Category Archives: Theological Movements

Is there a postliberal theological project?

Posted by on September 16, 2010 73 comments

I was having a conversation the other night with a couple friends about the respective theological perspectives of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck regarding to what degree we can really classify them together as constitute a common school of thought (i.e. the “Yale School”). This conversation led me to think further regarding the whole notion of “postliberalism” which folks from Lindbeck to Hauerwas have claimed as a descriptor of their theological orientation.

What I’m fundamentally wondering about is whether or not there really is/was a coherent theological movement or sensibility that we can truly classify as “postliberalism.” If so, what is it? If there is such a thing as postliberalism what is its ultimate aim? What, if anything is the “postliberal project” if there is one? I find myself without a ready answer. It is by no means clear to me how or if Lindbeck, Hauerwas, and Frei (to simply name three commonly-mentioned examples who are often associated with the moniker) were working on a unified theological project of some sort. Thoughts?

McCarraher on Radical Orthodoxy

Posted by on February 1, 2010 35 comments

By popular request, here is Gene McCarraher’s biting critique of Radical Orthodoxy. Right on the money as far as I’m concerned.

Like a lot of Christian intellectuals over the last two decades, I quaffed a bit of the Kool-Aid served up by those in the RO constellation. Well, if I can extend the Kool-Aid metaphor a bit, drinking from the cistern of RO was refreshing and stimulating, particularly the idea that theology can be a distinct and compelling form of social and cultural criticism—of all the literature on that score, I think Graham Ward’s Cities of God is a real milestone. But as I’ve watched how some of this has played out or not played out over the last decade, I’ve concluded that the theological renaissance these figures embodied not only has waned, but also has encouraged some very bad mental and political habits. For one thing, I’m tired of hearing “modernity” and “liberalism” treated as though they were the spawn of Satan. Along with the other usual suspects—instrumental reason, science, universal rights, cosmopolitanism, “the Enlightenment project”—modernity and liberalism get hauled into the docket and found guilty, usually after a perfunctory trial, of the Judeocide, ecological catastrophe, capitalism, nuclear war, abortion, et cetera, ad nauseam. Give me a frigging break. When modernity and liberalism are this all-encompassing, they’ve become nothing more than verbal ciphers, containers for everything the writer doesn’t like, bestowing license to utter all manner of grandiose and stupid pontifications. With a lot of these people, liberalism equals nihilism, which equals the lowest circle of the inferno. The theological problem with this view is that it tends to completely strip the created world of its goodness. Can’t liberal modernity mediate grace or partake of beatitude in some fashion? Since when did Gothic architecture and the like become the only sanctioned media of Trinitarian love? Since when did Brave New World become the final word on modernity? So if you want to deride instrumental reason and technology, fine, but just remember all that when you have a toothache, or if the specialist discovers a tumor in time, or if your wife needs emergency assistance during childbirth. If you want to curse cosmopolitanism, fine, but just stop jetting across the oceans and using the Internet to do it, all the while lecturing the rest of us about nestling in the homespun joys of localism.

I’ve noticed that among RO’s American avatars there seems to be something of a Wendell Berry cult. You’d never know it from the way that they talk about him that the agrarian proprietary ideal is also what fueled Indian genocide and segregation. So enough already about rural life from disaffected suburbanites.

Like all intellectual laziness, that of RO has political implications that are debilitating and even insidious. I’ve long thought that what I’ve called the ecclesial fetishism of the movement is a problem. As Eric Gregory reminds us, the kingdom is much bigger than the church. By the same token, the movement’s portrait of church is sociologically unreal; it certainly doesn’t correspond to any church I know. If they want to say that their conception of church is an ideal, I wish they’d put the adjective eschatological in front of the word; but then, come the eschaton, there will be no church, only the kingdom. Like all fetishes, the church comes to bear an imaginative and political weight that it just can’t bear. Meanwhile, the insistence on the church as a political community can have theocratic implications to which I strongly object. I’m not the first person to point out that Milbank’s ecclesiology would seem to commit him inexorably to some kind of theocracy. He often employs all manner of bluster and circumlocution to avoid addressing this issue squarely—his response to Ben Suriano’s question about this in The Other Journal a few years back is utterly incoherent. But then, Milbank and others in RO can be too ill-tempered and dismissive to converse with anyone outside the cognoscenti; Chuck Mathewes has deftly pointed out that Milbank can’t talk to his opponents, only about them.

Milbank’s Christian socialism has a lot that’s attractive: decentralization, attention to technology as a moral and aesthetic realm, a call on unions and professional associations to become more guild-like and demand control over the means of production. But from what I’ve seen so far, he seems to favor in practice a distributism of the Chesterbelloc variety: small farms, small workshops, and local proprietary enterprise, all with a neomedievalist glaze over everything. Sorry, but this sounds like petty bourgeois capitalism decked out in Tolkienesque drag, a Rotary Club of the Shire. The decentralist tradition of Peter Kropotkin, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Goodman is much better informed historically about cities, ecology, and the history of technology. Milbank knows little or nothing of these people, but then it’s kind of an open secret that his reading of the historical record is selective, if not downright tendentious—he writes about John Ruskin, for instance, as if Ruskin was the only critic of industrial capitalism in Britain in the nineteenth century. Nothing about William Morris, Patrick Geddes, or Ebenezer Howard. Oh, that’s right; they weren’t Christians, so they couldn’t possibly have gotten anything right.

Canonical Theism: 30 Theses

Posted by on February 26, 2009 35 comments

This list of theses is authored by William Abraham, the main fellow behind recent publications that are proffering the label “Canonical Theism” as a sort of ecumenical and ecclesial movement that endeavors to appropriate the theological heritage of the church in a particular way. Specifically this movement centers on re-envisioning the very idea of “canon”, attempting to purge it of any connection with a theological epistemology and broadening to include vast segments of the church’s traditions, practices, saints, liturgies, images, hymns, etc. I’ll have some thoughts on this later, especially after I get around to reading the book which bears name of the movement. For now here’s Abraham’s thirty theses on the movement. I’m curious as to what folks might think about this construction. I have quite a few questions and apprehensions.

