The Image of Fish

I'll preface all this by noting that what follows is thoroughly not a tracing of the Death of God Theology or Philosophy; mostly it is my perspectives on the whole "God is Dead," thing as it currently stands.  As such, if you are unfamiliar with the "Death of God," thing, the names Friedrich Nietzsche, William Hamilton, or Thomas J. J. Altizer, you might want to check out the wikipedia article on it, and then poke around on the web for a bit.  There is a lot to read about it around.

Also of note: I am not in favor of jettisoning tradition because it is tradition.  I think there is a place for denominational work.  I'm not sure what that place is exactly, but that has more to do with my ignorance of ecumenical geography than it does with any theological position.

Yeah.

Clarification of Terms

Given the hot topic that "death of God" theology was, and is, it seems worth considering what is actually meant by the phrase.  More particularly, I want to express what I mean by the phrase, and why I think it is an idea with which it is worth grappling. After a brief consideration of what I mean by the phrase I will explore some of the related topics that provide some of the foundation upon which theological grappling may well take place. 

When I refer to the death of God I refer to my sense that (1) Our conceptualizations of God and the word God itself are in need of substantive reformulation.  People have been so swayed by unfaithfulness, judgment, and oppression that terms which resulting in one feeling a century ago sometimes drive people in the opposite direction in the present.  (2) Our traditional liturgies and theologies need to be renewed because they do not adequately speak to the experience and condition of contemporary people of faith.  This is not to be done for the sake of popularity or so as to avoid controversy, but rather because certain ways of thinking about, and naming, the Divine that may have previously "worked" to inspire, drive, and comfort people no longer provide sustenance or succor.  It is not so much that God is dead as that our naming of God no longer seems appropriate or fitting: (3) Our techniques for naming God ought to die.  And be renewed.  The classical traditions and methods still surely point to an abiding reality, but they do so in a way similar to calling a grown man named Timothy "Little Tim-Tim." There must be a better way to point to our faith and practice than what has been done.  Or, in the very least, it is worth the attempt to discover if there is a way.

The InterVarsity Dictionary of Theology entry for "Death of God" closes with  the following question.  "If we agree that God is too transcendent to be described in words, or too immanent for his acts to be distinguished from those of nature and man, then what do we have but a dead, or non-existent God?"  There is such a great wealth of ideas in this question that it seemed worth exploring it in detail for what might recovered in answering it.

Too Transcendent

That God is too transcendent to be described in words is a notion I often encounter, especially among progressive Christians, who often extend the idea by commenting that we shouldn't even be expected to be able to describe God because God is such a mysterious force/being/presence.  The results of thinking such as this is that God is left as an utterly amorphous, vague idea, an abstracted mystery that then allows for some very dubious theology to be done.

For Progressive people of faith, I feel very strongly that the desire to leave God almost entirely unarticulated comes as a response to an over-articulated demand for God to be a particular way coming from a more vocal Christian Right.  More or less, what I am suggesting is that the fuzzy theology of many liberal Christians is a sociological result of the  hardline, aggressive stance of some conservative Christians.  Because "they" are clear in their theological tenets and sometimes act in ways that we feel are judgmental and inappropriate, and "we" do not want to be like that we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, jettisoning not only judgment, but also clarity.  

One of the struggles that I believe we face is that even the language we use to talk about talking about God is marred with the marks of a Hellenization that does not well suit the numinous.  When we postulate that God may be too transcendent, we seem to be articulating a vision of God that is somehow fixed "out there," something akin a quasi-Platonic Form of Divinity.  Indeed, Plato's description of the Form of Beauty seems not too far removed from how many talk about God: "It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself" (The Symposium, 211b).  That is, the transcendent Form is so far removed from our world and our experience of the world that the best we can hope to do is experience some lesser reproduction of the thing.  The result of this thinking then, is that the best we can do when attempting to articulate something transcendent is hope to name some flawed copy of the thing we actually sought to speak.  I reject this construction.

Given that Hellenized thought is so profoundly foundational to Western education, culture, and theology, it would be naive to presume any capacity to be able to reject it wholesale and still be considered to be in conversation with the tradition, so I reject it knowing that I will hereafter always stand as a possible hypocrite to my own claims, knowing that I can easily far into the type of categorical and Wholly Other thinking that I am dismissing.  That being said, I think that what is called for is not a rejection of talk about God because God is unnameable, but a rejection of colonizing talk about God because God's name has been used to oppress and destroy.  We are called not to abandon attempts to name our experience, but to acknowledge that our attempts will be provisional and contextual, not eternal and utterly accurate.

