnation and the interconnectedness of all. April 19-20 in St. Petersburg, Florida for the A Sustainable Faith Conference. Join me the day before for a cigar, brew, convo. on Hell, & a discount for the event. Sunday I will be preaching at the Missio Dei.

Sketching an alternative proposal

What options then may be open to readers who share Clayton’s and Knapp’s concern for a dynamic Christology, but who want to retain a more traditional theological framework?

Here I can of course only offer the briefest of sketches, but you might call my tentative proposal ‘semi-adoptionist’, for want of a better term, drawing on Philip Clayton’s former Doktorvater Wolfhart Pannenberg. What if we retain the pre-incarnate Logos – it is absolutely the Second Person of the Trinity who takes flesh -, but radicalize the kenosis of Philippians 2 by taking seriously the free acceptance by the Logos of subjection to physical and mental developmental processes (from conception to Cross) including all they entails in the light of our limited but real scientific knowledge of human physicality. Jesus as divine Son is united to the Father ontologically throughout his earthly life, but is not necessarily consciously aware of it; the Logos rather ‘starts again from zero’ in accepting the limitations imposed by inherited human DNA, neurological structure, cognitive development, development and obedience to his earthly parents (Luke 2:51-52), having to learn a human religious tradition in its particularity, and the unavoidable reality of spending around one-third of his life snoring (yes, Jesus slept as well as wept!).

In this scenario Jesus is not ‘adopted’ at Baptism or Resurrection in the sense of crossing a threshold between a ‘non-divine’ and a divine nature, but certainly attains to a new intensification of his Sonship in a ‘functional’ sense. He is anointed with the Spirit at Baptism, raised through the Spirit at Easter and exalted as Kyrios  at his Ascension by virtue of having defeated the Powers in his self-emptying death on the Cross.  Appropriating The Predicament’s language of emergence theory, these are real events in Jesus’s life where a new ‘emergent level’ is reached. In this scheme there is therefore authentic becoming without the radical discontinuity suggested by all-out adoptionism. At the same time this ‘becoming’ is not restricted to the humanity of Jesus; as long as we regard Christ as one person and not two and remember that his indwelling by the Spirit, his earthly life is simultaneously the experience of a human being and the life of humanity experienced by God.

To use Irenaeus’s framework of seeing Jesus’s life as a recapitulation of what it is to be a human being, I would like to suggest that the mission of his earthly existence is in some way to become in time, through a life of self-giving love and perfect obedience to the Father, the Son that he is from all eternity.

As to how it is possible to keep the notion of the eternal Son while admitting real development in Jesus’s life, I would suggest that the idea of ‘Sonship’ has two aspects which, while obviously related, are conceptually separable. This was already explored by Pannenberg in Jesus, God and Man when trying make sense of Paul’s affirmation on the one hand of Christ’s pre-existence found in expressions such as ‘God sent his Son’ (Galatians 4:4) and formulations such as Romans 1:3, where Jesus is ‘designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead’, which has sometimes been interpreted in adoptionist fashion.  Pannenberg’s position is that while adoptionist language is undoubtedly Biblical, ‘the idea of Jesus’ adoption by God says too little’ and that – quoting Paul Althaus – ‘Jesus was what he is before he knew about it’.

One aspect of the Divine Sonship is filiation, i.e. the Son as the ‘only-begotten’ of John 1:18, a status which obviously cannot be ‘renounced’ kenotically. If we are using the title ‘Son’ in this way, it seems wholly reasonable to assert that Jesus was God’s ‘Son’ even in Mary’s womb. However, once the word ‘Sonship’ is used in its second sense, invested with real content in terms of the outworking of Jesus’s character rather than merely denoting filiation, things look different; if what we talking about is Jesus’s path of self-emptying love, this inevitably requires the trajectory of a life lived. It simply can’t happen by magic.

Being a composer, let me conclude with a musical analogy. Imagine the Son’s eternal Divine nature ‘vertically’ in terms of harmony, as a chord you could strike on a piano or a guitar. Now take those same notes into the world of ‘melody’ where things happen in time, i.e. horizontally, and play them in succession from the bottom up. But don’t dampen the strings of the guitar, and leave the piano pedal down. What happens is that you arrive at the same chord. In our temporally-structured world of earthly existence, it is such a ‘melodic’ unfolding which is the only means of the ‘composing-out’ of Jesus’s Sonship (Auskomponierung in the German technical jargon of which music theorists are just as fond as systematic theologians). Something really happens. But the notes are the same as those of the chord, and the listener’s experience is enriched by the melody. Not only enriched, but hopefully inspired for her own melodic journey through life.

The project represented by The Predicament of Belief  is surely an excellent and important one; Steven Knapp and Philip Clayton deserve our congratulations and gratitude for the considerable service that they have rendered both to the academy and the Church in undertaking it. But I think that I am not misinterpreting the intentions of the authors themselves in saying that their book is best taken as a starting-point and not as a final destination.

To be continued.

Doubly trained in music and systematic/philosophical theology, Peter Bannister is Associate Artistic Director and Composer-in-Association of SOLI DEO GLORIA Inc., a Chicago-based organization devoted to furthering sacred music in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He also co-directs the American Church in Paris’s participation in the John Templeton Foundation’s ‘Scientists in Congregations Ministry Initiative’, and is the author of the Music and Theology blog ‘Da stand das Meer’.

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spirituality?  Is it an asset to Christian Theology?

In this amazing video series Christian theologian and philosopher of science Philip Clayton tells scientific story of emergent evolution and invites the viewer into an evolutionary spirituality.  The video series was produced by Travis from The Work of the People \ Alter Video Magazine and recorded during the Emergent Village Theological Conversation at Claremont School of Theology.

Video #1 (Origins of the Universe)

It used to be that science was thought to have nothing to do with us. In this first of five videos
on “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton explains how we are in fact part of the
grander story of the universe. This brief history of the cosmos shows how we belong to the narrative of
continual emergence that is the history of the cosmos. Understanding the physics of the universe’s birth
helps one to see how humanity fits into the universal story. (And what about life on other planets?)

Video #2 (Origins of Life)

Is life the result of a miraculous divine intervention, or is it an inevitable byproduct of the laws of physics
and chemistry — or both? In this second video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,”
Philip Clayton describes current scientific thinking about the origins of life on earth. We see how life is
influenced from the beginning by natural selection, which produces increasingly complex organisms over
time. Can this process be seen as the means for generating increasing levels of spiritual possibility?

Video #3 (Symbiosis versus Competition)

We are often taught that evolution requires the concept of “competition” to be at its very core. In this
third video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton talks about recent
scientific discoveries that show how organisms work together symbiotically to create ever new forms
of cooperation. More than just being “red in tooth and claw,” nature seems to act in powerful ways
through cooperation across a vast variety of ecosystems. It appears that some scientists have projected
their own (materialist, sexist, or atheist) values onto the data that they are seeking to interpret.

Video #4 (The Coevolution of Biology and Culture)

Could it be that more than just biology is involved in the evolutionary process? In this fourth video of
the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton shares the concept of coevolution,
the idea that cultural and biological forces both play a role in determining the broader trajectory of
living organisms. Through the phenomenon of social learning—that is, being taught new skills by friends
and relatives that are not genetically programmed—we begin to see that evolution includes social and
cultural influences as well. Genes and cells are apparently not the only determiners of who we and the
other animals become; agency and intentions play central roles as well.

Video #5 (Evolution, Spirit, and Spirituality)

In the centuries after Newton, science was held not only to exclude “spirit” but also to disprove its
existence. In this final video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton
argues that recent changes in the interpretation of science actually invite the non-material back into
the conversation. The question confronting us now becomes whether we think of the universe as
functioning only reductively—with all true explanations lying ultimately at the level of physics—or as
full of possibility, with newness emerging from sources all around us. If the universe is really “upwardly
open” in this way, science and religion may serve as partners in addressing life’s deepest questions:
what is the meaning of life? What matters; what is of value? And what does it all point to in the end?

"Everything Happens For A Reason"

by Justin D. Klassen

Greetings, fellow fans and imbibers of Homebrewed Christianity! I am grateful to Tripp and Bo for giving me space here to pursue some reflections on the shattering implications of contemporary materialist or atheist uses of Christianity.

The question guiding these reflections could be stated as follows: What can believing Christians learn about their own tradition from that tradition’s most controversial fans, especially from those who don’t believe in God, for supposedly “Christian” reasons? In a future post, I’d like to direct this question toward popular conversations about environmental ethics. But today it makes sense to begin more generally, by identifying what a materialist use of Christianity might criticize in popular thinking about God.

Let’s begin, not with God as such, but with a contemporary American proverb that often stands in for God: “Everything Happens For A Reason.” The sentiment of this proverb has been deployed widely in response to the destructive storms that ripped through my neck of the woods this past weekend. I call it an American rather than a specifically Christian proverb because its expression is common to a range of meaning-seekers wide enough to include both John Piper and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, if a quick Google image search is to be believed, people are having this phrase tattooed on their bodies with increasing regularity. Many others of us seem at least to have it tattooed on our hearts. What is so compelling about the idea captured in these words?

Perhaps some illumination can be found by reflecting on when we tend to pull these words out of our hats. My sense is that we don’t use them when life is going according to plan. Nor do we trot them out when we experience interruptions that are only minor. So my muffler fell out of the bottom of my rusted car recently, and it messed up my day. I had to throw my bike in the car and pedal-commute from the shop to work in the morning. I don’t think anyone would be inclined to say that this “happened for a reason,” unless they meant simply that the muffler failure had a proximate cause (the salt of too many northern winters acted as a catalyst of oxidation—but no one would get a tattoo about that “reason”). So when do we feel the need to write these words on our hearts, or to deliver them to the hearts of others?

It would seem that we need them in times of deep, shattering interruption—like when a relationship is broken, when we lose a job we thought defined us, or when someone dies. If this is the case, then we can conclude that we find these words most useful precisely when we cannot believe them to be true. I know my muffler failed “for a reason,” so I don’t have to point to my tattoo in that case. But in those moments when I am at a real loss to explain an event, for myself or for some fellow sufferer, then, oddly, I am inclined to insist that there is an explanation. The moment when I really don’t know any reasons is strangely the same moment when I must claim so strongly to know them that getting a tattoo to this effect begins to sound like a good idea.

Slavoj Žižek describes this desired recourse to reasons as the ideological function of religion. By this he means simply that religion (in which our “American proverb” can be included) allows us to deal with the trauma of experience by telling ourselves the lie that it’s not traumatic. We get to be close to suffering, we get to mention people experiencing trauma in our prayers and sermons (which I’m sure many of us heard this past Sunday), precisely by refusing to experience even these worst of events as traumatic. In other words, just when the trauma or shock of life is about to sink in, people like John Piper come along and explain it away, under the guise of dealing with it.

A key difference between Žižek’s critique of religion and other forms of atheism is that Žižek calls his atheism “Christian.” Homebrewed readers and listeners may recognize this tactic from their familiarity with the work of Peter Rollins and others. Žižek argues that the paradigmatically Christian experience is the experience of dereliction, not completion. It’s the experience of having that ink needle slapped out of your hand at the moment you think you most need its solace. And it’s the transformation of our anguish over the absence of reasons into a new kind of freedom. As Žižek puts it, the Spirit of Christianity heals the wound of experience, “not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane body into which the wound has been cut.”

A life in fidelity to the derelict one, then, would be a life lived with eyes open to the reasonlessness of experience, but where the absence of reasons is not felt as a lack in relation to some fantasy of “completion,” but as the gift of loose ends. Life as such, in Christian terms, is a superabundance of loose ends. And if Jesus is affirmed as divine, then it is divine not to tie life’s loose ends into a tidy knot but to celebrate them, and sometimes, to weep over them.

It is no secret that Žižek gets the substance of his approach to Christianity (not to mention his sense of the traumatic nature of experience) from the work of G. K. Chesterton. In the second chapter of Orthodoxy, Chesterton suggests that a “poetic” disposition is better suited to the infinite sea of reality than a “logical” one (one that needs everything to happen for a reason). The logician’s disposition may connect all the loose ends, but the resulting knot binds both the world and the person into shrunken forms of their true selves. Sometimes we attribute the failure to articulate clear explanations of life’s uncertainties to a “lack of imagination.” Žižek and Chesterton both would have us reverse this relationship, and say that it’s wherever life cannot be abided without being explicated, wherever suffering cannot be shared without being explained, that our imagination is failing the world, and we are failing our fellow travelers.

All this is to say that what Žižek’s Christian atheism shows believing Christians is that it is possible to imagine fidelity to the God affirmed in Jesus as militant against the God of “reasons,” the God who cannot stomach life as human beings really experience it— as the locus of inexplicable joys and sufferings that may be shared, and may even be expressed, poetically, but may never be “explained.”

Justin D. Klassen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the
author of the recent book, The Paradox of Hope: Theology and the Problem of Nihilism (Cascade, 2011), and co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Charles Taylor’s account of modern secularity. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Melissa, their two daughters, Clara and Gracie, and their dog, Eloise.

Narrative theology examines the fecund relationship between story, Biblical interpretation and the ongoing life of the church. It examines the relationship between narrative as a literary form and theological reflection.

It is in the reading, telling and interpretation of narratives that humans derive their communal and personal identity as well as provide a basis for meaningful activity of the world.

Accordingly, biblical scholars and theologians have considered how narrative functions

• biblically
• doctrinally
• historically
• liturgically
• morally
• missiologically

and what implications this might have in terms of a Christian understanding of the nature of God.

Narrative draws deeply from philosophical insight into the relation between narrative and rationality. Knowledge is thus not derived from random collection of “facts” but only in light of the inherited narrative frameworks passed down through meaningful stories.

In Christianity, the primary narrative framework is supplied by Scripture. For Karl Barth the critical matter was not whether the narratives could be proved historically inerrant or scientifically verified, but rather how the stories functions themselves to span the gap between the believer and Scripture’s ultimate Author who lives and moves through these narratives.