Thesis I: Canonical theism is a term invented to capture the robust form of theism manifested, lived, and expressed in the canonical heritage of the Church. It is proposed as both a living form of theism and a substantial theological experiment for today. We can explicate it further by distinguishing it from other forms of theism and by indicating more clearly how it is related to the canonical heritage of the Church.

Thesis II: Canonical theism is to be distinguished from Mere theism, Philosophical theism, Process theism, Open theism, Classical theism, and Consensual theism.

Thesis III: It differs from Mere theism in being much more robust; thus it is unapologetically Trinitarian in form and content.

Thesis IV: It differs from Philosophical theism, say, Anselmic or Perfect Being Theism, in that it is derived from the canonical heritage of the Church rather than developed from philosophical sources.

Thesis V: Canonical theism differs from Process theism in that it has no stake in the theism advanced by Process philosophers and theologians are free to examine the claims of Process theism on merit.

Thesis VI: The same principle applies mutatis mutandis to present attempts to develop the form of Open theism that is currently being articulated by some American Evangelicals. Canonical theists are free to examine the claims of this form of theism on its merits and to either reject it or to accept it as additional midrashic extension of their theism.

Thesis VII: Canonical theism differs from Classical theism in that the latter is a historical notion drawn from the history of ideas and used to designate a strong monotheism with impassibilist connotations. Canonical theism is first and foremost Trinitarian; and, while it readily absorbs the classical attributes of monotheism, the commitment on passability is modest and complex.

Thesis VIII: Canonical theism differs from the Consensual theism of, say, Thomas Oden, in two ways. First, it is skeptical of the claim that there exists a consensus across the patristic era, Roman Catholicism, Magisterial Protestantism, Evangelical orthodoxy, and the like. While there are clear elements of overlap between these groups, there are very serious differences that challenge the claim of consensus. Second, Canonical theism focuses on the public, canonical decisions of the Church existing in space and time across the first millennium.

Thesis IX: Canonical theism is intimately tied to the notion of the canonical heritage of the Church. The Church possesses not just a canon of books in its bible, but also a canon of doctrine, a canon of saints, a canon of Fathers, a canon of theologians, a canon of liturgy, a canon of bishops, a canon of councils, a canon of ecclesial regulations, a canon of icons, and the like. In short, the Church possesses a canonical heritage of persons, practices, and materials. Canonical theism is the theism expressed in and through the canonical heritage of the Church.

Thesis X: The canonical heritage of the Church came into existence through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was active in motivating, energizing, guiding, directing, and overseeing their original production in the Church.

Thesis XI: The canonical heritage of the Church functions first and foremost soteriologically. It operates as a complex means of grace that restores the image of God in human beings and brings them into communion with God and with each other in the Church. Each component is primarily a tool to be used in spiritual direction and formation.

Thesis XII: The canonical heritage through which Canonical theism is mediated is not in and of itself an epistemology, nor is it meant to serve as an epistemology. It is not a handbook on how to resolve disputes about rationality, justification, warrant, knowledge, and truth.

Thesis XIII: The ongoing success of the canonical heritage of the Church depends on the continuing active presence of the Holy Spirit working through the relevant persons, practices, and materials.

Thesis XIV: The canonical heritage of the Church is to be received in genuine repentance and lively faith. The effective operation of the various components depends on an open and contrite heart and a readiness to practice the light of God that one encounters.

Thesis XV: Generally speaking, the various components of the canonical heritage have their own distinctive role in the economy of faith. Thus, the scriptures do not do the job of the creed, and the creed does not do the job of the episcopate, and the episcopate does not do the work of baptism, and so on. Each has its own function in the healing and restoration of the human soul.

Thesis XVI: While the various elements in the canonical heritage work ideally together, there is a fair degree of overdetermination, for there is overlapping in their particular purposes. When one is missing or improperly used, others can take up the spiritual slack. Thus the icons can marvelously convey the content of the gospel and the teaching of scripture.

Thesis XVII: Canonical theism’s vision of canon differs from the standard western vision of canon in two ways. First, it extends canon beyond the canon of scripture or the bible. Here it draws on the original meaning of canon as a “list”. Second, it eschews conceiving canon as an epistemic criterion, relocating canon within the Church rather than within the field of epistemology and philosophy. In Canonical theism canon is construed fundamentally as a means of grace, a way through which the Holy Spirit reaches and restores the image of God in human agents.

Thesis XVIII: On the surface commitment to Canonical theism appears to involve a turn to Roman Catholicism and a move a way from Protestantism. This is false. Both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism work with a radically epistemic conception of canon; and they restrict canon to scripture. Magisterial Protestantism tries to work with the canon of scripture alone. Roman Catholicism adds tradition, the magisterium, and papal infallibility understood in epistemic terms as the means whereby the meaning of the canon is to be rightly understood. Hence epistemology rather than soteriology is primary in the conception and reception of canon in both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

Thesis XIX: Although canonical theism is clearly compatible with Eastern Orthodoxy, it is unclear how far the Eastern Church articulates any substantial vision of the canonical heritage of the undivided Church.

Thesis XX: Canonical theism emerges as an option within Protestantism and is proposed as a healing theological option within Protestantism. It can readily be seen as a fresh reappropriation of the patristic tradition for today. It invites Protestantism to a radical revision of its internal commitments. It is unclear how far this is possible given the constitutive elements of Protestantism. Perhaps Canonical theism is essentially post-protestant at its core and cannot be absorbed within Protestantism. At its conception Canonical theism arose out of a deep, even searing, dissatisfaction with current forms of liberal and conservative Protestantism. However, there is no reason in principle why Canonical theism cannot preserve and even enhance the best insights and fruits of the Protestant traditions across the centuries.

Thesis XXI: Canonical theism gives intellectual primacy to ontology over epistemology. We find ourselves meeting God, discovering our sinfulness, encountering redemption, struggling with evil, immersed in suffering, and the like. We are initiated into the faith of the gospel, baptized, enter the Church, experience the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, and are converted to a life of holiness. We encounter these phenomena without having to hand an epistemology, without necessarily figuring out how to deal with the questions about truth, rationality, justification, and knowledge that conventionally arise. Nor do these phenomena require us to have an epistemology before we engage in them. Hence ontology is logically prior to epistemology. Without the ontology the epistemology is likely to be thin, wooden, and inappropriate.