Too Immanent

The fear that God becomes undifferentiateable from the natural world seems to be a hold over from a fear of the physical.  Rather than issues of Immanence and Transcendence being opposite ends of a theological continuum, I believe they are both a response to those same Hellenization processes which thrust God out into the aether.  When God is a bounded being that can be intellectually placed somewhere  - even if that where is "beyond all experience" –  then any claim to God being present in the physical world is simultaneously a claim to placing God within reach.  The issue, it seems to me, is not about whether God is "here" or "there," but that fact that we think God is categorically place-able in anything.  

The phrase  "too immanent for his acts to be distinguished from those of nature and man," suggests that if God is seen to be immanent, then somehow we will lose the capacity to discern God at all.  But what then of the God of Scripture? Of Liturgy?  Would we not still experience a sense of communion in prayer even if we did allow ourselves to panentheistically name the Pretense as present in the world?  Where and when did God inform us that we lived in a polarized world where things are only made in two shades?

A key seems to be in remembering that in Jesus Christ we have the bridging mediator that guides us to the cross and the rebirth in which the heavens and earth converge.  The Holy Spirit which persists is our guide  in present days.  A guide into new territory which has yet to be named.

The Death

Essentially, what I would like to call for, to proclaim, is that "death of God" theology has died.  That is, it no longer captivates, inspires, accurately speaks to the condition of contemporary people of faith, etc.  Rather than a consistent fixation of the end of an era of classical God-talk, I am much more interested in its renewal.  It strikes me that the task of the theologian is always four-fold: Recover, reclaim, cast off, and create.  There is certainly a wealth of information and passion to be recovered within the traditional modes of theological discourse, and some of it ought to be reclaimed for its use in building up the true church of believers in the Body of Christ. And some of it needs to be jettisoned as a nothing more than a historical, philosophical artifact and vestige.

I am interested in that which comes after the casting off of old clothes, the encounter with the open air after centuries of enclosure.  What wondrous words might we find to articulate our sense of the Divine in this world?  What a glorious bricolage we may find.  

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This post is centered around a phone interview that I did with John Caputo about the issue of hyperrealism.  Click "phone interview" to get the MP3.

The question that I open asking references his book, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, and is specifically about this passage.

I compare how Caputo uses the term to the more common usage that Jean Baudrillard uses.

The "Richard" I reference in the interview is Richard Kearney of Boston College, and the book being referenced is his Anatheism, the official site of which is here, and a good (independent) engagement of which is here. 

A series of conversations between Caputo and Kearney are archived here from the 2007 Emergent Village Philosophical-Theological Conversation.

A series of recordings of lectures from Caputo are found here.

Tripp Fuller's Homebrewed Christianity interview with him is here, and the recent interview I did with him is here.

Relatedly, Caputo asked that I try to promote the Call for Papers for an upcoming conference he is co-hosting around the future of philosophical thought.  He is particularly interested in younger voices being present, so lets send him a whole host of interesting things to read!

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The oft captivating Blake Huggins at (Ir)religiosity has prompted me once again.  I encourage folks to go give his post "The task of the theologian: responsibility for God," a read and/or check out my thoughts on a very similar topic below.

What do we Gain with a Doctrine of God? 

What do we accomplish in the development of a Doctrine of God? With ecclesiology we find ourselves left with the suggestions of worship, the role of the church, and the relationship of Church to world. With Doctrine of Humanity we investigate theological anthropology and move towards some sense of our ultimate purpose, how we might be called to be in relation to one another and the world, and potentially, the ground of a Christian ethic. What then, does Doctrine of God provide us with? I believe that the answer lies in the way of C.S. Lewis's comment that, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." The best of our Doctrines of God provide us with a way to consider the Divine in such a manner that also allows us to make some greater sense of the world and our various experiences within it.

Our articulations of the Divine must simultaneously be a commentary on our own condition as well as a means of hope for something more. In some sense, we run the risk of imbuing God with our own ideas, falling into Feurbach's accusation that our constructs of God are always just projections of the values we hold most dear, rendering God as nothing but an objectified and created container that holds our collective virtues. Of course, on the other side, explaining God as somehow beyond everything of this world also runs into problems as it relegates the Divine to a distant and disconnected horizon.

I do not want to locate God solely within the known world and our experience, as we can too easily define God in our image instead of vice-versa. Similarly, I am resistant to the idea that God is entirely beyond our experience as well, a God which would force an articulation of the nature of God to be greater than our experience, a wholly other God. With both of these extremes offering something to the person of faith, and with either possessing its own potential pitfalls, it behooves us to consider how we might incorporate these positions into one articulation of God and God's nature, and in so doing, explore the role and purpose of a well-crafted Doctrine of God.

