Daily Archives: September 25, 2008

Against Being Holistic

Posted by on September 25, 2008 30 comments

Some of my favorite theologians to read are grand synthesizers who are capable of building conceptual systems of theology that are very beautiful things indeed to explore, linger, and wander about in. Two that come immediately to mind are Hans Urs von Balthasar and Thomas Torrance. Balthasar in particular is one of the greatest examples of holisitic thinkers. His thought is one of the grandest intellectual projects in all of theological history encompassing the breadth of Western philosophy, theology, and literature.

What I find most alluring about Balthasar is the degree to which his theology offers and answer to virtually everything. Balthasar’s system is able to incorporate almost any objection, perspective, insight, or particularity. It accounts for almost everything in advance. This is what makes is beautiful, impressive, and alluring. And I think it may be his greatest weakness.

I am becoming more and more convinced that there is a sort of inadvertent quest for totality at work in the thought of many theologians who put forth such aesthetic, holistic projects. David Bentley Hart strikes me as another recent example. There is a sort of Promethean longing in many theological projects for a holistic metadiscourse that is able to seamlessly situate both contesting perspectives and complimentary insights, accounting for them in advance from within. The attempt to be holistic and comprehensive in theology often mask a covert desire for conceptual neatness and security.

This is not to say that I am not impressed with or have no sympathies for these projects. They are, in fact some of the greatest pieces of theology I have read. The problem I have, or at least the lingering question I have about them concerns the degree to which they strive for a sort of premature closure that shuts out the possibility of being unsettled and disturbed by what may be discovered in the course of the theological task. The questions are all too often settled in advance. This is the haunting problem of such metatheologies. Beneath the gothic arches of these beautiful systems lurk the ghosts of forgotten voices, neglected witnesses, elusive protests subtly silenced. The quest for a holistic theology, then, is something that is suspect. To what degree does our longing for a holistic theology mask a sort of methodological Constantinianism that grasps after conceptual closure and wants to foreclose the possibility of dissonance and dislocation?

Too often I fear that theologians’ agendae are centered more on the desire to rule out disruptive difference that to cultivate the sort of Christic dispositions that would enable us to welcome such disruptions as divine gifts. The theologians’ task is not, then, to construct holistic systems that are able to situate and account for all contesting voices and challenges. Rather, the theological task is to call the church to the kenotic posture of self-dispossessive openness to the Word of God in Christ which always lies beyond us, welcoming us in the insecurity of promise, trust, and hope–the en via life of the pilgrims.

The Perichoretic Church

Posted by on September 25, 2008 8 comments

Regarding the proper use of perichoresis to describe the unity of the church, Miroslav Volf strike just the right balance (against those who would paint him as a simplistic social trinitarian). He claims that “It is not the mutual perichoriesis of human beings, but the indwelling of the Spirit common to everyone that makes the church into a communion corresponding to the Trinity, a communion in which personhood and sociality are equiprimal” (After Our Likeness, 213).

What makes the church an image of the divine perichoresis of the Trinity is not that human beings qua human being interpenetrate one another in a way analogous to the trinitarian relations. Rather it is that the church, as the community indwelt by the triune God through the Spirit’s presence in each believer and in the Eucharist, brings about a pneumatic union of all ecclesial persons in the event of the church’s gathering. Because the same Holy Spirit indwells all Christians, all Christians are unified “in the Spirit”, being knitted together at the utmost level of intimacy and closeness. The church is a perichoretic community for this reason and this reason only.

A Further Note on Perichoresis

Posted by on September 25, 2008 1 comment

Many of the advocates for social trinitarianism point to its ethical and political implications. If human relationality is supposed to image divine trinitarian relationality, then clearly there are a great many ethical implications from this about community, social justice, etc. Moltmann in particular typifies this sort of claim.

Moreover, the claim for the robustness of this sort of trinitarian ethic tends to be grounded in the concept of perichoresis. If God’s inter-trinitarian relations are a dynamic event of interpenetration and mutual indwelling, clearly our relations with one another must manifest the same sort of mutual interiority and intimacy.