Because the truth of Scripture is ordered to its narrative, Hans Frei argued that modern emphasis on pure reason or universal religious experience has led to a damaging eclipse of the biblical narrative and thus the theology that rests upon.

a quick follow up to the post earlier this week

 I wanted to thank everyone who gave feedback on the Four Locations of Theology in the 21st century post from earlier this week. I appreciate the comments here, on facebook, and the emails.  It has given me a lot to think about and I wanted to clarify three themes that have emerged.

Three clarifications:

• Reason seems to be the suspicious quadrant. Every time I bring up quadrilateral, more than half of the conversation will be centered on reason. This week was no exception. Reason draws the most concern – which is funny to me because tradition is the one that I find most suspect.

Here is the thing I would want to clarify: the other 3 themes of Scripture, Tradition and Experience all have reason woven into them. Those who wrote the scriptures, those who established the tradition and even our won experience are all saturated with reason. It is inescapable. The scriptures did not fall from the sky! They passed through the author’s minds and were processed with reason. Same with tradition. The creeds were not divined in some sort of supernatural ceremony. The were constructed and reasoned. Our experiences are interpreted utilizing our filters, frameworks and lenses.

 It seems important then to clarify that those three are not independent of reason but are dynamically intertwined with it. It would be useless to take out reason (as some have suggested) because it interlinked and inescapable. 

•  It may be that the quad needs something else. Some suggested replacing one of the 4 elements with an alternative. My favorite idea came from my friend Raphael who said

 “I suggest we add a fifth source for the practice of theology in the 21st century: Imagination!”

Admittedly, it would no longer be a quad! but I think that the tradeoff is that you would get adventure and zest incorporated and not just a static, conserving, or historical product.

•  There are no guarantees. Even if we could all agree to utilize the quad for the theological endeavor, there is no guarantee that we would all come up with some thing or come out with the same conclusions. This seems to be a major concern – that we can not ensure the outcome of such an endeavor.

I am surprised at the conserving nature of such mentalities! People are ok to ‘go on the journey’ as long as we predictably end up basically where we started.

Think all you want. Explore new thoughts and incorporate science … just don’t stray too far from the foundations of antiquity!  Integrate new realities and account for ongoing historical developments … just make sure that you end up with the same thing we started with.

I have not overstated this hesitancy and resistance. But the reality is that there are no guarantees. You may start out an Evangelical and end up being an Emergent type working in a Mainline church with Process theology as your main conversation partner!  (for instance)

 In summary: 

1. You can’t get rid of reason, it is already present in the other three. Scripture, Tradition and Experience are inextricably laced with it.
2. The quad may need a little something extra. The 21st century may require some zest, adventure and imagination
3. There are no guarantees. While we want to honor the historical expression and provide continuity with the trajectory … it might look a little different and think a little different than it did in the 3rd or 17th century.

Thanks for all your feedback, thoughts, and concerns. I appreciate the conversation.

Yesterday I had the honor of giving a lecture for the Center for Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology.  My goal was to show how one theologically sensitive youth minister under the influence of Process theology would think through the task of youth ministry.  Most of what I proposed does not necessitate one being committed to Process theology but you will hopefully see how the ideas come out of my own theological framework.  If you are interested in more conversations like this then come next week to the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here in sunny SoCal for some more Process inspired conversations.

If you have responses, questions, and such post them.  Bo and I are going to do a Theology Nerd Throwdown in the near future on youth ministry and we would love your input.

I love the quad! I am a proud descendant of Wesley and I still find it quite helpful to utilize the same quad.  Here is why I find each element so valuable.

Graphic Option TWO

I have been researching some famous takes on ‘the end’ (or ‘final things’) in preparation for an upcoming Theology Nerd Throwdown (TNT) about the resurrection and eschatology.

One of the reasons that I wanted to go back a re-visit this topic wasn’t just because we got several calls into the phone-in hotline (678-590-2739) – and not just because it is 2012 – but because my own eschatology has changed so radically in the past 10 years. So, I should probably put all my cards on the table before I interact with these legends. Two confessions:

• I do not believe that the book of Revelation is about the end of the world. I see it primarily as a political commentary on the first centuries (CE) utilizing an apocalyptic genre and therefore of little profit for purposes of this doctrine or for future-casting. Our hope come not from the book of Revelation but from the truth of Christ’s resurrection. 
• I was raised pre-millennial partial-dispensationalist, with amillenial charismatic leanings and an eye toward post-millennial expectations. My dad was a church historian and preacher so I know those camps’ strengths and weaknesses pretty well. I would obviously no longer frame the conversation the way that whole argument is constructed.

I find that in each of the following authors there something deeply attractive and then something a little troubling – some more troubling than others. Here then is my sampling of perspectives. I would welcome any feedback or new suggestions.

Irenaeus: this 2nd century writer was perhaps the first great postbiblical theologian  and he believed in a physical resurrection (Against Heresies, book 5, chapters 32-33, 36). You can see in his writings where we get most of our historical literal reading. He even believed that the new flesh would be identical to the old in which the saints would inherent the ‘new heavens and the new earth’.
The hesitation comes when he gets to this part where he is working with Matthew 26:27-29 where Christ promises not to drink of the fruit of the vine until the new kingdom. He is putting a lot of stock in the literalness of both the presence of grape vines as proof of  the physical nature of new creation and the assuredness of the resurrection because of the disciple’s presence for the drink.  There is a hermeneutic in place that I am just not sure anyone wants to assimilate in the 21st century.

Origen: this 3rd century writer has a spiritual take that stands in sharp contrast to the literalness of the Irenaeus. His doctrine is known as apokatastasis ton panton – the restitution of all things (On First Principles, book 3, chapter 6). I was prepared to like Origen – as I am a big fan of his on several other subjects.
I was not prepared however for his big leap! He puts so much stock in the idea of God being ‘all in all’ that he even goes as far as to say that there will be no more contrast between good and evil and this will be true for each individual person as well. He was definitely working with a model of ‘Mind-Body-Spirit’ that is ancient and I was not sure I wanted to go back to.

Augustine: this 5th century writer is perhaps the most famous writer on this subject (City of God, book 22, chapter 30). He helps us dream of perfect peace and promises rewards where “virtue will be the best and greatest of al possible prizes”. His is truly the stuff of bliss and delight.
I have several hesitation with Augustine, not least of which is the whole best of all imaginable worlds suspicion of human creation and limitation … but it is how he get there that is notable.

“There is a clear indication of this final sabbath if we take the seven ages of world history as being “days” and calculate in accordance with the data furnished by the Scriptures. The first age or day is that from Adam to the flood…”

We obviously live in the seventh day (of indeterminate length) before the 8th day of Sabbath rest. I’m assuming that I don’t need to elaborate why this antiquated mental construct and hermeneutic employed is problematic for the contemporary thinker.

Schleiermacher: This 19th century writer actually has a really healthy and vibrant reading (The Christian Faith) … but it is framed in a unique bracket. He begins by saying  (essentially) that the doctrine related to the consummation of the church is going to be different than other doctrines (like Christology) because so much of it is speculation and can not come from human experience. He makes a strong case for seeing prophetic pictures through the rules of art and an insistence on tracing everything back to the utterances of Christ. He points our the inherent limitations of conceiving of a future life by analogy with the present one. He is right about that! Too often talk of heaven is nothing more than a projection of the best of here. The glitch with this guy is that the minute you bring up his name in conjunction with experience you have a whole can of worms you have to deal with. 

 Bultmann: This 20th century writer stressed that our is essentially an eschatological religion that is not simply ethics or morality. He says “According to the New Testament, Jesus Christ is the eschatological event, the action of God by which God has set an end to the old world.” (History and Eschatology)
I like what Bultmann had to say. I mean REALLY liked it! But let’s be honest: unless you are going to get down with his whole existential-demythologized program … you are not going to be quoting a lot of Bultmann. He just comes with too much baggage. It seems to me that he is an all-or-nothing kind of resource.

Tillich: This 20th century giant runs his interpretation of the kingdom of God through his philosophy of history (The Protestant Era) making an important distinction between Kairos (fullness of time) from Chronos (measured time). I won’t review it here except to say that it is blazing awesome stuff and if you are prone to liking Tillich, then definitely check this out. He even explains how democracy, socialism, and anarchy are leftovers of religious utopia concepts. Tillich, however, is not for everyone – his heady and philosophically elaborate ideas are not entry level stuff. 

Pannenberg: I have never read anyone like Pannenberg. This 20th century writer accounts for the existentialist concepts of his peers while transcending their concerns and focusing on a real history and real future of the kingdom of God, not just internal personal experiences. I read a selection from The Idea of God and Human Freedom because I had just recently reread Theology and the Kingdom of God. Tripp is a big fan of Wolfhart P. so I will not take too much time here as I am sure that we talk about this plenty in the TNT.  I will just pass along this quote:

“In my opinion this is to misunderstand the meaning of the eschatological prophecies of the future. They are of course concerned with the real future, but in a different sense from predictions on the basis of natural laws, forecasts of political developments or the intuitive foreknowledge of contingent future events. The eschatological prophecies of the future formulate the conditions of the final realization of man’s humanity as a consequence of the establishment of the righteousness of God, which is essential to man’s being as such.”

You can see that it is thick reading with nuanced distinctions… but I love his insistence on a real historical expression while accounting for the abstract-conceptual concerns of the existentialists.

I am excited to talk with Tripp about Marjorie Suchocki’s process idea of being taken back into God and our experience being remembered in God and being free to experience the fullest of God’s presence for eternity – as well as N.T. Wright’s concept of  “the world being put to rights” that is so popular right now, as well a little Jurgen Multmann to make our good friend Tony Jones happy.

If you haven’t signed up for the conference yet, it is not too late! You have a month get your tickets and get to Southern California where it will be 86 degrees and sunny today.  Go to http://www.processtheology.org/

For those who don’t read atheist political philosophy…Paul is back, popular, and getting all sorts of attention.  In our conversation we play out a number of these Pauline insights and then tackle a bunch of questions being asked in the church today.  If you are interested in the philosophical discussion there is no better place to begin than St. Paul Among the Philosophers which is introduced and edited by Jack Caputo.  It includes chapters by Zizek and Badiou (philosophers) and then responses form Christian scholars from across the disciplines.

Stuff We Discuss…Paul, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Pete’s new book, Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones, Kester Brewin, Occupy Wall Street condoms and T-Shirts, the Crisis of Capitalism, Red Letter Christianity, the End of History, Identity Politics, Missional Progressive Christianity, why we aren’t ‘making disciples’ in church, and if the church should still gather after the Death of the Big Other God.

Since this was recorded live in a room with a Keg of Dale Brothers Beer there are the occasional bumps from me pumping the keg. I put some soft jams underneath to help cut down the noise from the note taking audience.

Here are the top 11 blogs of Homebrewed Christianity in 2011  :

1. Theology Nerd Book Survey 

2. That’s “Too Gay” – Brian Ammons’ Banned Chapter from Baptimergent

3. Your First Steps into Biblical Universalism…

4. 31 Reasons I Left Evangelicalism and Became a Progressive But Not a Liberal by Michael Camp

5. God Takes Sides….or When Karl Barth Was Right

6. Defining the Secular: Charles Taylor (pt. 3) by Deacon Hall

7. Rob Bell Wins 

8. The classic ‘Footprints in the Sand’ poem revisited

9. Are you a Bellian or Piperian?

10. a big difference between Christianity and Islam 

11. Goosing Emergents into the Mainline

Thank you all for your amazing participation and feedback – that was a wonderful year of conversation and theological brewing!

Let us know if you had a favorite that didn’t make the list.

From Chad, Tripp, and Bo – thanks for a great year, Brew On!  and don’t forget to share the brew.

Register for the conference at ProcessTheology.org - find the reading list [here] – order Process for the Perplexed by Bruce Epperly and get ready to engage philosophers, theologians, practitioners and church leaders in an amazing set of conversations!

If you want to listen to more podcast about Process, here are 3:

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Process with Bruce Epperly

Intro to Process Thought with Robert Mesle

An Emerging, Progressive, and Relational Vision of Faith with Bruce Epperly

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0827205295/?tag=homebrechrist-20

leanings.  This comes out of a really sweet commentary on Romans he wrote with David Lull which is well worth checking out.  Now enjoy discovering how Whiteheadian Paul was.

Thank you for this opportunity to talk about how my philosophical theology has influenced my interpretation of Romans. In my opinion, everyone is influenced in all their thinking by what they understand to be real. But since relatively few, these days, even relatively few philosophers, discuss metaphysics, or recognize this level of reflection, the influence is largely unconscious and therefore uncriticized. I owe to Whitehead and Hartshorne the fact that I think a good deal about this question. I need very briefly to explain the difference between the way I understand reality and the way that most people today, especially as heirs of the Enlightenment, assume it to be.

Most people think that their access to a world other than their own experience is through their sense organs. They focus especially on what they see and what they feel through touch. For practical purposes this gives them a world of solid objects that are colored. If they have studied some epistemology, they may agree that in fact what is given is only a phenomenal world. In either case, whether sensa or material objects, the entities making up the world are mutually external. It is widely assumed that no two things can occupy the same space at the same time.

These assumptions underlie the political and economic thought of the Enlightenment as well as its natural science. They have made any real concept of “community” difficult. They have made a coherent interpretation of quantum physics impossible.

I have been persuaded that another understanding of reality is better. This begins with an analysis of a moment of human experience itself. This is an event, rather than a sense datum or an empirical object. Instead of trying to understand this event as a product of objects in motion, this approach proposes the hypothesis that the world as a whole is composed of events and that in their most basic structure they resemble human experiences.

The analysis of the basic structure of a moment of human experience is in terms of its relationships to other events. Most of the content of one moment of experience comes from the influence, the flowing in, of past experiences. Much of the remainder comes from new stimuli derived from the body, especially through the brain. These mediate the influence of events outside the body, especially through the sense organs. There may also be some influences from outside the body, especially other human experiences, whose effects in experience are more direct and immediate. And in the theistic vision of Whitehead, there are also novel possibilities for the self-constitution of the new experience that express the inflowing of God into the occasion of experience.