Divine Resonance

If our explication of the nature of the Divine somehow places God fully beyond human access, then God becomes available only beyond life. If, conversely, it is the case that God's valency is experiential, then our models and articulations of the Divine ought to provide for this to be the case. Those who see this move as heretical often have a sense of the role of theology and doctrine of God that differs substantially from mine. While many feel as if knowing and proclaiming the redemptive truth of God is central to a Christian life, I have some significant suspicion of those who insist on their interpretation as the only valid approach, as if their sense of God is ultimate and complete. I agree with Tripp Fuller that, "in an unfinished universe it is unreasonable to think a theology is finished." What we know of God is contextual, personal, and ever capable of change. To say that God is ever changing may seem to fly in the face of the eternal nature of God, and yet I believe that there is some grounds for it, which I would like to articulate via analogy, of all things, to chemistry.

Asked what H₂O is, most people will answer water. They are correct, and there is more to the story than their response. Formed the other way around, "H₂O" as an answer to the question "What is water?" is not wholly correct. Imagine two molecules of water, each with two atoms of hydrogen associated to a larger atom of oxygen. What we have discovered is that even in a container of "pure" water, the reality is that a collection of H₂O molecules do not remain simply a collection of H₂Os. Instead, they begin to interact with one another, resulting in one of the two oxygen atoms taking a hydrogen atom from the other, an event which chemists notate as 2 H₂O <–> H₃O⁺ + OH⁻ and refer to as the "self-ionization" of water. Essentially, even though water is H₂O, that is, two hydrogen atoms and and one oxygen atom, water does not ever actually exist in a pure H₂O form: it is constantly in a state of resonance, transition, and relation: that state of oscillation in process between H₃O⁺ and OH⁻ is what we refer to as H₂O, as water. So too is God: somewhere between transcendent and immanent; personal and eternal; and any number of other seeming contradictions.

By extension then, our task as theologians is not to name God as a fixed God that is and always will be, but to describe God in a such a way that captures some of the Divine nature as it is in the process of becoming something other than what we have named it. This is not to say that God is becoming something ungodlike any more than it is to say that water is not water-like simply because we always thought it was just H₂O. The function of a Doctrine of God is to provide a sketch of how it is that God is at some middle point of becoming something more than we thought it was, but not so far afield that it is unrecognizable; two molecules of water do not self-ionize into wombats: they stay water-related, just further afield than we first thought. There is enough sense of continuity between H₃O⁺ and OH⁻ such that it makes sense to call a mixture of those things H₂O, even though what we have discovered challenges our sense of what exactly that wet stuff is.

As we scientifically name water as H₂O because that is the state in between its two poles of existence, so too can we conceive of God, with the noted exception that while water "self-ionizes" into two distinct parts, each of which is qualitatively identifiable, quantifiable, and fixed, God seems to be formed of more parts than we can name. Yes Father, yes Son, yes Holy Spirit, and yes also Alpha and Omega; Love and Light; and Living Water and Word. Yes, yes, and infinite becoming yes.

The Truth of the Daily

If I ask someone to tell me what water is and they say that water is something you drink, that doesn't mean they got it wrong. Even though there are other things that we drink as well, that certainly is one of the things that water is. Too often we associate truth with abstract generality so that when someone speaks to the particulars of their experience we discount, or devalue their commentary in light of more totalizing and structural methodologies.

Understanding and/or relating to some aspect of the Divine does not entail understanding and/or relating to the entirety of God. If you ask my wife if she knows me, she is sure to say yes, and you would think nothing of it. Of course she knows me. And yet there are thoughts I think, things I see, and stories I have heard that she has no knowledge of. That doesn't mean she does not know me: it means than I am more than that which she knows. I see no reason why this should not be the case with God as well. We articulate God's qualities not to limit or ascribe finitude to that which is more than that, but as an offering and invitation to others that they might respond in kind, lending their voices to a conversation which is both the echo of ancient words and the renewal of current hope.

I see the task of a theologian as one akin to a poet's: to capture some sense of the moment in such stunning detail — by tone, image, sound, example, etc — that upon reflection, some echo of that moment is called forth in the other. In the writings of George Fox, he repeatedly called for Christians "to answer to that of God in all." As a theologian, I understand my role as an articulator of the Divine that I perceive in the world, an answering call that hopefully encourages other to do the same.  

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Patheos blog article on the Holy Spirit.

Phil Wyman's Four Square No More Blog post.

The Transform Gathering East Coast page.

Informational films I've made (with Kristina) about Quakerism are here.

Tony Jones' post about Pentecostalism and the Emergent Church is here.

Sam Laurent's profile (almost to the bottom of the page) from Drew is here.

Sarah Walker-Cleaveland is currently working on some pneumatology stuff and her home page is here.