Thesis XXII: The canonical heritage generates rigorous epistemological reflection and theorizing. Such work needs to be pursued at the highest intellectual level. There is no drawing back from the epistemology of theology into some kind of naive credulity or a shutting down of the question of meaning and justification rightly raised by philosophers in the twentieth century. Canonical theists are interested in pursuing the implications of epistemologies compatible with Canonical theism for the understanding of the history of the Church and the study of scripture. Canonical theism may lead to the development of epistemological insights that have overtones for all of human thought and existence that are as yet unidentified and unexplored.

Thesis XXIII: Canonical theists have no stake per se in foundationalism as an epistemological position. Canonical theism is open to a whole variety of epistemological options, whether foundationalist or coherentist, internalist or externalist, evidentialist or non-evidentialist. These matters are to be pursued with rigor and appropriate sophistication as needed.

Thesis XXIV: In the epistemology of theology, special attention should be given to epistemic suggestions already present in the canonical heritage of the Church. These have often been obscured from vision when canon has been construed as a criterion and when epistemology has been conceived along internalist lines.

Thesis XXV: No single epistemological vision should be offered or sanctioned as canonical in the Church. This can be spelled out in two ways. First, various and internally competing epistemological visions and theories are compatible with the content of the canonical heritage. Second, the various epistemological assertions, comments, and suggestions found in the canonical heritage do not constitute a full-dress, comprehensive epistemological vision.

Thesis XXVI: Epistemological insights and theories have a place as teaching tools in the Church and as part of the work of evangelism and apologetics. People naturally ask epistemological questions within and without theology and their questions deserve to be taken seriously. Knowing when and how to introduce epistemological issues and materials is a matter of delicate pedagogical judgment.

Thesis XXVII: The history of the canonical heritage throws light on the history of epistemology. Some of the most interesting epistemology in the West has been evoked by theological disagreement, even though in the secularization of the academy this has been lost from view in the histories of epistemology. Canonical theists are interested in fresh ways of understanding the history of epistemology, not least in identifying and exploring epistemic insights that have been forgotten or ignored. They are especially interested in the place of theism in the history of epistemology, exploring the role posited for God in debates about rationality, justification, and knowledge.

Thesis XXVIII: The continuity between the canonical faith of the Church beyond the first millennium is an open question. Clearly, different configurations of Christianity have preserved and effectively deployed much of the canonical heritage in their own way and manner. Witness, for example, the varied way in which the doctrine of the Trinity has been preserved in hymnody in non-creedal traditions.

Thesis XXIX: The canonical heritage of the Church should constitute a bedrock commitment for Christians as a whole. We need to approach the various Christian churches and denominations not in terms of one element of the canonical heritage as constitutive of Christian identity but in terms of how far they have owned the various components of the canonical heritage. This prohibits an all or nothing judgment, with one group automatically in and another group automatically out. We will have to work with judgments of proportion and degree.

Thesis XXX: All epistemological proposals, like papal infallibility, scriptural infallibility, and the Methodist Quadrilateral, should be treated as midrash, secondary to the primary constitutive commitments of the Church as a whole. Hence we need not give up our epistemological theories, but they do have to be decanonized in the ecumenical arena. This is where the rub is going to come hard for many. Perhaps the epistemological positions could be canonical for sub-groups within the Church as a whole, while not being at all canonical for the whole Church. Radical decanonization of epistemologies of theology is the preferred option.

The Apostolic and the Post-Apostolic

Posted by on October 5, 2008 4 comments

In conversation with Yves Congar’s Tradition and Traditions, John Webster makes the observation that one can describe the Nouvelle Théologie movement as a sort of theological mood or style that is premised on the claim that the distinction between the apostolic and the post-apostolic ought not to be pressed.

In other words, according this theological style, we should not assume much, if any disjunction between the patristic reception of the apostolic witness and the apostolic witness itself.

Now there may be merit to such a view, but of course it implies a very specific sort of theological historiography that is, in principle quite open to question, especially in light of the radical conflict over interpretation of the gospel that is present in the New Testament itself.

However, the question for all of us interested in theological history and the search for a responsible theological method for studying doctrine and the church historically is intimately connected with this issue. What is the nature of the apostolic witness and what is its connection to its ongoing ecclesial reception? How one answers that question will likely be determinative of how one approaches a whole host of ecclesiological and ecumenical issues.

Milbank on Scientism, Sex, and Personhood

Posted by on June 5, 2008 8 comments

The latest issue of The Other Journal has a fascinating interview with John Milbank on contemporary atheism.  In the process a whole mess of things get talked about, including the sexualization of contemporary culture in contrast with the sort of inverted totalitarianism that obtains in regard to all other forms of freedom.  Here’s just one snippet:

“Science is the freedom to know and is Faustian. Beyond this is the right to choose one’s lifestyle. But of course one can’t interfere with the freedom or happiness of others nor the power of the State. The really crucial thing here which the left has missed is that sexual freedoms have increased exponentially while all other freedoms have declined.

Today in Great Britain you scarcely have the right to demonstrate and a higher proportion of the population is in prison than are in China. The boy at the shop counter with no customers is not allowed to read a book to improve himself all day, but who cares what he gets up to with sex and drink after the shop closes? Of course there’s also a double think about sex—its all OK, male sexuality is nearly always exploitative, etc… But in general it would seem that, as Adorno and Horkheimer predicted, sexualization is intended to keep us all quiet: neurotic, hysterical, frustrated and unhappy but still ‘looking’. With sex divided from procreation, science and sexual freedom come together.

So by supporting the total disjuncture of sex and procreation, the left is really supporting a new mode of fascism. ‘Women’ are lined up with science and choice in order to produce a new kind of ideal human subjectivity—male and autonomous and yet pliant in ‘female’ manner. The newly envisaged female body is the final site of the coming together of scientific objectivity and absolute freedom of choice. Perhaps one could even speak here of a new racism of the human race as such—it’s to be made the object of an endless ‘objective’ improvement and expression of a will to freedom/will to power. Of course this also means that the specific phenomenology of the female body is destroyed. It’s denied that this body is inherently linked both to the male body (as also vice-versa) and to another body that is itself and yet becomes not itself—the baby. Having denied the link of babies to men and also to women save as objects of their (‘male’) choice, babies thereby become pure consumer objects and all human personhood is abandoned.”