The references to the body and its sense organs can be generalized only to other vertebrate animals. But the general point, that the presently occurring event is constituted by the inflowing of other events can be generalized much further. Hence, in this view, the real things that make up the world are not mutually external individual objects; instead, they are events constituted by the new unification of other events. In Whitehead’s terms, events are not “simply located.” Each event includes other events. A human experience is largely constituted by its relations to others. It is social through and through. The same is true of a quantum of energy.

What does this have to do with the interpretation of Paul? Quite a lot, I think. Of course, I am not claiming that Paul held to just the same view of reality to which David and I hold. But I do believe that when Paul has been read through the eyes of the dominant understanding, much of the richness of his thought has been obscured. I believe that when one is open to believing that entities interpenetrate one another, much that he says can be affirmed more seriously, and, indeed, more straightforwardly.

Speaking of those in the communities of believers, Paul said that we are members one of another, that together we constitute one body, and that this is the body of Christ. As long as we think of ourselves as bounded individuals, fundamentally external to one another, connected through contracts or common interests, this language can not be taken very seriously. On the other hand, if we understand that we are fundamentally constituted by our relations with one another and with a past that includes the Christ event, the language makes much more sense.

I have been embarrassed throughout my career by my extreme limitation with respect to languages, and especially the biblical languages. Prior to this opportunity to work closely with a New Testament scholar in the interpretation of a text, I have been quite hesitant to make pronouncements about the meaning of scripture. However, given my biases, in my Christology, I did dare to pick up on Schweitzer’s idea that Paul thought of a spiritual field of force emanating from the Christ event. I dropped the word “spiritual,” since in my understanding such a field of force emanates from every event and is at once both physical and spiritual. It consists in all those events that in some measure internalize the one in question. Every historical event affects all the events in its future. Given this metaphysical view, it is easy to assert that some events, such as the Christ event, have had a far greater field of force than most others, that the church serves continuously to renew, re-form, and channel this field of force, that the decision to orient oneself in terms of that field of force rather than others increases its efficacy in one’s life, and that much of Paul’s language about our relation to Christ makes sense when we think in these terms.

The Whiteheadian metaphysics also makes sense of Paul’s language about our relation to God. The idea of God’s Spirit indwelling us and of God’s love being poured into our hearts has been puzzling to those who accept the dominant worldview. For a Whiteheadian, it is quite straightforward. God is literally in us in the strong sense of participating in constituting what we are moment by moment. The effectiveness of that presence depends greatly on our decisions and many other factors.

Most important for our interpretation of Romans is the relation between ourselves and the Christ event. If that event is fundamentally external to us, then its saving effect must be that, in some way, it changed God’s attitude toward us. Theologians have held various views about how Jesus’ death satisfied God’s requirement of righteousness from human beings so that God declared believers to be just. For nearly a thousand years many Christians have supposed that some such doctrine is the heart of the gospel and that it expresses Paul’s message.

If we approach Romans with the view that all things participate in other things, we can find there a quite different understanding of how Jesus brought into being a new relationship between humanity and God. The crucial relationship of others to Jesus is one of participation. This is strongly suggested in Romans 6. The NRSV tells us that we have been baptized into Christ Jesus and that this is a baptism into his death. We have been buried with him by baptism so that just as Christ was raised from the dead, so we too might walk in newness of life. If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection life his. In 8:17 Paul tells us that we are joint heirs with Christ—if we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

Despite all this language, at least in Protestant circles, the focus has been on pistis. This was certainly important to Paul, but we believe that it should be understood in a way that ties it much more closely to the rhetoric I have summarized of union with Christ Jesus. We propose that Paul taught that just as we participate in Jesus’ suffering, death, burial and resurrection, so also we participate in his pistis. But the dominant translations are based on different assumptions and do not allow this idea to come to expression.

The role of a philosophical theology is not to dictate translations. It does, of course, bias one toward one translation or another. Theological bias influenced by philosophy has prevented translators from writing about the pistis of Jesus. Only very recently have they acknowledged that a number of texts can be read better as speaking of this. We think that the pistis of Jesus was as important to Paul as the suffering, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, these expressed or resulted from his pistis.

Further, pistis has almost always been translated as “faith” even though in some instances, such as references to the pistis of God, translators have recognized that they must translate it as “faithfulness.” We recognize that both translations are valid, but we believe that “faithfulness” is the more inclusive term and that Paul often had this more inclusive meaning in mind. We chose to reverse the balance, using “faithfulness” wherever it fits and “faith” only where it is clear that Paul focused on the narrower meaning. In particular, we believe that Paul was impressed by the faithfulness of Jesus, for example, in going to the cross for the sake of sinners, and that speaking of the faith of Jesus does not capture the fullness of Paul’s meaning.

Clearly, Paul was also interested in the pistis of those to whom he wrote. We understand this also to be more richly understood when it is translated as faithfulness in most places. How is this faithfulness related to that of Jesus? We think this relation is much like the relation of baptism to the death and burial of Jesus. For Paul the relation is one of uniting with Jesus. Our faithfulness participates in Jesus’ faithfulness or opens us to being formed by Jesus’ faithfulness. God then sees us in light of the faithfulness in which we participate rather than in terms of our continuing limitations and failures. We cannot participate in Jesus’ faithfulness without participating in Jesus’ suffering and death. Paul believes that through thus uniting with Jesus we are united with him also as children or heirs of God and are assured that we will share in his resurrection or

glorification.

To show that this is a plausible interpretation of Paul’s theology led us to a concentrated focus on Romans 3:21-30. For the detailed exegesis of this passage I have been wholly dependent on David Lull. But I am persuaded that his retranslation of this passage is more accurate to the Greek and makes far more sense than what we find in the NRSV. It also fits much better with the theology we find elsewhere in Romans.

We have, of course, relied heavily on other New Testament scholars, scholars who are unlikely to be influenced by the metaphysics that is important to David and me. This is important. Philosophical theologians must be especially careful to avoid any crude eisegesis, and the concurrence of scholars without their prejudices as to the meaning of texts is especially important.

One final word. I believe that the point of view of interpreters deeply affects what they see and describe. I have accented the role of our point of view in my comments. I also believe that it is crucial that what we see and describe from that point of view can be seen also by those who are not particularly interested in the point of view. I hope that even those who are committed to more conventional metaphysical ideas will agree that Paul may have thought in a way more like what we describe. Of course, I would be even happier if some decided that this point of view is fruitful and adopted it, at least provisionally.

To be a Christian is to hold Jesus in highest esteem. Even more important, it is to live as Jesus’ follower and as one who believes that in following Jesus one is also serving God. According to the synoptic gospels, people in his day, marveling at his words and deeds, called him “Lord.” The great question then was whether he was the expected one, the Messiah, or, in Greek, the Christ.

For his disciples, the resurrection appearances of Jesus settled these questions. Jesus was definitely Lord, and definitely Messiah or Christ. Although much that was expected of the Messiah had not happened, the title Christ almost became part of Jesus’ name or a virtual synonym. Jesus’ was God’s beloved son, chosen by God for the salvation of all who followed him.

Paul developed these ideas. As was expected of the Messiah, Jesus was a descendant of David, and through his resurrection he came to be, or to be recognized as, the Son of God. Jesus fulfilled God’s mission by opening the doors of salvation to all, including the Gentiles. Jews had been seeking salvation by obedience to the law, but this did not work. By his faithfulness to God even to death Jesus provided another way. Jews and Gentiles alike could participate in that faithfulness. This meant that they would suffer and die with Jesus. God accepts that participation as righteousness. Those who thus participated are reconciled with God and will also participate in Jesus’ resurrection.

This is truly an exalted picture of who Jesus was and is and of Jesus’ work for God and on our behalf. There is a heavenly dimension in that the resurrected Jesus is no longer an earthly figure but a heavenly one. But Jesus remains unquestionably a human being. “Messiah,’ “Son of God,” “Lord,” and “Savior” are all human titles. The resurrected Jesus is the first fruit of the transformation in which we are all to participate.

There is no suggestion that Jesus belongs in another realm as a divine being alongside God the Father. The thinking of Paul remains in the fully monotheistic tradition of Judaism.

Now in Colossians we are confronted with a very different picture. A generation has passed, and the Rubicon has been crossed. The faithful are now predominantly Gentile. Paul is the great leader, virtually the founder, of the Gentile church, and believers are eager to claim his authority for what they say. But their ways of thinking are no longer Jewish. The sharp distinction between the one Creator and the many creatures has faded. Jesus is the primary focus of their thought. He, not the emperor who claims their worship, functions as their God.

They still affirm the God whom Jesus addressed as Father. But the emphasis is now on the intimate, indeed insoluble, relation between Jesus and God. All things on heaven and earth have been created through Jesus and for Jesus. “In him all things hold together.”

To Jews of that time and to us today, it is impossible to think that a person inhabiting a human body could function in these cosmic ways. Probably that was never quite the intention. “Jesus” had come to name not only the human figure about whom we read in the synoptic gospels but also a divine being who temporarily inhabited a human body and in that role died on a cross for our sake. But there is less clarity in this Colossians passage about this distinction than in the prologue of John where it is clear that the everlasting Word of God became a human being in Jesus. There is no preexisting divine Jesus.

Even John is not as clear as it might be about the distinction between the human being Jesus and the Word that became flesh in him. The creeds likewise blur this distinction to the great detriment of Christian faith. Jews could see God’s Power, God’s Spirit, or God’s Wisdom manifest in a human being. Paul affirmed this of Jesus. If we believe, as I strongly do, that something of God is present in all God’s creatures, there is certainly no problem in emphasizing the rich and full way, certainly distinctive and possibly unique, in which God was present in Jesus. But we need to retain the distinction between the divine that was incarnate in Jesus and the human being who was partly constituted by that incarnation. In Paul the distinction is generally clear. In Colossians it is badly blurred.

The great danger of this blurring is that Jesus’ humanity be lost. Jesus became for many Christians a God walking around in human form. Fortunately, there were many Christians who resisted this loss. Antioch was a great center of the ancient church and of its teaching. There they clung to such formulations as that of the divine indwelling a human being. This is far more intelligible, far more faithful to Paul, and far healthier for the church. And throughout the whole controversy in the ancient church about the nature of Jesus it prevented the obliteration of Jesus’ humanity.

But those who in fact worshipped Jesus insisted that Jesus was not only the human being indwelt by God but also God. And over the centuries this confused and confusing idea has played havoc with Christian teaching. Jesus’ humanity has too often been swallowed up in Jesus’ deity.

If this had not happened, Jews would not have been so profoundly alienated from Christianity. There would have remained the dispute as to whether salvation comes through obedience to law or participation in the faithfulness of Jesus, but this could have continued as a debate that might prove fruitful for both parties. Christians had no business asking Jews to compromise their monotheism. Mohammed, who had the highest appreciation for Jesus as the greatest of God’s prophets before the revelation of the Qu’ran, might well have become a Christian. At least the mutual enmity of Christians and Muslims would have been greatly eased. Perhaps both Jews and Muslims might have learned from Christians to understand more fully God’s sacramental or incarnational presence in the world.

But all of this is what might have been. What has in fact been is that neither Jews nor Muslims could appreciate a Christianity that compromised God’s unity, even if it claimed that its teaching of three divine persons did not do so. What has in fact been is that many have been alienated by a teaching that places believing very doubtful ideas about Jesus over following him in humble service even when that entails sharing in his suffering.

For several centuries now Christians, especially Protestants, have been engaged in rescuing the human Jesus from his de-humanization by the church. Unfortunately, like many needed reactions, it has often gone too far. Humanizing Jesus has often meant reinventing him in the image of contemporary ideals, on the one hand, or in a negative light, on the other. Almost always it has separated him from “the Father” whose presence his followers saw in him.

Jesus is not alone in being subjected to this treatment. It seems to be important for us to bring the most admirable people down to our size. I believe that there are human beings who are truly remarkable in diverse ways and that humanizing them should expand our image of humanity rather than reduce them to fit a small one. I believe that we can and should say things about the fully human Jesus that we say of no one else. Being unique does not make one less human.

For that reason, despite my heavy critique of the confusion of deity and humanity that I find in this passage in Colossians, I also find much to appreciate. I have taken as my text verse 19: “in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” In my view the more fully God dwells within us the more fully we are human. Precisely because God dwelt so fully in Jesus, Jesus shows us what humanity in its fullness can be.

Our recognition of God’s presence in Jesus is also our assurance that God is like Jesus. Far from condemning us for our sins and failures, God loves and forgives. In the language especially emphasized in this passage we are reconciled to God. If we participate in Jesus’ faithfulness, there is nothing left for us to do.

We can come to God with the assurance that we are already fully known and accepted as we are and therefore can open ourselves in responsiveness to God’s inward call. In Jesus we learn that while we are secure in our relation to God, following our calling is not a path of safety in human terms. There is no assurance that our ventures in service of the weak and the poor will succeed, but there is assurance that God affirms them and uses them beyond our knowledge. God used even Jesus’ death for our salvation.

The author of Colossians expressed his devotion to Jesus in language some of which proved harmful in later centuries and in different contexts. We can learn from that to be careful that our formulations of our devotion not put others down. But we need equally to know that it is not the strength of our devotion that is dangerous to others, but only its mis-description and misunderstanding. We need to find in our time and for ourselves the way to express no less devotion, ourselves now, than the author of Colossians expressed in his time and place.

* This and more John Cobb HERE

Clayton Crockett is Associate Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. His work focuses on postmodern theology, Continental philosophy of religion, psychoanalytic theory and theoretical issues concerning religion and politics.

In the 1960s, the strict opposition between the religious and the secular began to break down, blurring the distinction between political philosophy and political theology. This collapse contributed to the decline of modern liberalism, which supported a neutral, value-free space for capitalism. It also deeply unsettled political, religious, and philosophical realms, forced to confront the conceptual stakes of a return to religion. (from the book description)

In this conversation with Tripp Fuller, politics, history and religion are evaluated from thoroughly theological lens. His book  Radical Political Theology : Religion and Politics after Liberalism is available from Amazon in hardcover and Kindle editions.