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A review of Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination

Referencing: Revised Second Addition, 2001 Augsburg Fortress

       A classic in the field of Biblical Studies and homiletics for years, Brueggemann's 1978 magnum opus still is rich with material for consideration and reflection. Composed of a series of lectures, the contents of this small book are so well-cited in progressive Christian academia that sometimes reading it can feel clichéd.  This, however, is not a mark of dull and reused writing on behalf of Brueggemann, but rather a testament to the degree that his text has been influential in the field.  As such, it bears reconsideration in its own right, not held to our vague sense of it as a useful book, but to the particulars that the text offers.

Early in the book Brueggemann articulates his claim: "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us. Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated” (3). In this short paragraph Brueggemann lifts up profoundly consequential aspects of the prophetic message: it helps to imaginatively craft a new world, speaks directly to contemporary (dis)ease, and is emboldening and subversive.

Brueggemann understands the Biblical prophet's task to be is the same as today's preacher: we are called to prophetic imagination, not just Biblical education or Christian vocabulary appropriation. For him, it is our task to shake people from their anesthetized state of numbing acquiescence to  Empire; accept the reality of pain, suffering, and death; realize that this is a means beyond this darkness; and energize people to envision and enact anti-Imperial change.  Key to Brueggemann's subversion though is a core of joy.  This is not Battle in Seattle Anarcho-Socialists throwing bricks through the windows of Starbucks, it is a "hope-filled language of prophecy, [which cuts] through the royal despair and hopelessness, [with] the language of amazement. It is a language that engages the community in new discernments and celebrations just when it had nearly given up and had nothing to celebrate" (67).

In a day and age when most of what we do – including a very significant portion of theological training and education –  is focused on occupation and application instead of innovation and inspired vocation, Brueggemann's conceptualization of the prophet subverts even this, with prophetic work being akin to that of a capital "A" Artist.  Our task as prophets is to insist that "imagination must come before implementation" (40), acknowledging that the "poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality" (40).  Here I find myself breaking somewhat with Brueggemann in the minor sense that I do not think there was ever any other way to liberatively challenge oppressive systems than with acknowledgement, imagination, and action.

Brueggemann's treatment of the texts from which he draws, especially Isaiah and Jeremiah, is clear on the importance of emotional connection to situations, the revelatory power of accepted anguish and amazement, and joy and grief (e.g. 79). Brueggemann comes to the conclusion that prophetic work "brings together the internalization of pain with external transformation" (91), and that "all functions of the church can and should be prophetic voices that serve to criticize the dominant culture around us while energizing the faithful" (125). This commitment to acknowledging anguish seems much stronger in the text then when I had last worked with it, and it is a useful thing to consider. Moreover, it is essential for Brueggemann that we not remain in some mire of pure pathos either: the act of acknowledging suffering is part of the same gesture which wakes us to the reality that there are cites of someday subversion everywhere that find ourselves participating in injustice.  Bruggemann's prophet points us toward that day and encourages us along the way until we arrive. 

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Lots of things in this one…

The QUIP Quaker Writers conference was held to coincide with the release of this book (which I have a few things in).

The Center for Process Studies at Claremont hosted the Theopoetics and the Divine Manifold conference , at which, most academically noteable for me (at this moment), were Catherine Keller, Vince Colapietro, and Mat Lopresti.  

While there I gave a presentation in conjunction with the paper I delivered working with my ideas about a Heraldic Gospel.

Then I spent time at Whittier First Friends Church.

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Via their website:

Why “theology after Google”?

Progressive Christian theologians have some vitally important things to say, things that both the church and society desperately need to hear. The trouble is, we tend to deliver our message using technologies that date back to Gutenberg: books, academic articles, sermons, and so forth. We aren't making effective use of the new technologies, social media, and social networking. When it comes to effective communication of message, the Religious Right is running circles around us.

Hence the urgent need for a conference to empower pastors, laypeople, and the up-and-coming theologians of the next generation to do “theology after Google,” theology for a Google-shaped world. Thanks to the Ford funding, we’ve been able to assemble a stellar team of cultural creatives and experts in the new modes of communication. We are also inviting a selection of senior theologians, and well as some of the younger theologians (call them “theobloggers”) whose use of the new media (blogging, podcasts, YouTube posts) is already earning them large followings and high levels of influence. For two and a half days, in workshops and in hands-on sessions, in lectures and over drinks, these leading figures will be at your disposal to teach you everything they know.

The Theology After Google conference is coming up this week, and I thought that folks might be interested in some of my contributions there. (They're bringing me in as one of those theobloggers)  Particularly: Members of the Religious Society of Friends, folks interested in theopoetics, and hermeneutics nerds. The full schedule is here, and is all set to Pacific Standard Time. 

The main setup is like TED talks, and will all be live streaming here: tinyurl.com/tag10stream .

Please interact, and as I said in the vid, shoot me any comments that you think are relevant.  Fun times.

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