–Ben Suriano, “Three Questions on Modern Atheism: An Interview with John Milbank“, The Other Journal June 4 (2008)

The Ubiquity of the Theological

Posted by on April 14, 2008 11 comments

One of the greatest insights of much recent theology is the insistence that there is no non-theological sphere.  All forms of discourse, in one way or another are theological.  This I take to be the central insight of John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory and the Radical Orthodoxy movement as a whole.  The question that this raises, though is what the ubiquity of the theological means for the shape of theological engagements with culture.  In other words, I wonder if recognizing the ubiquity of the theological inevitably casts theology into an agonistic mode.  Does recognizing the ubiquity of the theological mean that all our discussions with other communities and cultures must be conducting solely in the mode of undermining and exposing the theological foundations of all non-Christian thought? 

Put differently, does exposing the theological roots of all discourse require us to engaging in the sort of thermo-nuclear theological assault on everything outside of the Christian faith that is embodied in project’s like Milbank’s?  Does the ubiquity of the theological mean that the sole mode of Christian discourse with those outside is monological and deconstructive?

Karl Barth Blog Conference 2008: Update

Posted by on January 28, 2008 Comments Off

As it turns out my own proposal for a plenary paper for this year’s Karl Barth Blog Conference will be published on day three of the conference.  The title for my piece is “A Still Greater Historicity:  Hegel, Jüngel, and the Historicization of God’s Being”.  This paper will exmine  the role of Hegel in Jüngel’s trinitarianism (with special reference to God’s Being is in Becoming) in dialogue with recent discussions about the relationship between the economic and immanent trinities, particularly the question of how Jesus is indispensable to an account of the immanent Trinity.

Here is one of the important quotes from Jüngel’s God’s Being is in Becoming on this issue:

“God’s being in person is in a spcifict way a free event in so far as it is not only ‘being . . . moved in itself and therefore motivating being’, but ‘being which is self-moved’.  That means that, as event, the being of God posesses the freedom of decision.  Decision does not belong to the being of God as somthing supplementary to this being; rather as event, God’s being is his own decision. ‘The fact that God’s being is event, the event of God’s act, necessarily . . . means that it is His own consicous, willed, and executed decision.’  What was already worked out in the doctrine of the Trinity is now confirmed from working out a concept of being apprpriate to God: God’s being is constuted through historicality.  For in its ‘decision, and therefore personal being’ God’s being ‘is the being of God in the nature of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’ in which ‘God live from and by Himself’.” (p. 80-81)

One of the things that his quote shows very well is, not only Jüngel’s superb exposition of Barth’s actualistic and historicist doctrine of God, but the way in which Barth’s doctrine of God establishes a properly theological construal of being.  In contrast to John Milbank’s accusation, that Barth’s work ultimately fails “to redefine being and knowledge theologically” (Radical Orthodoxy, p. 22), Jüngel shows how Barth’s Christocentric theology of election grounds and is grounded in a properly theological ontology.  For Barth and Jüngel, to be is to be included in God’s primal decision to be God-for-humanity.  And, as revealed in Christ, this decision is not something extraneous to God, but is rather identical with God’s very being (for Jesus is “very God of very God”).  God’s decision to be God for us is the very decision by which God is God.  As Jüngel points out, “the decision about God’s being is not to be understood only as a decision for God, but also – precisly as a decision for God – as a decision for humanity” (p. 81).  Therefore, being is theologically defined as that which is included in the event of the triune God’s election of the world in Jesus, which includes all things, leaving nothing out.  In contrast to Milbank and others who see the triumph of a sort of post-Kantian philosophy in Barth’s thought, when he is read rightly, as Jüngel exemplfies, his theology offers a profoundly robust theological ontology that is at once Christological, historical, actualistic, and participatory.  It is this ontology that I will be exploring in the upcoming Karl Barth conference, with special reference to the doctrine of the Trinity. 

Radical Orthodoxy meets South Park

Posted by on October 9, 2007 1 comment

Lee over at the Smithy has produced an awesome post on Radical Orthodoxy in which he likens it to what is probably my favorite cartoon and guilty pleasure, South Park.

Here’s a bit of what he said:

I don’t know if any of my gentle readers recall the early Southpark episode where Tweak is out of his mind due to his constant coffee drinking and thinks he sees little gnomes stealing his underpants. It turns out he was right all along, and that there was a gnome civilization living in the sewers (next to Mr. Hankey the Christmas poo I presume).

The other day I was reading some more Radical Orthodoxy. Milbank was faulting Scotus for arguing for the Immaculate Conception because it meant he could not appreciate fully the christmas carol “o felix culpa.” …

Reflecting upon these matters, I was struck by the similarity to the Underpants gnomes. When the children ask the gnomes why they steal people’s underpants, they respond in their cute high-pitched voices, “stage 1: steal underpants. Stage 2: ? Stage 3: Profit!!” Radical Orthodoxy’s method works very much the same way. Stage 1: Scotus says something that Aquinas does not. Stage 2: ? stage 3: Modernity! Holocaust of Nihilism! For the “?” one must imagine the little gnome shrugging his shoulders and making a questioning, wordless, utterance.

Lee, you can be assured that I remember that episode as I have watched them all religously and repeatedly.  However, I never thought of all the connections I could make between South Park and Radical Orthodoxy, and so for that, I thank you.  If nothing else, this great post has made me throw my inhibitions about discussing South Park in theological posts to the wind.  Y’all can look for that in the future.