Don’t forget to sign up for the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation in Claremont, CA January 31-February 2.

Let me first of all start off by admitting that I cannot defend the whole enterprise called systematic theology. That is, I cannot defend it as some absolute set of propositions each of which relate to another in an eternal unified whole. I think that this point stands in two important sense. First, for those who would defend such a view of systematics, I don’t believe that they’re defending systematics as a whole but, generally, their own systematic positions, which is a power move to the utmost degree (conscientiously advocated or not). Systematics is and must remain open both in terms of the fallibility of human knowing and in terms of the flow of being in its becoming. Our propositions and understandings of God do, will, and must change. Neither can I defend the general hubris by means of which systematic theologians have upheld this discipline in the past.  Systematic theology is not an end in itself, which it has too often been taken to be, but a means toward the proclamation of the Word in thought, word, and deed.

For now, I want to focus on the critique that I believe is taking place tonight that academic theology is “impractical,” unable to do anything about the contemporary situation. To that I say, precisely.

Let me be clear, here: we must act within our world and open paths in this world toward peace, justice, and love. I will never decry the importance of something like “action,” often expressed as “activism.” However, activism acts on a worldview that it believes to be true, if not absolutely, then certainly with a great degree of probability. This is where disciplines like systematic theology come in.

Systematics and other academic-theological disciplines are, for one, activities in their own right. They are analyses of the world or past worlds as the are and have been such that in these worlds. The difference is, however, between the activity of thinking in systematic or academic theological terms and other activities (or activisms)is that thought is a manner of activity that opens up new interpretive possibilities–new ways of understanding the complex web of beings-in-relation that forms our world.

In this regard, the focus of systematic theology is not found in ensconcing a particular actuality (a possibility come to fruition through, say, bodily activity); it is found in opening up ever greater interpretive possibilities–interpretive possibilities that expose the complexities of the world in which we live at least enough to yield some humility in the theologian and activist alike. Systematics, then, brings nuance to a world that we too often want to interpret in the blacks and whites of “absolutely right” and “absolutely wrong,” which usually yields the violent logic of “me against them.” Systematics, then, holds a critical function (in the strict sense of critical), positing space between a overriding desire to act directly and the need to think that action through.

In saying this, however, I would contend that the proof of my argument is in the pudding. Thus, I want, secondly, to challenge skeptics of this idea to a task. For 30 days, read someone–an op-ed columnist, perhaps–with whom you greatly disagree. (I make my critical thinking students do something like this, by the way.) Come to know their thought and be able to think their thought after them to such a degree that you’re able to predict how they would be able to approach specific questions. Get into the intelligibility of what they say. I believe that you will have a simultaneous experience. You will be freed not from your disagreement of the person but of your desire to belittle them. This is no small step as too often it is our desire to belittle that deprives from basic understandings of opposing positions. You will also become freed, however, to see through holes in your previous worldview such that, even if you’re still not open to this particular person’s thought in and of itself, you are open to new positions and new possibilities from other persons with competing worldviews.

Take all that and apply it to the attempt to illuminate a basic theological worldview, and you’ll hopefully see the importance of systematic theology and its practice. Systematic theology illuminates new possibilities for the expression of faith for the activist and theologian alike such that neithers’ expression could remain absolute in its contextuality.

Does this, by the way,  mean that the activist must stop her work? Absolutely not! It simply reminds the activist that it takes more than their work to open the possibility of their work in the first place. Her work will open up new grounds by means of which to think through world, for sure; but it also rests on the illumination of worldviews that both she and others have opened up through theological and philosophical exploration in the first place.

Maybe I should explain. There seem to be two Peter Rollins

•  the mesmerizing author and speaker credited with such wondrous works as How (Not) to Speak of God, The Orthodox Heretic, and now  Insurrection, who helps people’s faith by relieving them of their  superfluous religious facades.
• the suspicious and sinister author and speaker who mystifies critics with his ability to deconstruct (ie. deceive) and entertain (ie. trick) people into asking Slovoj Zizek into their heart – and thus agreeing to go to hell.

As you can see there are two distinct Peter Rollins. And here is the thing, I like them both.

 I like what Peter Rollins is up to and I like what people think that he is up to. 

I buy books for my nephews and nieces. The favorites are Donald Miller, Shane Claiborne and Peter Rollins. These books challenge their hearts, expand their minds, and help their faith. They would have one view of Peter Rollins.

His new book is Insurrection and he is in full form during this hour.

If you like what you hear or what to express some concern, come over here [link] and sound off.

Caputo Writes lots of books.  He mentions Some Philosophers…Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude.

* We are excited about Doug Pagitt coming to Soularize!

* ‘Like’ John Caputo on facebook

Open Theology (we stated) was primarily:

• A) grounded in a reading of Scripture – versus other schools of theology that are a result of philosophical or systematic concerns.
• B) focused on a specific aspect of concentration: the opened ended nature of the future.

This explains why Open does not even attempt to account for everything ( atonement theories for instance) or provide a totalizing system as other schools of thought sometimes do.

 So my theory is this: I have found that Open Theology tends to appeal primarily to folks – often of some fashion of evangelical persuasion,  past or present – who get trapped between three other boundaries.

1. That theologies based on philosophy require a priori commitments before one can even begin to interact with the ideas. Philosophical theologies like Process are too abstract and require too many mental gymnastics. When someone looks into Process (or many other schools) and wades into the explanation against substance/matter and its replacement with packets of time/moments/actualities – it is just too much jabber-talkie and vocabulary.
2. That Biblical Scholarship is too much work behind the text before one ever gets to the text. In fact, that work behind the text may keep one from engaging the text much at all. Biblical Scholarship has become so elaborate, contentious, and contradictory that it is intimidating to even begin. Sometimes you just want to read the Bible and talk about what it means! 
3. That the round-and-round cul-de-sac conversations of bumper-sticker Calvinism vs. ‘Arminianism’ are exhausting and pointless. Open thought gets you out of that endless loop of antiquated argumentation.*

This is the appeal of Open Theology. It avoids the a priori assumptions of so much philosophical theology, it gets you into the text instead of spending all your time behind the text and it gets you out of the repetitive circular logic of centuries past.
Those three thing appeal to a distinct group of people.

*  (I’m not talking about real Calvin-Calvinist like the honorable Paul Capetz.)

In the intro we  have fun dreaming of Johnny Depp playing Pete Rollins in The Insurrection movie  with Christopher Walken as John Caputo. (Bo has unofficially trademarked this idea -so don’t get any fancy plans)

Come to SOULARIZE Oct 18-20 & Chill w/ us, Deacons, and a herd of awesome peoples!

Also worth noting for those of you who are into Holy Smokes, Tripp was smoking a Rocky Patel 1992 during the interview.

In the podcast Tripp recommends Paul Fiddes’ The Creative Suffering of God & Participating in God.

I love when he says things like:

The kingdom of God is the rule of weak forces like patience and forgiveness, which, instead of forcibly exacting payment for offense, release and let go. The kingdom is found whenever war and aggression are met with an offer of peace. The kingdom is a way of living, not in eternity, but in time, a way of living with out why, living for the day, like the lilies the field–figures of weak forces–as opposed to mastering and programming time, calculating the future, containing and managing risk. The kingdom reigns whenever the least and most undesirable our favor all the best and most powerful or put on the defensive. The powerless power of the kingdom prevails when ever the one is preferred to the ninety-nine, whenever one loves one’s enemies and hates one’s father and mother while the world, which believes in power, counsels us to fend off our enemies and keep the circle of kin and kind, of family and friends, fortified and tightly drawn.”  - The Weakness of God p. 15

All of this has been on my mind lately because of two upcoming events:

•  At Soularize (October 18-20 in San Diago) I will get to meet and share the stage with John Caputo at our Homebrewed Christianity live 3-D event.
• I have been editing both the Merold Westphal interview where Tripp asks about Wesphal’s good friend & sparring partner John Caputo as well as the Kevin Corcoran (Church in the Present Tense) interview for the following week. Both are not the biggest fans of what Caputo brings to the table.

In part two of the Westphal interview, Westphal asserts that he finds Caputo’s brand of ‘theology’ a bit like “thin soup”.  His thinking  (starts in minute 21 and goes to minute 28) is that if the promise of the future is just the logical possibility that the future will be better than the present, that is just wishing. What we need, he says, is a more active speech-act performing God.

He then goes on to say that he doesn’t understand why Caputo continues to call himself a Catholic and then takes it even further to ask why he even calls himself religious! What?

Is this where we are at in Christian theology these days? I hear this line of thinking all the time (albeit not often from someone as renowned as Westphal).

 I think that the future is a tough thing to be too dogmatic about. I get Panneberg’s proleptic possibility in his eschatology of hope. But that is hope … which, in my mind, is like one degree removed from wishing. So the acceptable options are a) certianty or b) hope, but anything less confident than that is unacceptable?

I know that Westphal’s thinking is based on much bigger issues than just the future, but it is an odd one to focus on in my opinion.

Let me be clear so that we don’t get off topic. I love reading John Caputo. I don’t just mean on philosophy or about other thinkers. I mean when he talks about Christianity – as a Christian.

I find him both intellectually inspiring and spiritual nourishing. So when somebody calls what he brings to the table ‘thin soup’, I am a bit perplexed.

Normally, I am not one to get defensive – so is it enough to simply say that I disagree with the honorable guest of Episode 114 on this one?

Thanks to Tad & Stephen for setting up the interview. Ohh that sweet pic was taken while I was interviewing Merold.

In the episode we discuss…

- Heidegger & The Onto-theological Critique

- Evangelicalism

- Growing up a dispensationalist and ending up a Christian philosopher

- Hegel, the social constitution of the self, & the located nature of ‘reason’

-Necessary Conditions for Christian Theism…God is personal & speaks

- Pseudo Dionysius, Augustine, Aquinas, Feuerbach & negative theology

- Revelation, the Word of God, and Human Receptivity

* This podcast if free…Consider Helping Build a Well w/ a Deacon Shane Galloway! Pretty Please! Click & Give

* Join us @soularize Oct 18-20

Here’s Dalferth’s books.  I give a big’ole recommendation to Philosophy and Theology. I imagine you can guess the content but it is an amazing survey of all the different relationships philosophy and theology have taken.  I can promise that it is both an introduction and an eye opener.

* Next Week….Theology and Economics with Joerg Rieger

* Come to Soularize October 18-20! John Caputo, Philip Clayton, Monica Coleman, Peter Rollins, Jay Bakker, Bill Mallonee, and the Blue Like Jazz movie!

*Don’t forget to HOLLA at the HBC podcast @ 678-590-BREW!

Tripp puts them in contrast to Progressive, Emergent and Evangelical. We recorded this before the posts Goosing Emergents into the Mainline. 

This is part 2 of 3 for the current TNT series (Theology Nerd Throwdown).

Facebook Peeps Click HERE to Listen

As the old saying goes, “when it rains, it pours.” And somehow, the world has been pouring spirituality down on me as of late! I have to admit, I’ve rather enjoyed it.

Despite this pouring out of spirituality in my life, I’ve noticed a theme emerge in these spiritual formation courses and opportunities that need not be there. Often times, spiritual organizations “market” (for honest lack of a better term) themselves in such a way that they will help you to get “deeper” into the divine than any silly dogmatic, doctrinal, or intellectual statement could ever bring you; they’ll help you to enter into God more personally. While the latter clause certainly presents a good goal, I simply wonder whether the former method—getting beyond doctrinal statements and properly reflective thinking—is necessary to it.

The unfortunate view that we moderns and “post-moderns” have adopted with regard to intellectuality is that we tend to think of it as somehow “neutral,” “unaffected by the world around it,” “objective,” and after truths for which we have no feeling. (“Postmoderns,” if this word means anything in particular, would generally deny that we are neutral but tend to uphold neutrality as something like an ideal for perfected reason). So we conceive of the height of intellect in terms of calculative procedures: hypothesizing, experimenting, verifying, and tabulating. We’ve defined thinking, in other words, by the empirical method that emerges from the Enlightenment and its focus on the natural sciences. I actually don’t think this is such a bad view of intellect in certain situations, but I do think it constitutes a reduction of the intellect and its ideality such that, with this notion in mind, it is no wonder that talk of getting beyond intellect for getting deeper into the divine emerges in this context.

Yet, intellectualism has not always been thought of in this way. Take Plato. For Plato, the intellect is something like another desire. That is, in the same way that a hungry stomach desires food, the intellect desires truth. Indeed, for Plato, the intellect is given over to an erotic drive to reach the Truth, the entirety of which I need not get into. The point being thus: the intellect is far from a neutral observer of things that merely convey s ideas through words to a detached mind. The intellect is passionate, directed, and “in love.” The intellect is our movement through the real to God in God’s self, at least for Plato.

We can see this Platonic principle at work, too, in a myriad of Christian mystics and thinkers, namely, the idea that the intellect does not merely hinder our relationship with the divine, but is a properly spiritual avenue for expressing that relationship. Such an understanding has been generally called “faith seeking understanding.” One need not go any further than Anselm, the founder of this saying, to understand the true context of this saying. His Monologion especially is an intellectual appropriation of a prior faith given to him by the spirit and expressed in words. It is a prayer, or an intellectual reflection on his prayers, that grasps at doctrines such as the nature of God’s Trinitarian being and Goodness, among other things.

This isn’t to say that Anselm believes himself to understood or thought through his faith fully, which is why there is a sense in which “going beyond intellect” holds some sway in spirituality. Rather than “getting beyond” intellect, I think the better way to think through the issue is in the following ways. On the one hand, one cannot properly think through the being of God without being centered in God’s being pre-cognitively; on the other hand, if one is brought into the being of God pre-cognitively, then thinking is a perfect expression of one’s spirituality and one of the major means through which we come to, worship, and exist in relationship to God.