There is one big problem with this sort of argument. Interpenetration is not by any means a necessarily good thing. Any feminist theologian worth their salt will tell you that “penetration” can be pretty violent and dehumanizing. Mutual indwelling is not, in and of itself, a good thing at all. Lives that are closely knit together to such a degree that they can meaningfully be called “interpenetrating” may or may not be good lives. Human relations are morally defined, not by the fact that they are dynamic and interpenetrating, but by the sort of ends to which our relations with one another is directed, and the quality of life together that is fostered in and through our relations with each other. What matters is not primarily that we advocate for a form of human life that is “interpentrating”, but rather that we accurately describe the quality of relations that are appropriate to the gospel, namely lives of self-giving love, gift, deference, and thoroughgoingly mutual subordination.

We don’t need a concept of perichoresis to tell us that all of us are indwelt, shaped, and formed by our relations with others. That is plainly obvious in all human cultures. What we need is not a blank advocation for a view of human persons as mutually interior to one another–we are that way whether we like it or not–rather, we need to advocate for properly shaped social relations as defined by the agapaeic ethics of Scripture. Merely establishing that “we are all connected” establishes nothing but that which everyone, particularly those who are suffering, already know.

Revisiting Perichoresis

Posted by on September 25, 2008 16 comments

The language of perichoresis, bearing a long pedigree in trinitarian theology, has fallen on hard times of late. Part of this is certainly due to the way in which the concept has been over-used in many recent works in trinitarian theology. Colin Gunton has offered perhaps the most sophisticated use of perichoresis in attempting to construct a trinitarian theology of creation and redemption. Gunton argues that, not only can perichoresis be used analogically to describe the nature of human personal relations one to another,but can in fact be understood trancendentally as a mark of all created being. Gunton argues, on the basis of sort of perichoretic metaphysic that “reality is on all levels ‘perichoretic’, a dynamism of relatedness.” (The One, the Three, and the Many, 165.)

Gunton is unique among contemporary theologians in that he has built an entire project in theological ontology on the basis of understanding perichoresis as a transcendental mark of being. This has brought him plenty of criticism, primarily focusing on the claim that perichoresis, properly understood only describes God’s own immanent reality as Trinity. We cannot simply “read” the divine dynamic of perichoretic unity from God onto created relationality.

I think, however, that the criticisms of projects like Gunton’s which use perichoresis as a sort of trancendental miss the mark. The problem is not that Gunton illegitimately extends a divine concept to human relationality. To presuppose that divine qualities are inherently opposed to created being is to make a fundamental theological mistake, namely that the divine attributes are simply the negations of the human. There is no prima facie reason why the dynamic of perichoresis could not be legitimately applied in an analogical manner to describe human patterns of relationship simply because it is an attribute of the triune God.

The real problem with Gunton’s account is the way he seeks to deploy the language of perichoresis, not the fact that he seeks to use such language. The problem is that Gunton sees the point of connection between the divine interanimation and interpenetration and human relationality in a transcendental mark of being common to both God and creation. In short, what makes Gunton’s project problematic is not that it uses perichoresis, it is that it utilizes the analogia entis to establish a general category of “perichoreticness” to describe creation and divinity (p. 141).

We would do better to understand perichoresis as a quality of divine action than as a transcendental mark of being as such. What is helpful about this conceptuality is that it grounds our understanding of perichoresis and its implications for how we understand redeemed human sociality in God’s action extra nos. God’s economic action in the world manifests the characteristics of the divine interpenetration and interanimation of the divine persons. When God acts in the world, God’s actions have the shape of perichoresis: spaciousness, hospitality, structural openness, superabundant gift-giving. Because God is eternally a communion of persons who exist in a perfect actuality of making space within themselves for one another, God’s action in the world manifests the same shape. Thus, it is appropriate to describe the ecclesial communion of the church as a perichoresis, not because it is a transcendental mark of being, but because the church exists by virtue of God’s divine act of constituting it. The church manifests the shape of the divine perichoresis because the church is the dwelling place of the trinitarian persons, not because of any sort of transcendental human sociality.