Theological Parodies…a good time to be had by all

Posted by on August 6, 2007 3 comments

The other night a couple of friends and I were enjoying some beers at the local English pub, the Horse Brass (about as authentic as they get outside of the UK) and were having fun rhapsody-ing on about all things theological.  In the course of the evening we came up with our own, purely comedic version of Radical Orthodoxy, which as you may know, I have lamooned on this blog several times before, with various responses.  But, regardless we have come up with an excellent new book series proposal that I think all RO-minded thinkers would find captivating:

“Radical Mythology: Repristinating the Pre-Modern without Apology”

Forthcoming titles include:

Methexis & Metanoia: Reclaiming the Humors in Christian Bioethics

Theological Alchemy after the End of History

Leechcraft and the Christological: The New Debate

Lest You Fall Away: Living on Flat Earth amongst Nihilistic Spheres

Divine Creationality: On Reclaiming Ptolemaic Cosmology

Tiamet Reconsidered: Demononological Strivings and/as Origin of the Cosmos

In Defense of the Crusades, Or, Why Islam is Nihilism

Phileo and Fellatio: An Augustinian Theology of Orgasms

The Erotics of Redemption: Temple Prostitutes Vindicated!

J.P. Moreland & the Psychoses of Evangelical Cultural Engagement

Posted by on July 25, 2007 27 comments

I recently did something that I make it a point to never, ever, ever do.  I picked up a copy of a book by J.P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle.  I was wrong to do it and I should have stuck to my guns and just put the book on the shelves after cataloging it at work.  But alas, I did not.  Instead I skimmed through the whole thing and am now thoroughly convinced of one important theological point: the only difference between Radical Orthodoxy and contemporary evangelicalism is that RO has more rhetorical flourish and has read some western literature and continental philosophy.  Other than that, they are the same.  Both of them consist of asserting that the contemporary cultural zeitgeist is inherently nihilistic, irrational, barbaric, and stupid and the Christian worldview, or metanarrative (which they understand with absolute perfection) is the only solution to the world’s woes.  Or, more specifically, the only solution to the infinite nihilism and vicious solipsism of the horrifyingly secular world is for the Christian worldview/metanarrative to take over the world with the church regaining cultural dominance and power.  In short, they are both so terrified of modernity that Christendom sounds super wonderful and awesome.  So let’s do that!

I’ve already wrote enough on RO about this for the time being, so evangelicalism, and particularly Moreland are really in my crosshairs right now.  His book opens with this following statement:

The year 1974 was declared the Year of the Evangelical.  Apparently no one was listening.  The year came and went as our culture continued slouching towards Gomorrah.  Fast forward to 2007.  Islamic terrorism threatens our borders, our political discourse is shrill and spoken in sound bites, and an epidemic of pornography addiction threatens the very possibility of healthy relationships between men and women.  People have to think twice about whether saving aborted babies or snail darters are more important.  We can’t agree about the sexual makeup of a healthy family. (p. 12)

Moreland goes on to say that the reason evangelicals didn’t rise to the occasion in 1974 is because the cultural revolution of the 60′s was still so recent that we hadn’t yet reached the bowels of Gomorrah and seen the fullness of horrors that has resulted from our culture’s rejection of the “Judeo-Christian worldview”.  However, now that we have seen all those aforesaid horrors, we must now rise to the occasion:

Since the mid 1800s, there has never been a greater window of opportunity for us to seize the moment and, by our lives and thought, to show our culture the way forward.  Now is the time for us to stop being thirty years behind the times.  Now is the time for us to gather our confidence and lead. (p. 12)

Yes!  Absolutely!  Christians must take over the world for God!  Here is the quintessentially nostalgic contemporary evangelical battle cry.  We must regain control of the world and save it with our better worldview.  Moreland goes on to argue in his book that the two principle opponents of Christianity today are “naturalism” and “postmodernism” which yield a “thin” and “meaningless” world.  The solution is his “kingdom triangle” which is to 1) recover the Christian mind (aka analytic philosophy and foundationalism), 2) to renovate the soul (aka spiritual formation in the vein of Dallas Willard), and finally 3) to restore the Spirit’s power (aka to recognize that there are still miracles going on á la Jack Deere – I guess Moreland’s some kind of neocharismatic now).

I could continue to supply a litany of references from this book that reveal its totally nostalgic, fear-driven, and power-grabbing thrust.  Moreland wants evangelicals to run the world for God.  The “we” of his book is always Christians in America, and America is the subject of his hoped for Christian takeover.  His uncritically Americanized cultural polemic immediately assumes that Christians have a stake in making America work and that America somehow has a special claim on Christian’s loyalty.  This of course has everything to do with Moreland’s hopes for an Amerianized Christendom where conservative family values run the world.

However, his hopes for how this wonderous world of American Christendom  are to be realized are utterly pelagianistic and hinge on Christians having the most unassailably brilliant philosophy and strategy that we will sweep away those damn secularists and postmodernists and finally get things back to the way they were in the good old mid 1800s.  I could go on a tirade about this forever, so let me just give two main points of critique.

 First, Moreland’s proposals for cultural engagement are Pelagian and driven by an utter lack of trust in the Triune God.  The inside flap on the front cover of this book states that “the biblical worldview [is] the only hope for the world”.  Maybe this is just a faux pas on Moreland’s part, but a statement such as that is not simply wrong, it is heretical.  The only hope for the world is not a worldview, but a person, Jesus Christ.  However, I think this statement much more than a faux pas, but rather the thrust of the entire book.  Moreland’s whole agenda is for the church to save the world that is “slouching toward Gomorrah“.  There is no sense of trust and hope in the transcendent power of the Triune God to transform the world, or more accurately that in Christ the transformation of the world has already happened.  Rather, for Moreland it is our job to get God’s work done by saving the world. 

This is nowhere more evident than in his third element of the “kingdom triangle” that we are to “restore the Spirit’s power”.  What could be more pretentious and heretical than the idea that it is up to us to be restoring the Spirit’s power?  Moreland’s book seems so terrified by how culture has fallen away from his particular understanding of conservative politics and values (his “Judeo-Christian worldview”, which by the way is an abstraction, but that’s another discussion) that instead of faith in God being proclaimed, instead we are thrown back upon ourselves to renew our minds, renovate our souls and restore the power of the Spirit.  However, in the Bible it is the Spirit who blows where he wishes and now one knows where he is going or coming from (Jn. 3:8).  Likewise it is not we who transform ourselves by renewing our minds, but God in Christ who conforms us to the image of the beloved Son (Rom. 8:29, 12:2).  Moreland seems to think that these activities are not the works of the Triune God extra nos, rather we are thrown back upon ourselves to accomplish these tasks, thereby saving the world, at least in a provisional sense.  This is functional Pelagianism at best.  The irony is that Moreland hails from a Calvinistic and dispensational premillennialist school and is here advancing a proposal that is Pelagian and postmillennial.