In other words, thinking through doctrine such as the nature of the being of the God-man, the Trinity, the idea of salvation, etc., is anything but a hindrance to entering into a deeper spiritual relationship with God. I would at least claim that, as a Christian, thoughtful reflection on precisely these doctrines allow us to draw ever nearer to the divine and the divine’s love for us, found for us on all sides of the cross. The key, then, is to simply not accept the statements dogmatically—as calculative beliefs that, should we ascent to them, allow us entrance into heaven or, should we reject them, send us straight to hell. Nor should we accept such doctrines as somehow objectively and empirically verifiable, able to be found without God bringing us specifically into God’s own being such that these become meaningful doctrines in the first place. Rather, these latter two types of thinking are the ones that today’s spirituality promises to get us beyond—and rightly so!

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Doctrinal statement is already a part of spirituality, for one can only write it and utter it with any form of seriousness by already being within the spirit.

All this said, I’m working through these spiritual disciplines and books, and I will definitely continue to do so. I’ve benefitted greatly from them. However, I would also like the chance to more deeply engage in a spirituality of the Cross, a spirituality of the Resurrection, a spirituality of Trinitarian relations or of the Spirit intimately involved with all these movements and events, even known only as such in and through them. Obviously, such spiritualities are out there, and it would probably, at most, take some light googling to find spiritual exercises focused in such doctrines. But it is worth noting that, however such spiritualities and spiritual formation courses would be put together with such an emphasis, they would need to retain a deep intellectual content to them—a content that neither takes one away from doctrinal formulation nor from spiritual depth but pushes one deeper into both.

Such spiritualities would require that we change our manner of thinking about what thinking is and is supposed to do. Rather, we would need to take seriously the statement found in the picture at the beginning of this post—a saying of Heidegger’s posted at the beginning of a trail in the Black Forest dedicated to him. The sign says something like, “in thinking is each thing long and slow.” That’s probably good spiritual advice.

I am a John Cobb FANIAC!  Here’s a super sweet post from Cobb that all HBC Deacons should read. It is from the first Open & Relational theology gathering at the American Academy of Religion.  It collects all sorts of people….Process theologians, Open Theists, and Social Trinitarians.

First, we believe that we are speaking of a real God. For two centuries, now, this has become increasingly difficult, and increasingly rare, in academic and intellectual contexts. Down through the eighteenth century, the question of God’s reality was assumed to be a metaphysical one. Either the word “God” referred to a reality independent of human thought, language, and belief, or else there was in fact no reference. If one adopted the latter position, one was an atheist. But atheism was rare in European society in those centuries. Although much about God could be known, many thought, only by revelation, the existence of God was evident to reason.

Hume showed that once one accepts the empiricist idea that knowledge of what is not our own experience comes to us only through the senses, there is no cognitive basis for affirming God’s reality. Kant agreed that there is no way to the reality of God through theoretical reason. Still, through his analysis of practical reason, he justified positing the reality of God. Since then the emphasis has been on the positing, that is, on the human act that grounds affirmation of God, rather than on the reality of what is posited. Theology has become, largely, anthropology.

The linguistic turn in philosophy and other disciplines accentuated this move away from the metaphysical reality of God. “God” is recognized to be a bit of language. Such bits of language have their meaning in their relation to other bits of language, not by referring to any nonlinguistic entity. In this context, the question of the metaphysical reality of God, that is, of God’s existence prior to, and apart from, human language cannot even arise.

The Kantian turn to the creativity of the human mind in shaping experience and the linguistic turn to the great importance of language in shaping how we understand ourselves and our world have both made great contributions to our understanding. But from my point of view as a realist, both grossly exaggerate. The world we live in is not in fact created by our minds. We are created by the world. Language does refer to that which is not language.

For our present discussion, the crucial issue is God. In my opinion one of the reasons, a very important reason, for the decline of the old-line churches, is vagueness about the reality of God. It is hard to worship and serve either something that we posit or a bit of language. We may provide all kinds of reasons to continue supporting the church that do not involve the reality of God, but these do not evoke the depths at which Christian faith in its fullness lives.

The most powerful response in the twentieth century was the appeal to revelation and faith. The Neo-reformation movement argued that the God of reason was never the God of Christian faith. That God is known only through God’s self-revelation. This was largely identified with Jesus Christ, although, in a secondary sense, at least, the Jewish scriptures were also regarded as revelatory. There was no question but that, for those in this movement, what is revealed is real, although its reality remained obscure to reason.

Hume had made the point much earlier that belief in God must be a matter of faith disconnected from reason. In his writings, this seems cynical. Believing that for which there is, and can be, no rational justification whatsoever does not seem a wise or socially desirable thing in Hume’s world. That it was taken up with great success as the rallying cry for the Christian faith in the twentieth century seems remarkable. It certainly helped the old-line churches to regain some of their lost vitality.

Nevertheless, there are inherent dangers in disconnecting religious beliefs from the rest of human understanding and knowledge. The conviction that these disconnected beliefs are true is difficult to maintain. One must appeal more and more to the supernatural. The whole secular educational system makes this more and more difficult. In fact, neo-orthodoxy faded as a real option for most people after the initial excitement subsided, including most members of old-line churches. Sadly, nothing has replaced it as a unifying ground for belief in God’s reality.

Radical empiricism provides an alternative to Hume and Kant and all those who follow them. It argues that our relation to that which is not our immediate experience is not exhausted by sense data, or rather that our immediate experience includes relations that are nonsensory. Whitehead provides the most systematic account of these relations. In his account, a prehension is the way in which one actuality participates in the constitution of another actuality. Thus relations to a real world are inherent in every experience. That there is a real world is not something we have to derive from sense data. On the contrary, we can show that sense data arise out of more fundamental relations.

This analysis supports the independent reality of that which is other. Of course, it also shows that that reality is quite different from the appearances given us in our sense experience. It is a world of subjects, not a world of colors and sounds that is the primary reality. Whiteheadian realism is a very critical realism.

By itself radical empiricism, including its Whiteheadian formulation, does not assert the reality of God. It simply reopens the door to that discussion. Once the door is reopened, Whitehead and Hartshorne both find convincing reasons for affirming the reality of God. This is not the place to rehearse the arguments.

The understanding of God whose reality they affirm is quite different from that of much of the Christian tradition. Both Whitehead and Hartshorne thought that their understanding of God is closer to what is embodied in and affirmed by Jesus than is the dominant tradition. Those of us who call ourselves process theologians agree with them. We find that their view also fits with the actual experience of many believers. It cuts through intellectual puzzles that trouble them. It gives sensible guidance for life.

In short it is realistic in a second sense. Although it challenges the dominant models of thought of the modern era, it does so in ways that fit the actual evidence of the sciences. Although it challenges the dominant inherited theology, it does so in ways that release the most convincing features of the Christian faith from immersion in incredible and damaging ideas.

There are many Christian communities that have not gone through this tortuous history. We may say that, in many ways, they are fortunate. But they have also had problems. The reality of God, taken for granted in these communities, is asserted in ways that create intellectual puzzles and conflict with life experience. The doctrines affirmed are sometimes discordant with what the serious reader finds in the Bible. Hence, apart from concern about the dominant philosophical context, the issue of realism, in the second sense, arises here also. Are the doctrines of traditional theism realistic?

What is striking is that reflection coming out of life experience and Biblical study in communities that have taken for granted the reality of God converge so far with the ideas of God that come from those who have wrestled with, and proposed alternatives to, the dominant philosophical views. We know that some in the conservative evangelical community have used this convergence to discredit those who have been engaged in fresh thinking. Understandably, therefore, some emphasize the remaining differences. That emphasis may be needed.

In any case, tensions continue. Conservative evangelicals may remain suspicious of some of the styles of biblical criticism that inform the approach to scripture of old-line Christians. Old-line Christians may feel that conservative evangelicals are slow to rethink some of their social and ethical views in light of the primacy of God’s love. Conservative evangelicals may think that old-line Christians are too concerned about philosophical grounding and about shaping Christian beliefs in light of that grounding. Old-line Christians may think that conservative evangelicals do not fully appreciate the importance of the philosophical tradition in undercutting belief in God’s reality among thoughtful people in the modern world.

Neverthelesss, our meeting together here suggests to me that these tensions and mutual suspicions are not determinative. They are topics for discussion. I hope and believe that what we share as Christian believers will prove stronger than the divergences that reflect the different paths through which our communities have come to this point. In my opinion, the inherited lines of division may give way to new ones that more usefully point to the issues of the twenty-first century rather than to those of the nineteenth.

Conservative evangelicals who interpret revelation in terms of the love embodied in and taught by Jesus Christ will not be too different from Christians in old-line churches who also understand God in terms of this same love. Both will strive to express that love in relation to other people and, indeed, to all other creatures.

While old-line believers have convinced themselves that the theology they have developed under the influence of radical empiricism and specifically Whitehead and Hartshorne is responsibly biblical, we have known that are interpretation is deeply affected by our philosophy. Hence, in many circles it is suspect, and we are often ourselves unsure as to the extent to which we may be involved in eisegesis. It is a source of profound reassurance when we find that others, not specially influenced by this philosophy, find in the Bible much of what we have found. Their work greatly enriches and strengthens ours.

On the other side, we believe that it is also important to relate our Christian faith to the natural and social sciences, to other religious communities, to the critical political and global issues of our time. We do not see that conservative evangelical friends have dealt as much with these issues as have we. We think that some of the work we have done along these lines may enrich those with whom we increasingly share the kernel of our faith.

There are other ways in which I hope for mutual enrichment. Old-line believers have too often, in recent decades, treated their faith as but one commitment among others. I hope that relating in this larger community will lead us to recover the wholeheartedness that has been better embodied by conservative evangelicals. On the other side, conservative evangelicals may join with old-line believers in a fuller repentance for the crimes committed in the past, and even today, in the name of Christ.

I do not mean in all this to minimize the importance of differences or to discourage debate. A healthy community includes diversity, and differences among those who are part of the same community often generate the most intense debates. I mean only to express my appreciation that we have defined ourselves, under the leadership of Tom Oord, as a single community, at least as a single community of discourse, inclusive of differences. Since our shared commitment to a real God of love is in fact a challenge to much of the tradition as well as to the intellectual and cultural leadership of our world, let us work in complementary ways to make that challenge effective.

1. Socially-conscious but not reductionist: I generally affirm Christian progressivism’s forays into fights for gay-rights, its support of ecological responsibility, and its dedication to helping the underprivileged. After all, I find all of these issues of utmost contemporary social importance and believe that, to no small degree, the Gospel helps us to address social problems prophetically. There is a huge difficulty, however, when progressives confuse these principles of their social morality with the Gospel itself; they too often implicitly believe not that God came to save the world as a whole but to ensure that we drive hybrids and vote Democrat. The Gospel, however, is and must be grounded in something beyond social issues and progressive answers to them or else the Gospel would provide no means for actually assessing such issues; rather, the Gospel would become a piece of propaganda defined by these social issues and our answers to them. I personally would have no interest in such a Gospel.

2. Christianity is not a gateway religion: I’m afraid that I’m not onboard with my progressive, mystical buddies who think that, by affirming some ultimate reality beyond the Christian faith, they are engaging in some deeper and more coherent form of faith. I’m Christian, rather, in the sense that, as a Christian, I’ve found myself able to love because God has first loved me. God is, after all, love; and when I say this, I don’t mean that we can throw away the term God in its Christian form and retain the term love. I mean that love only makes sense in the prior and cross-bound form of God as Trinity. My desire to communicate with persons, for instance, of “other faiths” (for a total lack of a better term) does not reflect my desire to overcome old Christian dogmatic statements (pursuit of the truth allows me that luxury) but stems from the self-expropriations pushed for, and demanded by, the dynamic persons of the Godhead. God, as Trinity, is always moving toward “the other,” including us.

3. Yes, sin is social…and still original. The talk of original sin in the neo-Calvinistic forms gets old; but so, too, does the talk of something like the intrinsic goodness of humanity in progressive circles. The benefits of the latter group, however, is that it has rightly recognized something like a proper “ontology of sin”: the fact that sin is not simply a matter of whether I myself am good or bad but that my self—intrinsically relational as it is—is bound to sin because the cosmos (yes, even so-called nature) as a whole is bound to the violence of sin. However, there is a certain lack of recognition, sometimes, that Progressive solutions to the problem of sin are as bound to sin as the rest of the cosmos. Progressives too often think that they’ve found the right set of issues and answers .If the world as a whole, however, is bound to sin, so, too, are the progressives who try to contain it, and the benefit of admitting to this fact is twofold. First, we can recognize that there is only so much that we human person can do to set things right and that we ultimately need God, who comes to us on a cross, to set thing right. Second, we can recognize that even our attempts to set things right are bound to a certain amount of failure: they will advocate in some manner not God’s will and intentions for the world but our own as we try to re-orient that which we call “Good” to our own positions. Knowing this allows us to rightly settle for “better” rather than “best” with the full recognition that our own understanding of what is both “better” and “best” are, for now, intrinsically skewed.

- From Deacon Fackenthal

David E. Fitch’s new book, The End of Evangelicalism?, brings together about the two most unlikely conversation partners I could imagine–Slavoj Žižek and American Evangelicalism.  And it does so with surprisingly good results.  I have to admit, since I don’t really consider myself an evangelical and don’t generally accept the major tenets of evangelical theology (Biblical inerrancy or substitutionary atonement), I approached Fitch’s book with high intrigue and moderate expectations.  But I can honestly say that every expectation was greatly exceeded.

The End of Evangelicalism? begins with the premise that evangelicalism in North America has experienced a crisis.  Fitch agrees that we may well be living in what can more appropriately be called a post-evangelical age.  In order to diagnose this crisis (and death?) of evangelicalism, Fitch employs the critical theory of Slavoj Žižek, the left-wing Hegelian, Lacanian, atheist who has in recent years become the rock star of postmodern philosophy.  Fitch examines three dearly held convictions among evangelicals–belief in the inerrant Bible, the decision for Christ, and belief in the Christian nation–using Žižekian analysis to demonstrate through each how evangelicalism has devolved into a set of beliefs that are empty at the core.  In his analysis Fitch is clear to say that, unlike Žižek, he does not believe that Christianity itself is empty at the core.  He does not think that Christian beliefs “are somehow necessarily false or illusory,” but he argues that the way in which evangelicals voice and practiced them leads toward a reified set of beliefs which then become ideology.  For both Žižek and Fitch, it is this ideology that is truly empty at its core.