There is nothing whatsoever wrong with talking about the church’s unity as being perichoretic (in line with Jesus’ language in John 17:21ff). What is crucial is that such descriptions of the church’s status as the earthly-historical analogate of the trinitarian perichoresis be grounded in God’s triune act of constituting the church as a radical novum in the world of fallen communality.

Against Ambiguity–In Praise of Binary Oppositions

Posted by on September 25, 2008 1 comment

The Johannine writings are distinctive among the writings of the New Testament in that they are so radically polarized in how the present the conflict between the church and the world. John’s whole thought world is one of binaries: life and death, love and hate, truth and lies, above and below, heaven and earth. This has been one of the reasons that the Johannine corpus has been subject to quite a bit of disdain. Clearly, it seems, John’s pure world of clear opposition between good and evil, church and world, must be an oversimplification, reflecting a sort of paleofundamentalism that must be qualified by other, more nuanced segments of the New Testament.

I would question this way of evaluating the Johannine writings. By contrast, I suggest that the very disambiguity of the Johnannine thought world is precisely what it has to offer the church. The problem with the church is generally not that it is too stark in how it views its life vis a vis the world, but that it is too nuanced. We are far more apt to strive for ambiguity, pluriformity, measure, and moderation in how we understand ourselves in relation to the pressing issues of our world. We crave ironic, tragic, and ambiguous ways of reading our world because it allows us to moderate any sort of ethical rigor that we might detect the gospel imposing on us. All too often our declarations about the ambiguities of being a disciple in a “complex” world are ways of simply making disobedience palatable and normal.

Bonhoeffer saw this perfectly in his book, Discipleship, which argued in no uncertain terms that we strive for ambiguity precisely to avoid questions of obedience. This is a message that continues to need to be heard. The Johannine word is always and ever relevant to a church that strives to have the demands of the Word against it eased into a sort of ambiguous tension–which is simply an elaborate way of dissolving any such tensions. We need to be told, not that there are countless “options” for our lives in Christ which may have their pros and cons, but that more often than not, our choices are between truth and lies, life and death. Our cravings for the comforts of ambiguity and complexity mask a perverse dodge that seeks to avoid asking the hard questions, presented so vividly in John’s gospel. What would it mean for us if we were willing to view the decisions we make about where to live, how to live, and who to live with as decisions either for life or for death? What if we permitted ourselves to embrace that kind of Johannine seriousness in attempting to morally navigate our Christian lives?

The Impossibility and Necessity of Love

Posted by on September 25, 2008 1 comment

The Johannine literature arguably has he most developed and sophisticated theological understanding of love in the entire Bible. For John, love and love alone is the test of all Christian reality. All of this is grounded in John’s theology proper–God is love, and as such love is the divine reality par excellence. Love is a divine, rather than a human possibility. Within “the world” love is simply impossible. For John our ability to love one another is solely grounded in the intrusion of God’s love into the world. “We love because he first loved us.”

For John, living in a community defined by mutual love is every bit as impossible as the dead being raised to life. However, if the God who is love, the God who raises the dead has indeed irrupted into the world, love is not only possible, it is the only true and real evidence of the gospel’s truth. For John, love is intimately tied up with the reality of the resurrection. Love is the the reality which raises the dead, and is the reality of the gospel in the world. Thus, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death.”

But what is the definition of Johannine love? It is precisely what we see in Christ–the willingness to expend oneself fully for the sake of others. There is nothing sentimental about Johannine love. Johannine love is the love that subjects itself to death for others and in doing so flourishes and lives in a way that defies any rational calculation. The reality of this love being embodied in the world is the only apologia for the Christian faith in Johannine perspective.

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