 Second, Moreland’s critiques of contemporary culture are a bunch of bourgeois, affluent, western platitudes driven by a typically American conservativism.  Just glance at the above quote on Moreland’s litany of what’s wrong with our hellish culture.  For Moreland the symptoms of our culture’s descent into Gomorrah are evidenced by Islamic terrorists, political rhetoric(read: liberals), pornography, abortion, and homosexuality.  Now let me be clear, I don’t think any of those things are good at all.  If you’ve read this blog much you know I’m pretty conservative on sexual ethics and I think abortion is a terrible reality in our society.  That said, what does it mean when these are the issues that define what Moreland is against?  His snide comment about saving darter snails just makes light of Christians who think we should be concerned about the environment. And where is poverty?  Globalization? Consumer capitalism?  I shouldn’t even mention that racism never appears in Moreland’s field of vision – though, since he is so nostalgic about the mid 1800s maybe we better not bring that one up?  I don’t know how anyone but a white Christian could make so stupid a statement as Moreland’s implication that the 19th century was the golden age of Christianity.

This agenda is a typical conservative one.  It is bourgeois and elitist to the core.  Only someone how has never had to go hungry or been unable to afford clean water has time to sit around and imagine that the gay family next door and internet porn are the biggest problems with our culture.  In a world where ethnic cleansings and genocides (which have everything to do with global capitalism and the conditions it creates) are ignored because they aren’t being perpetrated on people in the western hemisphere, if the only cultural critique Christians are able to produce is rants about sexual morality and abortion, then Christianity is in a sad state indeed.  It is self-righteous and immoral for Christians to parade agendas like Moreland’s while ignoring the “weightier matters of the law” (Matt. 23:23).  And that is exactly what this book does.

Believe it or not, I really am trying not to be too shrill with this critique, but I find Moreland’s perspective on culture to be so asinine and militant that I’m sure I get a little too revved up about it.  I hope that won’t alienate all readers.  But regardless, I think books like this and thinkers like Moreland are far more dangerous to the church than nutty atheists like Richard Dawkins.  It is the militants like Moreland who polarize Christians and cripple our authentic witness as they try to grab cultural and political power for the church.  It has nothing to do with cross and resurrection and everything to do with crossing the Rubicon.  Christians should be horrified by such a theological and political agenda.

Outnarrating Nihilism?

Posted by on July 3, 2007 15 comments

One of the central elements of the project of Radical Orthodoxy is based on the conception of Christian theology “outnarrating” all other metanarratives. A central claim of Radical Orthodoxy is that all other narratives or systems of thought tend inevitably toward nihilism because the only true basis for the peaceable negotiation of difference is on the basis of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in which infinite difference (namely the difference between the Father and Son, and the “second difference” of the Holy Spirit from the Son and the Father) is expressed, not in conflict, but in infinite peace and overabundant gift-giving. Thus, according to John Milbank, Christianity is “the coding of transcendental difference as peace” (TST, 6).

This idea is almost exactly right. Radical Orthodoxy is right to state that all discourses are ultimately theological and that there is no autonomous philosophical reflection. Where they are wrong is in the idea that it is Christian theology (or, particularly “Christianity/Neoplatonism”) which is required to overcome nihilism. As Colin Gunton observed, in a somewhat prescient review of the initial Radical Orthodoxy volume, if the Triune God is truly the creator of the world, then nihilism is ultimately not a real possibility. However, for Radical Orthodoxy it is less important that the Triune God is the creator of the world than that the church narrate the claim that since the church believes that Triune God is the creator of the world, it has the answer to the nihilism allegedly inherent in all other discourses.

This is wrong, not because it sees that the transcendental peace of the Trinity is the answer to nihilism, death, and non-being but because it insists that it is the church’s narration of this “counter-history” that ultimately overcomes and situates all other dialogues and discursive practices. The right answer is not to locate the power of God’s Triune peace in the church’s narration, but rather in God himself. The sublimation of nihilism is not actualized by the church’s outnarration of the modernity, but by the creative and redemptive activity of the Triune God in the economy of salvation. And what the Triune God does in redeeming the world is not to “outnarrate” all competing claims about the world, but rather to enter into them in such a way that they all find themselves located within the narrative of God’s own life as Trinity. Nihilism is not outnarrated by a more compelling ecclesial narrative, but by the actual self-giving of the Triune God in Christ which unites persons of all narratives, cultures, and nations in one Catholic body in which difference exists as communio.

The instinct of Radical Orthodoxy is right. It realizes that all other discourses must ultimately be related to the reality of the Triune Creator. However, it does not realize that it is God’s actual activity in the world in Christ that does in fact relate all created logoi to the one logos. There is no realm of “pure nature” (de Lubac) which descends into nihilism unless outnarrated by theology. By virtue of the ubiquity of Triune grace, all narratives are included by God in the work of Christ. There is no need for the church to outnarrate modernity because the narratives of modernity only exist within the narrative of God’s life as Trinity. As such, theology does not need to (violently) outnarrate all other competing narratives in order for the reality of ontological peace to become real in our world. All of humanity’s competing narratives, whatever violence or nihilism there may be inherent within them because of sin are always-already included in the reconciling story of the Triune God’s self-giving embrace of the world in Christ. God’s covenantal ‘Yes’ to the world subsumes and nonviolently embraces any and every ‘No’ from any discourse that would attempt to posit the world without God.