If you have read only a bit of Žižek or are completely intimidated by Žižek, fear not.  Fitch takes some difficult concepts and makes them easily accessible to those uninitiated in contemporary critical theory.  The first chapter of the book provides some background into Žižek’s social critique and draws out the concepts that Fitch employs in the next three chapters, which deal with the three beliefs he sees as signaling the devolution of evangelicalism into ideology.  The most important Žižekian concept for Fitch is that of the master signifier–”a conceptual object around which people give their allegiance thereby enabling a political group to form.”  Yet master signifiers don’t actually stand for anything concrete, and hence they are “empty signifiers.”

Fitch argues that Biblical inerrancy, the decision for Christ, and the Christian nation are all master signifiers, since they shape an ideology around which evangelicals organize themselves and their witness in the world.  Biblical inerrancy becomes nothing more than an identifier or a “badge” to prove one’s evangelical standing, since it doesn’t actually say anything about what a given church or organization believes regarding Biblical interpretation.  In fact, what the master signifier of Biblical inerrancy does (and what each of these master signifiers do) is allow us “to believe without believing.”  Each of these master signifiers organizes people’s allegiance and belief around an idea that remains empty at the core.

What Fitch suggests instead is that these empty signifiers be replaced with beliefs and practices informed by the fullness of Christ.  Out of this will come a politic of mission that adopts “a posture that embodies socially the incarnate presence of God in Christ that participates in his mission in the world.”  The important word here is “participation.”  It is only when evangelicals (or Christians of any stripe) embody the gospel, embody what it means to be a follower of Christ, and live out a Christ-centered politic in the world that empty-at-the-core ideology will be replaced with the fullness of an incarnational theology.  The last chapter of the book articulates exactly how this might happen, taking again each of the three beliefs in turn.

In the epilogue, Fitch looks briefly at four evangelicals who are practicing the sort of politic of mission described here:  Peter Rollins, Brian McClaren , and Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost.  While Fitch has points of contention with each of these authors, he sees in them promise for the future of the post-evangelical world.

Whether you are an evangelical, a progressive, or a progressive evangelical, I highly recommend reading Fitch’s book and grappling with his critiques.  The fun thing about master signifiers is that we all eventually fall into their trap.

First a quote from Whitehead himself….

The sheer force of things lies in the intermediate physical process:  this is the energy of physical production.  God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization.  He does not create the world, he saves it:  or, more accurately, he is he poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.1 – Alfred North Whitehead

For Whitehead nothing just exists, everything grows together.  Everything grows out of datum and the datum themselves had their own process of becoming; so for Whitehead “it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every becoming” (22).  God plays an essential role in the world’s becoming by being the “actual entity imposing its own unchanged consistency of character on every phase” so that “a definite result is emergent” from the process.2 In Process and Reality he came to describe God as having two natures.  The primordial nature, which orders the eternal objects (think Platonic forms) for the attainment of value in the temporal world, and the consequent nature, which receives the temporal world into God.  God’s di-polarity enables God to feel, know, preserve, and save the world.  As John Cobb puts it, God saves the world by transforming the world.3

In Process and Reality Whitehead recognized the necessity of God’s presence for becoming when he said, “apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world.  The course of creation would be a dead level of ineffectiveness, with all balance and intensity progressively excluded by the cross currents of incompatibility” (247). As both the ordering ground for the becoming of the world and the freedom enabling ground for its creatures, God is a constitutive part of each actual occasion.  So in addition to the experience of the past actual world, each becoming includes an experience of God.  It is important to note that this experience of God is essential for a recognizable temporal existence, but it is not require a subjective awareness.  Each moment of becoming is experiencing God, even if the occasion is not conscious of it.

The experience of God in the process of becoming has at least three elements that reveal the fabric of Whitehead’s alternative dynamic of power.  The three are the gift of possibilities, the lure for feeling, and the love of the world.  It is the past that is actual for Whitehead and yet the past alone is not capable of sustaining life or bringing about novelty.  In God the possibilities relevant for the becoming of each new moment are experienced.  These possibilities are a gift because they make freedom possible.  God is not then uninvested in what possibility becomes actualized through the creature’s freedom, but in the confrontation with a range of possibilities God is advocating for the better possibilities.  Whitehead calls God “the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire” which means God’s primordial nature participates in the initial phase of the subjective aim of each occasion (344). After an event has occurred it is experienced by God’s consequent nature in such a way that, “what is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world” (351).  At this point one can see that, for Whitehead, God’s power is not something separate from God’s love for the world. The ‘fellow-sufferer who understands’ is found reaching “toward the world both as it is and as it can be.”4

The brief description of the presence and power of God in Whitehead would not be complete if one facet was not made abundantly clear; for Whitehead the persuasive nature of God’s power is not chosen but natural.  The nature of reality is such that God has never been nor could have been coercive.  God did not chose to limit Godself prior to creation, but “God and the World stand over against each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation” (Process and Reality, 348). To say this does not make God less responsive and involved in the World and its history.  On the contrary, “apart from him there could be no world, because there could be no adjustment of individuality” (Religion in the Making, 158).  For Whitehead, the world is saved from banality and repetition because God is always investing Godself in the world and becoming vulnerable to the diminishment of value as well as the intensification of its expression.

1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality corrected ed. by Griffin and Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 346.

2. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1926), 94.

3. John Cobb, A Christian Natural Theology: Based on the thought of Alfred North Whitehead 2nd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 102.

4. Marjorie Suchocki, The End of Evil (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 152. (Here’s a free PDF of Marjorie intro-ing Process theology)

Let me be clear, here: there is a place where universalism can go wrong, a point that our buddy Tripp, through Steve Harmon, has already made. That is, when it takes a stance that turns into is something like a demand that God save all. We ought not and need not go there. Rather, God—his eating with tax-collectors and prostitutes—seems to speak enough to the possibility of universal salvation that we need not demand it of God. Let God be whom God is, and if the God reveals God’s self in Christ, I trust God fully with both my, and everyone else’, ultimate fate. So let universalism reject any demand that God fulfill our hopes and desires for such. Let it affirm, however, that God just may be the one who, in God’s love for the whole world as revealed in Christ, gave us such hopes and desires in faith.

On the other hand, let us universalists also take to the offense, lovingly reminding those who would sneer at this possibility both of God’s love and of God’s freedom. Indeed, those who a priori reject universalism, it seems, can only do so by denying God a possibility. To deny God a possibility, however, is to attempt force God’s hand in a way that it ought not be forced: in accordance with my demands and recognition of what I believe ought to be the case. In other words, it is to set up an idol not in the image of a calf but in the image of myself and my demands on how God ought to be. I might remind the reader, however, that this very move is what many , including Augustine and Luther, interpret original sin to be.

For instance, one of my favorite anti-universalist arguments in this regard is based in the notion of double-predestination. Because God has offered salvation to some, God must deny salvation to others; that is, a yes to some means a no to others. How absurd! Since when is a yes to some a no to others? If I bought one child an ice-cream cone am I denying another an ice-cream cone? I suppose it depends on how many ice-cream cones I have, and if I’m the God who creates out of nothing, I should have plenty. The notion of double-predestination is an attempt, then, to unleash a finite logic onto the infinite God, and it demands far more than a universalist, who only ever affirms the possibility of universal salvation, ever could.

I write this, then, only as a platform to give universalists some confidence. The position, when it does not demand of God something that we cannot demand, seems more in accordance to me with self-expression of God in Christ than the alternative. In other words, I want here to give a universalist call to arms. By a call to arms, however, I mean a call to open our arms to the degree that we can to all those whom God can, just may, and I hope will save, including those who would have us sent to hell for such a position.

My only concern is that, in general, Pete sometimes seems to be responding to a particular version of Christianity that has tended to superficially classify God as static, other, unrelational, and irrelevant to the world, depicting God as a separate deity “out there” that doesn’t directly affect me “here”.  A close look at most of Christian theology throughout the centuries, however, will reveal that this was never supposed to be the conception of God – other theological problems in the tradition of course notwithstanding.  Yes Christianity has recourse to the existential crisis in Ecclesiastes, or Jesus being forsaken on the cross – and we desperately need to retrieve these motifs as Pete does – but can its sources for consolation be left out?  For instance, God as immutable: unlike the Greek notion, in the Christian sense, God understood in this way was always Trinitarian!  Trinitarian meaning we assume the Incarnation, in which the ineffable God of eternity is profoundly affected by us, and especially by the union with humanity in Jesus.  The incarnation, among other things, also implies God’s willingness to make humanity a dialogue partner.[1] In other words, contra Rollins, 1) believing in God, and 2) what God says to me, cannot be separated.

Nonetheless, the sad fact is that much of popular evangelicalism in America in particular maintains a notion of God that is indeed akin to precisely what Rollins is criticizing.  So in this respect, I think what Pete is doing is incredibly valuable.  BUT, here’s the looming problem – Pete’s project provides a Christian form that is often without Christian content.  It is a philosophy of the Event without a theology of divine action (i.e., Zizek, Badiou, etc.).  And it is in this sense that what he is doing might be somewhat less valuable – even misleading.

Maybe Tony Jones really is being an “annoying wee troublemaker” – but it sure was funny!  My challenge to Pete, if I can dare be so bold as to challenge someone who has otherwise completely been challenging me, is this: Keep doing what you’re doing!  We do need it.  But as long as you refer to yourself as as Christian, maybe read some orthodox theology from time to time as well – that way you can do something constructive and not just deconstructive with it when you talk to people  – something other than turning Bonhoeffer or Pascal into figures that they were not   As a postmodernist, can’t Marion be your guide more than Derrida?  And even though this is exactly what you apparently mean not to do, can you figure out a way to give people the resurrection?  Not as historical fact or even with metaphysics, and not because we need answers or cheap reassurance, but because doubt without hope – real hope – ultimately leads nowhere but to despair – even for the “doubter in denial” who needs to experience the rupture of the Real.

As I get the MP3s I will be posting them in THIS FOLDER. They will be marked by class date so you can keep up with where you are in the class.

I hope you all enjoy these lectures.  Many thanks to Dr. Caputo for sharing the class audio.

Updated: 9/17 (lecture 3 and Syllabus)

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This paper, or at least the beginnings of it, stem from year and a half of wrestling with the now well know Radically Orthodox theologians, especially John Milbank. With a certain amount of sympathy to much of the project—which, in many ways, I would consider to be argumentation for the reinstitution of a sort of a, loosely put, post-modern neo-platonic social order—I have come down on the side of a definitive “no” to their overall goals. I have many theological reasons for this rejection—most notably, I don’t think the Radically Orthodox have a robust enough idea of sin. But perhaps the reason that has become most pertinent to my own decision was a pragmatic one, namely, that I came to see that the conditions for the possibility of my own and others’ religious freedom and, in general, the overall quality of my relatively free life as stemming from the basic structures of my own countries Constitutional and liberal democracy.  This point is not to deny the destructive force such social orders can have, especially when its citizens become irresponsible and selfish. So, Churchill is right when he says “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Of course, I believe this same man is also right when he says that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

That said, as a Christian, I do believe that my own faith can play, perhaps must by means of its often times prophetic self-definition play, an important role in the social order, even if not under the auspices of direct legal social control. And though I will not here make any pretense of defining this social role, my general thoughts have led me to the type of paper that have written for today. In it, I am concerned with what I think is an interesting paradox: that though the Christian faith has room to express its values and concerns in a liberal democracy and to do so in whatever terms it sees fit, that to express such concerns in specifically theological terms would be unbeneficial to both it and the social order as a whole. To shed some light on this point, I will therefore give a brief interpretation of what liberality has come to mean in the U.S. social order in the first half of the paper, namely, that liberality stands solely for the freedom of expression of the citizenry without a priori excluding any expression; this freedom includes those of the Christian faith.  However, because the believability of the Christian faith and any rationale stemming from it is only open to those who have traditionally been called “the elect,” I argue that Christians ought not attempt to influence the social order directly, offering a hint of what I believe to be a good alternative.

U.S. Constitutional Order

Accordingly, the first goal must be to define and outline the place of religious discourse, if any, in the U.S. Social order, which will take something of an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and its meaning. In the scholarship, both legal and non-, one will find little consensus on the intention, nature, and meaning of the U.S. Constitution. I do not propose to solve this particular problem by offering a comprehensive solution. I will simply offer what I think is a short but fitting philosophical interpretation of the document as I believe it has come to be culturally appropriated by U.S. Citizens. The emphasis, here, is on come to be appropriated as the Document has been severely reinterpreted based on our historical situations, a point with which I have no a priori problem.

In this regard, I posit that the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, much of the U.S. social order is now defined by its Bill of Rights. I cannot say and do not need to say that this orientation constitutes part of the original intention of the Document. Originally, the Bill of Rights seems to be an add-on (several “Amendments”) by the Anti-Federalists against the Federalists wishes; its purpose ensured that the small and growing nation-states that constituted the Federation would have a large degree of independence from the newly developing Federal power. However, for what I believe is very good reason, in1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights, which has become definitive in extending the Bill of Rights to the people as a whole; and when the Bill of Rights protects the people of the Federation as a while, it ensures that all individuals receive the protection defined in most of these Amendments against the tyrannies of certain states. I will also theorize, here, that this move solidified the Bill of Rights as focal point of the Constitution, defining the role of the Federal government as one that would protect individual liberties against both intrusions of states and itself, which is what the “people” of the U.S. has come to expect.

The Bill of Rights, then, is quite important. It protects the social order that the U.S. as a whole, for better or worse, has come to stand for: negative freedom. And in this order, negative freedom means, ideally, that neither the Federation nor the state can define a common good apart from the individual goods of the people. And the individual goods of the people can only be worked out according to their individual lives and the values they gain therein. I believe this principle signifies another important point.

Just as the Bill of Rights has developed into the focal point of the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment has also become the ordering point of the Bill of Rights. This famous Amendment thus reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” And what the Amendment symbolizes is a near absolute right of U.S. Citizens to engage in what Rorty calls their “projects of self-creation,” which means their individual “working out” of what they find valuable.

Perhaps more importantly, however, this Amendment symbolizes and protects both the manner and source of civil discourse in the States. The manner of civil discourse in the U.S. is defined by its freedom from most lawful and governmental constraints, the exceptions being something like Mills’ “harm principle” and, perhaps, certain attempts to overturn the U.S. Constitution itself. This manner of social discourse therefore allows that the people themselves openly become the source of social discourse, all of whom contribute their individually and communally developed voices, which themselves are developed based on the values that the people have a near absolute right to work out for themselves.

I think these points are extremely important when it comes to understanding the role of religious discourse in the States.  For one, what comes to be unique about this social order and its civil discourse is that almost no one is, legally, either included or excluded from engaging in discourse.  (Naturally, fact is often different than principle). And whether one is factually included in this discourse rests not on whether one ought to be included in some legal sense, but in whether one can make one’s voice convincingly heard so that it is factually included—which, for better or worse, usually takes both money and education. This principle of non-exclusion (not necessarily inclusion) includes religious voices.

For the sake of this paper, then, I will define religion in a functional sense, understanding it not necessarily in terms of, say, various world religions, though these might be included. But, I try to define it more sociologically. As such, I believe it useful for social and Constitutional matters to define “religion” as a way of life oriented toward and defined by some interpretation (implicit or explicit) of some sort of ultimacy. I think that such a definition can only work at a legal level, but it is what I use for now.

With a very basic interpretation of both the meaning of the term “religious” as I am using it and the meaning and this principle of non-exclusion defined by the U.S. Constitution, it is possible to define the role of public religions in the U.S. Social order. There follows two important principles for engaging in public religion in the U.S. social order. Negatively, religious organization have no right to call into question or attempt to alter the conditions which make their free participation in civil discourse possible in the first place, namely, the pragmatic contract established in and through the Constitution. There is no room for theocratic law—Christian, Islamic or any other. There is simply the pragmatic law of negative freedom ascribed to by the citizens—to mutually and gladly leave one another alone despite disagreements over ultimate ends. And in this realm, when religious organization try to make legal changes such that the U.S. is, say, officially recognized as a “Christian Country” or to impose religiously inspired laws on those outside of any particular groups’ religious belief, critics are both right and duty-bound to protest. Religion itself has no legal standing at a Federal level, and it no longer has a legal standing at a state level.

Positively, however, religious institutions and organization most certainly do have every right to engage in the civil discourse of the United States and attempt to shape the flow of public discourse, policy, and non-legally binding sets of values. The First Amendment’s sole purpose is to protect individual liberties from both Federal and state governments alike. The government, then, is in the business solely of regulating civil dialogue without setting down any legal obligations concerning what topics, ideas, reasons are proper to that dialogue—the only exception being, perhaps, that the Constitution itself cannot be overturned (though such overturning can be discussed) and that dialogue that causes direct harm is disallowed.  Religious persons and organizations are as much welcome to the discussion as are their detractors.

Believability

I have so far tried to bring some definition to the legal possibilities of public religion in the States: that public religiosity is welcome in the same manner that any public voice is welcome, but that the resulting shapes and movements of the public for or against any such voices are legally non-binding. Religious persons and organizations can include themselves in the Federation’s social discourse and can include themselves as they see fit. However, I now want to approach what, for me, is the more important question: how to actually influence the social order as such?

For the second part of my paper, I must admit that I’ve gotten myself into somewhat of a bind. What I will attempt to argue for is the non-translatability of Christian rationale into social orders that extend beyond the bounds of believers. Such is the social order in the U.S., at least in principle and probably in fact. The basic idea is simple: the condition for the possibility of belief in Christian ideas is not something beyond the faith, but contained within it. That is, there is no natural, rational way to make the truths of faith believable; therefore, there is no way to use, say, a direct line of Christian rationale to convince others in a civil discourse to agree.

What is even trickier is the fact that, to even claim that my argumentation is the least bit believable, I must make a move akin to Barth, Jungel, and other such theologians; lest I be caught in a retortion argument, I must claim my own argument itself to be an attempt to unfold revelation within revelation, a point that ipso facto must only believable within the strictures of revelation, which itself is a statement that is only believable within the strictures of revelation, and so on ad infinitum. In some very real sense, my claims are non-grounded, at least at a publicly exoteric manner, though neither would I claim them to be private in the strict sense of the term.

Accordingly, my strategy, here, will not to be to convince anyone in the sense of “move them toward belief” of my position unless they are, of course, a part of the Christian Faith; but I hope to make my thoughts interesting, nonetheless. So, I want to make a very important distinction between, say, the intelligibility of certain arguments and the believability of those arguments. What I mean is quite simple: arguments can be intelligible, interesting, even conditionally believable without being actually believable to the one who understands that argument. Such, for instance, is the point the Athenians indirectly understood when they accused Socrates of “making the weaker argument the stronger” and when Callicles admits to Socrates that he “admits but does not agree that the Tyrant is worse off than the slave.” The believability of certain propositions and ideas are different than either their intelligibility or even truth; I hope to make an intelligible, perhaps even an interesting case for why, at an analytic level of the content of Christian belief itself, the believability of the Christian faith cannot be transferred to a non-Christian social order.

That said, the notion of believability is also my point of departure for this argument. And the way I am attempting to use the term believability is much in the same way that William James, for instance, uses the term “live hypothesis.” James defines this notion as “a hypothesis which appeals as a real possibility to whom it is proposed (James, The Will to Believe, 3).” Accordingly, the liveness or deadness of the hypothesis are not “intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker;” and the “reality” of this possibility are defined by the thinkers’ “willingness or unwillingness to act.” Believability signifies something like the ability or willingness to assent to a proposition or set of propositions that seemingly or possibly describes or captures the truth (which could be taken in either the Heideggerian or more tradition correspondent notion) of a situation. More definitely, I want to use believability in the sense of trust; that when we come to believe a proposition, we trust that it is adequately descriptive. The question is what makes certain intellectual elucidations believable at all?

It is common, at this point, to assert that cultural practice and the linguistic horizons stemming from it defines the basic categories through which persons think and express themselves. So, Richard Dreyfus, states in the Preface to Carol White’s Time and Death, that

Sociologists point out that mothers in different cultures handle their babies differently and so inculcate them into different styles of coping with themselves, people, and things…. [Without claiming this account to be correct or complete], Let us suppose, as we are told by the sociologists, that American mothers tend to put babies in their cribs on their stomachs, which encourages the babies to move around effectively, while Japanese mothers tend to put babies on their backs so they will lie still, lulled by the mothers’ songs….The babies, of course, imitate the style of nurturing to which they are exposed…[and so] starting with style, various practices will make sense ad become dominant, and others will either become subordinate or will be ignored altogether.

The style then determines how the baby encounters himself or herself, other people or things. So, for example, no bare rattle is ever encountered. For the American baby, a rattle is an object to make expressive noise…. A Japanese baby may treat a rattle-thing this way more or less by accident, but generally we might suppose that a rattle-thing is encountered as soothing….

Once, [therefore] we see that a style governs how anything can show up as anything, we can see that the style of a culture does not govern only babies. The adults in each culture are shaped by the it as they respond to things in the way they show up for them (Richard Dreyfus in Preface to Time and Death by Carol White, xi).

Intrinsic to this notion of cultural development, style defines more than simply the intellectual possibilities that we can intellectual “see,” however. I also grounds the believability of accounts concerning culturally defined objects, making such propositions possible as live hypothesis in the first place. So, sticking with the example Dreyfus tries to develop, the proposition “that a rattle is a toy usable for self-expression,” may find itself only believable in a culture where self-expression is valued as such. Accordingly, in terms of the style learned by each of the above babies, they learned not only possible thought categories, but came to trust such categories, which themselves ground the development of further possible categories and entities.

The Christian Faith

At any rate, there is much to be said on these specific issue. However, I want now to take up the specifically Christian notion of believability, which is here caught in a difficult spot. At least some Christians claim that the believability of its rationale—that God Incarnates in Jesus of Nazereth, dying, resurrecting, and making new a sinful humanity—is not simply a matter of human tradition, but revelation in the sense that it brings something absolutely new to the human being, something that was not there before. Of course, empirically speaking, there is a Christian tradition that has grown out of certain western strands of thought, has interacted and been influenced by some of its greatest thinkers, and is bound in expression to the best thought-structures of its day. My point is not to deny this point. I hope only to say that the continuing condition for the possibility of this historical tradition is not the tradition qua tradition itself, but the event in which the tradition is grounded and trying explore.

On the one hand, then, it is certainly possible and philosophically legitimate to argue that the believer believes because he has been inculcated into the tradition. Believers are believers because their history and cultural background have made the Gospel believable. On the other hand, the content of the Gospel denies this explanation as adequate because contained in the content of this traditional expression is the notion of salvation and revelation.

The first of these categories, salvation, means that we are made into something new, something that was not here before; man who was sinful is given new life, in grace, in Jesus the Christ. At least historically, and I’m inclined to think logically, too, to say that something genuinely and authentically novel is not brought in is to fall into certain Peligian strands, at least somewhat dismissive of the need for the Gospel event.  However, this concept of novelty may be the topic, I’m beginning to think, of another paper, one that clarifies the nature of novelty and the novel content of the Christian faith. That said, the second of these categories as I use it—revelation—is the epistemic correlate of the first, namely, that we come to know that we are made anew so that we may make this newnewess our ownmost. Either way, if this content presupposes newness of being and the newness of its revelation, we can move with the logic outlined by Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus in his Philosophical Fragments.

New creation, if it is actually new creation, must move beyond the Socratic, which is defined purely and solely by anamnesis. That is, Socrates considers himself merely a midwife for ideas already contained within human possibility as humans currently stand. Accordingly, in order for the teaching to be actually new, it cannot be merely a historical tradition accessible on its own. There must be a teacher who brings to what is old—history—the “teaching” about the newness of creation and who is therefore himself new. While, therefore, the teaching of this teacher is achieved in history and becomes historical in its appropriation, the teaching itself is irreducible to the history that occasions its teaching.

What this point of newness also signifies is that there exists no old standard for measuring the truth of this teaching and whether it is believable. There is nothing in human tradition that could possibly testify to the believability of what is new without the new teaching itself becoming old. Therefore, if the old standards of believability were applicable to the new teaching, then the new teaching would be a product of anamnesis and, therefore, nothing really new. The new teaching, then, is its own justification, its own standard bringing with it its own conditions of believability given in the teaching itself.

As such, the new teaching only makes itself believable by enacting itself, plucking the old from the old and bringing it into the new. Therefore, the active “bringing into new creation” by the teacher grounds the believability of this new teaching as new; nothing else can do so. Without this “having been brought,” the believer must seem at best, hopelessly arrogant and, at worst, absurd. Or, at least this point must seem true from the old standard, which must claim that the teaching stems, as all other teachings, from human tradition.

It follows that only those who have received this new teaching have the ability to believe this teaching as new. But whom the teacher chooses to teach is not a matter of our discretion but the teachers.’ Accordingly, only those whom the teacher elects to teach, both in terms of the content of the teaching and the standard that makes the new teaching believable at all, have the ability to hear the message as believable at all.

Conclusion

I have suggested, therefore, that the believability of the Christian faith, for the Christian, is not subject to the same modes and rules of believability that we’ve come to define for other propositions. These propositions are based in human culture and practice alone and not in the teaching of the teacher, who makes by his teaching his teaching believable. This point further suggests that, a priori, ethics, social-standards, and … developed within the context of this new teaching are non-transferable in their believability, a point that directly affects the means by which the church can try to affect the liberal democratic social order.

If the church and its members takes seriously the notion of a liberal democratic social order, it cannot work with the pretense that it can influence the civil discourse in that order by means of either a directly Christian notion of social responsibility—for instance, that Jesus says or stands for X and, therefore, so should everyone else (to make a crude example). In fact, it may be the case that there is no direct point of interaction between the old and the new, and that the social order as it stands, contained as it is within the old, must be dealt with in its own terms. I have not definitive suggestion as to how, positively, to begin dealing with such social orders, but I do think that, for instance, Rudi Hayward has something to say on this topic. I don’t know much about the project as of yet, but the project is taking up the question of what it could mean to produce art as a Christian without producing Christian art; and, as the project seems well aware, such thinking can be applied beyond art itself to any number of social spheres, including the civil and the development of its social discourse.

The classes include ‘Post Modern Theology: Derrida and Religion,’ ‘Transcendence and Immanence: Levinas and Deleuze,’ ‘A Theology of Flesh,’ ‘Heidegger,’ ‘The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology,’ ‘Husserl and the Foundations of Phenomenology,’ and Merleau-Ponty,’ and ‘Radical Theology from Hegel to Zizek.’  You can download the class syllabus on his web page.

All the audio files I have are in this public folder.  Just right click and ‘save-as’ to download the MP3s.

Extending these crises more deeply, we have no clue whom we can trust anymore to help bring about long-term solutions. Whom do we go to in order to find plausible answers to these troubling questions? Every politician is in the pocket of someone or something dubious, at least to some extent. So called ‘experts,’ at least of the economic variety (and I would be willing to extend it beyond them) give us imperatives on par with divine commands; yet these ‘experts’ end up being wrong more often than they’re right. On top of that, to combat a myth currently circulating in Tea-party (and really all populist) circles, the ‘people’ aren’t to be a priori trusted either. ‘We’ are as shortsighted as anyone else, demanding oil and jobs at any cost. And, we keep our politicians fearful when they attempt to look at longer-term problems because (1) we honestly don’t trust them, and (2) we often times don’t honestly want them to change the status quo.

That said, the U.S. democracy is operating in a climate of absolute distrust, where everyone thinks that everyone else is actively conspiring against the other (and this belief might be held for good reason, frankly). I’m the first to admit that a certain amount of mistrust is necessary in a democracy, namely, that anyone who claims to act benevolently and without particularized interests in mind is the one to be least trusted. I’ll even make a theological point of this: to claim that one’s motives are pure, for the good of all, universal, is to claim a will on par with God’s, that we can actually will, as individuals, what is best not merely for ourselves but for everyone. This is self-idolization, in my book, and frankly this is the one place that Tea-partying anti-government arguments work; governments, which are made up of individual persons with individual wills, do not necessarily and really seek a common good and must be held to account.