As such, the church’s theological task is not the outnarration and overcoming of other narratives, but rather faithful witness to the self-giving love of God in Christ. The church exists as the witness to the reality of God’s own story in which all created persons find themselves. The story of God in Christ does not outnarrate the stories of the world, but rather enflames and enfolds them within the ardor of the Pentecostal Spirit of Triune Love. The transcendental difference of the Triune God is pure, noncompetitive harmony which unites all things in Christ, as fellow members of one body. It is God’s action of overabundant self-outpouring in Christ, not our theological narrations about God which place all human discourses in their right order. Nihilism is overcome, not by anything we do, but is in fact always-already overcome because God is Triune. Radical Orthodoxy is wrong ultimately, because there is, in fact nothing that needs to be outnarrated. All narratives exist and find their closure, their coherence, and their fitting end in the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Only if Christ’s resurrection is the outcome of all narratives is the reality of violence forever mitigated. And that is what the doctrine of the Trinity proclaims.

More Radical Orthodoxy

Posted by on July 1, 2007 2 comments

For another excellent list of “theses” about Radical Orthodoxy, one by the authors of the inital RO volume (probably) and another lampooning it, see the most recent post by Rev. Sam at Elizaphanian.

 Also, for an earlier, more nascent critique that I wrot on RO, see my 6 Theses on Ecclesial Social Engagement.

In other related news, I highly recommend D.W. Congdon’s latest contribution to his ‘The Spirit of the Lord’ series on political pacifism.  It is precisely this kind of theopolitical “radicalism” that RO cannot really stomach, given its bourgouis sensibilities.

Propositions On Radical Orthodoxy

Posted by on June 29, 2007 16 comments

Since Radical Orthodoxy has recently come up in a few discussions, I thought I’d post a few of my own basic thoughts about what’s really wrong with this particular theological movement.

  1. Radical Orthodoxy purports to be a theological theology.  It begins with a perfect theological instinct and aim: to show that all thought is fundamentally theological.  The theological is ubiquitous and there is no non-theological frame of reference for interpreting the world.  The question is if Radical Orthodoxy is in fact theological enough.
  2. Radical Orthodoxy is a neoplatonic theology. This point is directly related to the previous one. While Radical Orthodoxy purports to be radically theologically, it is in fact radically bound to the philosohpy of antiquity. Specifically, it is premised upon the proposition that the neoplatonic ontology of participation (methexis) is the necessary presupposition for a Christian ontology of particiaption (koinonia).  In fact it claims that the two are the same thing.  Thus, neoplatonic metaphysics establishes the conditions necessary for the incarnation, and the doctrine of the Trinity rather than the incarnation and the Trinity issuing in a distinctly Christian metaphysic.
  3. Radical Orthodoxy is a nostalgic theology.  It’s fixation on “Christianity/Platonism” as the to-be repristinated answer to all of modernity’s woes marks Radical Orthodoxy as an extremely nostalgic enterprise.  It longs for the time (real or imagined) when their particular metaphysic of participation ruled the philosophical imagination and when all aspects of life in church, state, and market were under the integrating rule of “the sacred”.
  4. Radical Orthodoxy is a bourgeois theology.  Those who are actually movers and shakers in this “movement” are aristocratic, wealthy, and western.  Their thought is forged in the academy, not in any sort of concrete ecclesial or political praxis.  This is not do demean rigorous academic theology, quite the opposite in fact.  Radical Orthodoxy tends to overdose on abstraction and jargon, and who is being quoted is far more important to it that what is being said.  As such, this movement as no real interest in the actual life of the church(es) in the world.  It is theology by a new brand of Cambridge Platonists written for their own inner circle.  As Rodney Clapp has observed, “You can’t just tell people to go to church and be better neoplatonists.”
  5. Radical Orthodoxy is a militant theology.  The fundamental desire of Radical Orthodoxy is to win.  It claims that only the Christian narrative is capable of narrating a world in which difference can exist nonviolently.  All other narratives lead to violence are as such are nihilistic.  The Christian narrative alone can outnarrate all other narratives and bring about “The path of peaceful flight…” (John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 434)
  6. Ironically, Radical Orthodoxy is thus an inherently violent theology.  It does not claim that the Triune God is the answer to the threat of nihilism, but rather that the answer is found in trinitarian theology.  Specifically in their own brand of gingerly platonised trinitarianism, that has more to do with abstractions about “exchange” and “gift” than about the actual missions and relations of the Triune persons as revealed in the economy of salavation (See in contrast D.B. Hart’s treatment of “gift” in The Beauty of the Infinite, 236ff).  Radical Orthodoxy claims that it is our theological narration of the sacred which will save the world from secular nihilism, death, and non-being.  As such it is both violent and Pelagian.
  7. Radical Orthodoxy is a revisonary theology.  It is based on a grand appropriation and revisionist readings of key figures in Christian history, such as Augustine and Aquinas.  The readings offered by Radical Orthodoxy of these figures are idiosyncratic and generally wrong.  Even from within their own movement, their revisionist readings of the Medievals have been strongly challenged (see James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy).
  8. Radical Orthodoxy is an erotic theology.  Any perusal of the literature by the major authors in the Radical Orthodoxy series will show their fascination with speculative theologies of sexuality, gender, and the body.  This is yet another example of the theological faddishness of this movement.  The bodies that are the obsession of thinkers like Gerard Loughlin, Eugene Rogers, and John Milbank are always and inevitably coupling bodies, not emaciated, battered, or mutilated ones.  Radical Orthodoxy offers and unembodied theology of the body that seems to think that the height of bodiliness is orgasm.  As such, Radical Orthodoxy is really doing nothing more for a theology of the body and sexuality than reproducing the sex-obssessed zeitgeist of our age.
  9. Radical Orthodoxy is a varied theology.  A distinction must be made between European and American contributors to the Radical Orthodoxy series and other theologians commonly associated with the movement.  Thinkers like William T. Cavanaugh, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., D.B. Hart, J. Kameron Carter, and James K.A. Smith stand quite apart from folks like John Milbank, Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, and Gerard Loughlin.  The orientation of nearly all American contributors to Radical Orthodoxy is based in praxis, is more strongly ecclesial, and more thoroughly pacifist.  As such the American contribution (by authors who are all associated with the Ekklesia Project) represents a far more valuable contribution to contemporary theology.