However, mistrust (as I’m using it) also has the connotation of some active trust. That is, we may know that everyone skews the good and the just by means of self-interested ends (conscious or unconscious), but we can also trust that they’re doing their damnedest not to. That makes a huge difference, I think; it at least puts a pragmatic program in place to use mistrust as a way to hold open public dialogue for democratically acting on real solutions to our long-term problems.

Keith Ward, philosopher and theology, answers Yes.  Below is an outstanding lecture he gave as part of a series with Metanexus (who has tons of other sweet lectures for free).  Keith is an outstanding lecturer and a wonderful author.  If you want a ton of Keith Ward MP3s for free go here and download whole series on religion\science, philosophers on God, and contemporary ethics.

Check Out Keith Ward’s Books.  Did I mention is going to be at Big Tent Christianity!

Keith Ward: ‘Does Science Allow for Revelation and Divine Action?’ from Metanexus Institute on Vimeo.

The reason I bring this point up today is the following. I am a vestry member in my congregation (for those of you unfamiliar with Episcopalese, it means something like a board of Deacons), and we had our monthly meeting yesterday.  Toward the end of it, our rector brought up the fact that the Diocese of Los Angeles has been pestering parishes to contribute to our new Bishops’ ordination ceremony coming up this May. Why? Because they want to have the “proper vestments” (including robes and rings), entertainment, and arena (we’ve rented the Long Beach Arena) for the occasion. Among other thoughts, I wondered for a moment if our leadership was stealing from the playbook of either Michael Steele or Lloyd Blankfein.

All of us were annoyed by this strong request; like many congregations, ours is running a deficit right now which we are only able to cover based on church investments…investments, mind you, that will be gone within a year.  In fact, what such requests signify to me is that the leadership in the Episcopal church (and this may or may not stand with other mainline churches) is clueless. At a time the church is beginning to cave in on itself, they want to spend money on pomp and circumstance.  Of course, such a move is, (to be rather explicit), rather masturbatory and self-congratulatory. After all, the church is relatively irrelevant as it stands in most other parts of today’s social fabric, meaning, the church won’t receive any congratulation except from itself.  Forget, then, about spending money on proactive ministries like planting new churches and supporting a vibrant college ministry (ministries that could help to make the church, even if not the Episcopal, more relevant again) when we can have a party.

So, dear Episcopal leadership, allow me to remind you of some of the basics of which I, a parishoner and vestry-member, would expect you to have some cognizance.

1. We are all currently in a financial crisis, and we already give you 12% of our church income right now for, in my mind, blessing oil and water that God can probably manage to bless without you. Such insensitivity to the needs of your parishes signifies that you’re uninterested in your parishes.  This just might be a problem since most people under the age of fifty stay in the Episcopal church, not because they received Bishop-blessed oil on their foreheads on special occasions, but because their parishes are filled with good, loving, Christian people.

2. In a similar manner, most persons within the Episcopal church (again, usually under fifty) have absolutely no a priori commitment to the Episcopal church as the Episcopal church. Again, these people are here because (1) they are committed to a stance of faith and (2) desire to enact those stances within particular congregations and parishes they find life in. Of course, that’s not to say that log-books of Bishops “proving” Apostolic lineage aren’t important; they are at a (purely) symbolic level.  It’s just to say that they are not and cannot be the priority.

3. On top of all of this, I would like to remind the Bishops of their actual place in the church.  You are pastors–or really pastors of pastors (2 Timothy 2:1-7). Nothing more; nothing less. In this regard, too, I would remind you that your sole purpose is to serve the rectors who serve the concrete parishes, that is, the parishes where the true life of the church manifests itself. If you don’t believe me, just look in the Book of Common Prayer and the order of who’s named last in the ordination ceremonies.  Also, (God forbid this), you might look in the scriptures.

4.  Finally, and with reference to this thought of looking in scriptures, I might remind you that, in our beginnings, we decided that the only compulsory acts we engage in are those found in scripture, though we’re certainly free to add any niceties, including robes and rings, if and only if we so desire and are able. When you are ordained for this position, then, you deserve the laying on of hands  (Acts 6:6; 1 Timothy 5:22…depending on the version you read). However, you by no means deserve a ceremony that will come one step closer to breaking the bank of your flock.

With all that in mind, some of you might be wondering why I would desire to be a part of the Episcopal church. And it’s a fair enough question (as, certainly, right now, I sound far more on the emergent side of things).  The truth is that I, too, have no a priori commitment to this ‘brand’ of church, even if I am firm in my faith and promise to serve in some congregation. However, I do think that the Episcopal church has something important to offer if it would open its eyes and ears to the truth of its own identity. That is, the Episcopal church, in continuity with its Anglican upbringing, has no absolute creedal code (the thirty-nine articles no longer function in this manner); rather, the church is held together, most obviously, through a commitment to a common liturgy.  But what this lack of commitment to an exact creedal code  need not signify is a dearth of intellectual movement (which is, unfortunately, where much, though certainly not all, of our current leadership is caught).  Just the opposite…it can be a vibrant commitment to engage in open dialogue about the meaning of our a priori commitments to Christ (the sine qua non I’ve already expressed in a prior blog), all of which are brought together in a common liturgy where we worship with one another. In many ways, the insights of many emergent thinkers and more recent movements toward “big tent” Christianity are already nascently presupposed in the Episcopal identity.

Too bad we’ve focused on the Bishops.

John Cobb delivers the challenge at the UCC's Southern California – Nevada Conference on June 5, 2009

He has continued to speak and write about new ecological issues that weren’t known at the time he wrote Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology (1972). In June, he challenged the UCC to take as its mission working with God for the salvation of the world … with the environment as a focal point.

I’m not at all jealous that Tripp gets to grab lunch with Dr. Cobb down in Claremont any time he wants.

So I marked the morning of my 40^th Earth Day (well technically my 28^th) by listening to this recording from when Dr. Cobb visited Tripp’s class.

“We need to make use of technology, but that’s not going to solve the problem.”

John Cobb … Earth Day 2009 (MP3)

Funnily enough, I’m not terribly sure that anyone could ever accuse me of being a great defender of Christian orthodoxy, at least not for its own sake.  I do tend to think that, in the United States, theologians, pastors, and lay-persons alike have neglected the history and development of our tradition so that they might push their own agendas; but it turns out that these agendas are sometimes good, rightly calling into question previous Christian interpretations of what were once considered fundamental and irreproachable Christian doctrines. Then I read a blog today by Peter Laarman, both a very nice and intelligent man who is also the executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting; unfortunately, the blog signified for me precisely where current discussions of Christian identity, especially in the context of “progressive Christianity,’ have gone entirely wrong. I would like to take say a little about this.

First, Laarman’s blog has me questioning precisely what something like “progressive Christianity”  has come to mean. If it means no longer confessing as a Christian, count me out. If it means confessing as a Christian…in the basic trust of God in Christ…to the best of one’s ability, arguing all the while that God doesn’t damn Muslims, homosexuals, and adulterers, and that God cares for the poor, then I’m in.   So, I propose a basic terminological distinction between “progressive Christianity” (what Laarman calls his stance) and “progressive religiosity” (what I believe it actually is).  I can affirm the first, but I’ve no interest in, as a faith stance, the latter.  To confuse these two terms is a category mistake that demonstrates on the part of ‘progressive religionists’ two things: a lack of understanding of the basic Christian faith (and its intellectual reflection in theology) and, frankly, a degree of arrogance when it comes to (re)defining that faith.*

Laarman makes several points, which, in an entirely non even-handed manner, I’ll sum up as follows: “the Christian interpretation of God is merely one possible projection of human thought into God such that, if we were honest with ourselves, we could see through and reject to no small degree.  We could then find solidarity with all other religious traditions by trading symbols and lies with one another about God, choosing for ourselves those projections which makes us feel the most progressive.”  The basic trajectory of the blog, then, is to reduce Christian identity to a non-identity, annihilating the basic belief and trust that persons do not first come to believe by means of intellectual articulation, but that they already find themselves in a state of belief and, in some real manner, have no basic ability to stop believing even if they wanted to do so (and I’ve tried).

First, then, progressive religiosity rejects Jesus the Christ** as a, even the, unique expression of God. To put this statement into a broader context, I can fully buy into the blog that Philip Clayton wrote last week, which essentially claimed that there are several types of Christianity, none of which need be mutually exclusive of the others.  I would add this simple point to Clayton’s reflections, one which I was gratefully able to tell Clayton myself: there is a sine qua non of the faith, a ground and affirmation that I can’t imagine doing away with and still calling myself Christian. What is that affirmation?  An absolutely basic trust that God has definitively saved this world in Christ.  I call it a trust because it is not even primarily a conscientious “belief,” an intellectual assent. One is passive in the original movement, which is a movement of God.  Trust, rather, is quite simply a change of the heart by God such that God, in Christ, becomes the fount of all one’s activities…beliefs, knowings, and actions.  We become (without importing necessarily the moral vocabulary) justified.

But it is important to affirm this basic trust in Christ, for if one reflects on it, it is precisely this trust in Christ that becomes important to the Christian.  Whatever Christ may mean…however we might interpret him…God has acted definitively in him. All intellectual reflection on what this might mean, however important, is truly secondary to the trust we find ourselves to have through this bare and basic turning.  Now, to be clear, this point need not mean that all intellectual interpretations of this basic point are co-equal.  (Word Christology, in my mind, is far superior to spirit Christology, and hermeneutic Christology trumps both.) But there is much room for debate on these issues, so long as they’re issues taken seriously in the first place.

Secondly, progressive religiosity rejects the intellectual soundness of human belief in the nonsense that Christ is the unique expression of God. The basic point, then, is that progressive religionists cannot take this primordial and unwilled (at least by the person) trust in God through Christ seriously (I know I should add the Holy Spirit in here, too).  And, if one does not take the Christian trust in God through Christ seriously, that’s okay; one does not need to do so, but certainly one is not Christian either. Neither can I fathom why one would want so ardently to hang onto the absurdities of our faith if one has no basic trust in God through Christ, unless for one of two reasons.  (1) Progressives see Christianity as purely a tool for moving forward some sort of political agenda; but then “faith” becomes the worst form of political propaganda with no ties to that original trust which makes the whole thing viable as a political stance in the first place!  (2) Progressives maybe secretly fear that, if they don’t admit nominally to being Christian, God will condemn them to eternal hellfire, and they want to ward off this possibility.  Fear not, my friends, a good chunk of us believe God to be more just than this; plus, I suppose if you’re going, I’m probably going, too!

Tripp, I’m counting on you to come out as a Progressive Christian now, too.  You’re up!

*On the other hand, I don’t doubt for a minute this is what my more fundamentalist friends say of me!

**When I say Christ, I mean the cross-dead Jesus and the resurrected one.

To begin with, I’d like to make a statement about my last post.  My basic premise in that post is quite simple: whatever the advertising world latches onto and uses for selling consumer goods sheds light on the ways in which that culture thinks and values. Because, in these previous commercials, advertisers latch onto a desire in our culture to form what we would consider “authentic” identities, we must take seriously as both a philosophical and theological category the notion of “authentic identity-formation,” or what I will simply call “authenticity” from here on out.

In this regard, I have been doing a lot of studies in Charles Taylor (the philosopher not the dictator) who takes up this notion of authenticity from a cultural and philosophical perspective.  According to Taylor, the ideal of authenticity as a contemporary ethical standard has emerged from several historical idea sources, all of which have been taken over and setup as standards in their own right.  So, the invention of individualism, the development of what will be called by Rousseau the ‘inner-voice of nature,’ and emergence of Romantic understandings of originality (none of which I will try to do justice to here) have all grounded the idea of authenticity.  So, for Taylor, the idea of authenticity is latently understood and lived by us as drive to become an original expression of humanity through our making explicit what is potentially within us. To put it a bit differently, we’ve all been imbued with different and unique “talents,” and the ethic of authenticity moves us to strive to make actual these talents, both becoming and forming for ourselves what we already are to some degree.

At a properly philosophical level, Taylor develops this idea in an interesting direction.  Philosophically, Taylor is highly critical of certain of our cultural appropriations of the idea of authenticity.  Our appropriations tend to be solipsistic, narcisstic, self-centered; persons who explicitly desire to become authentic often do so in such a way that they use others and the world surrounding them to make for themselves who they are and want to be.  But, according to Taylor, this appropriation of the ethic of authenticity is an aberrant one.  To become authentic is never to become such at the expense of the rest of the world, especially our fellow human beings; to become authentic rather, is to become so in light of, and in conversation, with the world and our fellow human beings (what Taylor calls our ‘dialogical horizons’), especially our direct communities and cultures.  To translate this critique in somewhat of the direction I want to take it, then, selfhood and the formation of individual identity depends on structures outside of the self that are irreducible to the self.  And to become truly authentic, for both Taylor and me, is to create oneself with a cognizance of these structures.

I will not move, here, into the possibility of all these structures; such a task would have to match Hegel’s attempts to unify knowledge and being in his Encyclopedia (a task that I think impossible in the first place).  But it is possible to say that there are certain of these structures that are contingent, for instance, that I was born in the Northwest of U.S. and was formed and formed myself in light of the possibilities afforded to me in that culture; There are, however, also such structures that are necessary (that if I’m born, I must die; death is a necessary structure in human existence).  The question I’m explicitly interested pertains to God and God’s necessity, namely, does God form a necessary identity structure such that, if I am not cognizant of God, I cannot be an authentic human being. For reasons that I will explain more later, I’m answering no: authenticity is possible without cognizance of God precisely because God must be understood as that which is more than necessary.

At any rate, I hope these cryptic statements are at least of some interest to you;  if not,  I’m afraid that conventional wisdom is right: that only my committee and one other person will ever actually read my dissertation