Worst Theological Problem Meme: Hans Urs von Balthasar

Posted by on June 13, 2007 16 comments

A Guest-Post by Fred from Deep Furrows

I’m a student of literature and not a theologian, but Hans Urs von Balthasar has had a extensive influence upon my adult life. Criticizing Balthasar is difficult for several reasons: 1. he was broadly and profoundly educated in Western culture as a whole, much more than I or any other; 2. he thinks symphonically, so revising one part in the score impacts everything else; 3. he wrote at a time of intense theological ferment, so the critic has to remember that his theology is part of a larger conversation. I cannot even begin to criticize Balthasar on these terms.

The biggest difficulty for me is how to be critical of Balthasar without substituting my own limited measure for his; that is, how can criticism become an opening to greater and deeper reality and not merely an exercise in affirming my own prejudice and opinion?

The first work of criticism is to look clearly at the object in question. This past weekend a brief conversation with a friend clarified the issue for me. A reader, writer, and teacher of fiction, she expressed a strong distaste for Balthasar’s theologizing of fiction. I suddenly realized that the value of Balthasar’s writings is not for fiction or the arts – instead, the value is for theologians, whose discourses have become too narrowly preoccupied with building theoretical systems. Balthasar opened the dusty ivory tower of theology to human experience in the forms of poetry, music, history, and more.

With this insight, I would offer some criticisms of Balthasar, but more of his theological reception and my own reading.

1. Balthasar does work that extracts key theological themes, often drawing on literary and cultural critics (he also did plenty of first-hand work, but his was a massive undertaking). As literary criticism, Balthasar’s books make great theology. Being a student of literature, I must remember the richness of literature beyond these themes. To impose these themes on literature a priori is to reverse Balthasar’s great adventure.

2. A related point is that to read great literature one needs great humanity, a humanity that is stunted if one replaces reading literature with the theological commentary it inspires.

3. Balthasar writes from Europe, and so he properly takes a European perspective. He notes that he was incapable of broadening his Theological Aesthetics to other cultures and noted that Asia would be especially “important and fruitful” (Vol I, p 11). As an American, I have an American perspective which of course includes England, Europe, Asia, etc., in addition to America.

4. Even Balthasar’s reading of selected European works must be complemented by further theological work which draws upon human culture. If this doesn’t happen, then Balthasar’s opening of theology to human experience as expressed in culture lapses back into abstract theoretical discourse. The Ressourcement series from Eerdmans has made several great works that inspired Balthasar available in English (most beautifully Charles Péguy’s splendid poem, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope).

5. Balthasar frequently lamented the lack of serious, significant creativity in the contemporary West. Of itself, Balthasar’s work doesn’t inspire a renaissance, but only indicates it.

6. What I say here comes from my experience that Jesus Christ renews and deepens my humanity, but also that tenderness for my humanity makes me receptive to Christ. Your mileage may vary.

An earlier, more lopsidedly positive, evaluation of Balthasar by me can be found here: Why I love Hans Urs von Balthasar

Von Balthasar: The Heart of the World

Posted by on January 2, 2007 Comments Off

I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the writing of Hans Urs von Balthasar for the last couple of years have now acquired most (or at least the majority) of his many writings. Despite the magisterial scope and intellectually dazzling (or befuddling) nature of his theological trilogy, I’ve found that some of the greatest works of Balthasar’s are his smaller books. Mysterium Paschale remains one of the greatest books to be written on the great Triduum. Love Alone Is Credible is perhaps the best exposition of the Christian faith in a context that is at once theological, philosophical, and poetic. I have long recommended these books to those seeking to acquire a basic grasp of Balthasar’s theology.

However, in my most recent excursion into Balthasar’s writings I think I have found the most profound and powerful book yet to emerge from his pen. In his Heart of the World Balthasar truly bares his own heart in a series of theological meditations that bear out all the theological richness of his trilogy and simultaneously flow to the reader as gently and beautifully as R.S. Thomas’ poetry, Wendell Berry’s novels, or T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. In it the great theme of Balthasar’s theology, namely the infinite abyss of triune love that is God washes over the reader in a torrent of ecstasy and sorrow, delving into the depths of the tragic estrangement of sin, death, and the life of humanity that is incurvatus in se while always moving beyond the tragic into the tragicomic drama which is the descent of the Son of the Father into the world, swallowing up the abyss of sin into the infinitely deeper abyss of God’s love and light.

Here the aesthetics, the drama, and the logic of Balthasar’s theology coinhere in the beautiful synthesis of the theopoetic. This book is, I would contend the apex of Balthasar’s theology precisely because its form corresponds to the form of God’s revelation in Christ to which Balthasar always sought to bear witness. Balthasar’s constant contention has been that the revelation of God in Christ displays the divine glory of the triune life which is infinite love, and being thus disclosed we perceive it as infinite beauty. Thus, for Balthasar theology must by its very nature bear the form of the revelation to which it bears witness. The beauty of theology is not a stylistic addition to the “actual” content thereof, but its very form without which it has no connection to the revelation of the divine love – which is beauty – at all.

Any of those who wish to understand Balthasar must read this book. In it the entire shape of the story of God in Christ is told and re-told in all its depth and beauty. I’ve never come away from a book so stirred both by the intellectual depth and compellingness of Christianity and its infinite beauty. This book is exactly what theology should look like, for in it the beauty of God is beheld, the drama of God and humanity is told, and the logic of revelation and hope is communicated.

Here’s just one quote from the book:

Who can grasp the Lord’s meaning in his creation and beyond it? Who can tie up with a short string the unbounded bouquet of wisdom? Who can tame the jungle of his incomprehensibility? See how man’s spirit and whole being lies, like the bowl of an impetuous fountain, under the downpour of so many mysteries. Let it gush! By letting it gush you will grasp what you can, and what you can is to be a bowl for the flood. Open up heart and brain and do not attempt to clutch tightly. By being washed out you will become purified. The strange thing that flows through you is precisely the meaning you seek. The more you give away through renunciation, the richer your wisdom becomes. The more you receive by holding out your hands, the stronger your power becomes. See: Everything wants to bewilder you so that, out of the abundance of bewilderment, you will know the superabundance of love. Everything wants to empty you out, so that you become a hollow space for the superabundance of faith. Everything wears you through like a cloth so that, by becoming threadbare through constant friction, you will be transparent to the superabundance of light. (pp. 211-212)

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