Category Archives: Theological Ontology

Idolatry and participation

Posted by on March 21, 2012 115 comments

Lately, I’ve noticed several re-articulations of a theological trend we’ve talked about here plenty of times before, namely the position that the church’s practices mediate God’s presence and action in the world, form Christians to be virtuous selves in contrast to the acids of modernity, and make Christ concretely present in the world, when otherwise salvation would be simply a spiritual abstraction of some sort. What is still needed, advocates of this trend maintain, is an ontology of participation which insists that divine and human action are fundamentally noncompetitive, that God’s action for our salvation is not simply God’s but because of the ontological participation between God and the world, it is also our action, and indeed, the very notion of attributing action distinctly to God versus humanity is problematized. God’s action does not “exclude” but rather is mediated precisely through the church’s own social practices and rituals. So the story goes.

Anyways recent work done along these lines (and this post by my friend Robb brought it to mind for me) tends to argue against those critical of this position that somehow such criticisms simply do not take into account the fact that their position views divine and human action as “noncompetitive” and thus as practically indistinguishable. Once we see that point, it’s no longer problematic to have God’s presence and action possessed and mediated through the church’s social practices and rituals. However, this re-assertion is problematic on a number of levels.

Obviously those of us who are critical of the school of thought that articulates what we might call “ecclesial-practices-as-the-direct-mediation-of-God’s-presence-and-action” are fully aware that certain strains of postliberal and contemporary quasi-Catholic theological sentiment believe that divine and human action cannot be seriously distinguished and thus that the church’s practices simply in some sense “are” and “extend” God’s action, make God present, and bind God, making possible God’s concreteness in the world (this is Reinhard Hütter’s way of talking here, and this line of thought is also pretty clear in Sam Wells’ work, and is made very clear in Jamie Smith’s recent books, it is also articulated very plainly in David Fitch’s recent book, The End of Evangelicalism, if folks want to check out some references). Of course we know that folks think that divine and human action cannot be distinguished, are noncompetitive because of a participatory platonic ontology, etc.

However, I don’t see how any of these re-assertions actually substantially criticize or render problematic anything folks like Nicholas Healy, John Flett, Peter Kline, or Nate Kerr, Ry Sigglekow, and myself have argued. It just re-asserts the position we have argued (in our various and distinct ways) against without really attending to any of the arguments in question, or showing how it withstands the critiques made against it. It is argument by re-assertion, not by engagement. It does not show why we ought to believe in a platonic ontology of participation, why we ought to view divine and human action as distinguishable, rather it simply asserts that when you assume a participatory ontology it makes sense to think of the church’s practices as the extension and concrete reality of God’s being and action in the world. Well, of course it isn’t problematic to see ecclesial practices this way when you assume such an ontology, but why should we? These are the questions that I haven’t seen any answers to (unless “because modernity is bad” counts as an answer somehow).

Moreover, these articulations seems to me to often involve a patently false argumentative turn. Namely they tend to insist that there must be “an impenetrable ontological divide” between God and the world (throw in some stuff about Scotus and nominalism and how evil it is here) if there is to be a distinction of divine and human agency. The problem is there is no reason why this line should be thought to be true. Just because human and divine actions can be distinguished does not in any way imply that God is somehow ontologically locked out of the nitty-gritty of human life and action. Obviously God has broken through any and all barriers (sin, death, the Devil, etc) in Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. It seems strange to me that this radical act of God, the very act of defeating death, sin, and hell somehow is not adequate to bring God and humanity truly together in an unbreakable sense, a sense that we can depend on. That somehow if we don’t have this reality socially possessed and doled out through the church’s rituals and practices, it is simply something “spiritual” and ephemeral.

Moreover, the whole way in which “noncompetition” between divine and human agency tends to be articulated in these accounts rests on a rather odd misunderstanding of what attributing distinction of action means. It seems to be assumed that if God’s action is properly God’s, and thus, fundamentally not ours, that then we have somehow locked God out of the world. As already mentioned, this fear seems to me to manifest an odd lack of faith in the reality of Christ’s incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, but furthermore it seems to rest on a mistake about the implications of distinguishing between agents and their respective actions. I mean, you and I are both human beings but your actions are yours and mine are mine in a unique and irreducible sense. If you murder someone, there must be a real sense in which that is your action and not mine, our common human nature notwithstanding.

It seems impossible to read the New Testament depictions of judgment any other way, for there it is always people’s own unique actions (feeding the hungry, visiting the poor, etc.) form the basis of how they are judged. Likewise the whole logic of salvation in Paul rests on the fundamental distinction between divine and human agency (“this is not of your own doing, it is the gift of God, not the result of human works…” etc). Obviously examples of this could be multiplied extensively.

All this to say, being able to attribute a distinction of actions to God and human beings does not create an impenetrable divide between them in any way (any more than distinguishing your action and mine sets us on different sides of an impenetrable ontological divide). It simply recognizes that God is God and human beings are not God. This does not sequester God from the world, but simply recognizes that God is present and active to the world in freedom, not as a function of our “making”. What it refuses to do is amalgamate God, make God some sort of constituent part of the world-event, which is what I think perspectives like the one often articulated by advocates of ecclesial-practices-as-the-direct-mediation-of-God’s-presence-and-action cannot help but ultimately do.

This is why, I fear, in the end such articulations are ultimately idolatrous. In this ontological scheme God becomes the possession of the church, no matter how vigorously this is denied. The church’s practices become God’s presence, no matter how passionately this is nuanced. God ceases to be the free and living Lord and simply becomes the religious commodity that the church dispenses and maintains in its own social rituals and life, despite the pious verbiage in which this is couched. And that is why, eventually, I came to reject this theological trend, at least as an overriding program for doing theology.

Is evil privation?

Posted by on March 11, 2010 75 comments

It has become an almost undisputed datum in contemporary theology that evil is to be understood in the Augustinian manner as a privation of goodness. Evil has no reality or being as such. Rather it is simply a lack, a minus within the plenitude of goodness (See for example Confessions VII 13[19]).

This sounds absolutely lovely and certainly gives theologians a great way to posses answers.

However lately I’ve been thinking through some problems with Augustine’s account. Three things:

  1. Its unclear why a lack of goodness necessarily makes something evil. My biceps are probably not as strong as the could be. They lack strength, which is good for biceps to have. Doesn’t seem evil. Or to use a specifically moral example, it would be good if I gave $100 to every needy beggar I ever came across. But instead I’m more likely to give a couple bucks if I have it on me. Is there any evil going on here? I doubt it. At the very least there is no necessary evil going on here, but there is a certainly “lack” of goodness.
  2. There’s absolutely nothing in the Bible I can find that remotely describes evil this way. If it is in there, show it to me. I can’t find anything that gives even a hint that we should understand evil as a lack of goodness in Scripture.
  3. Not only does the Bible not describe evil in this way, it actually describes it in ways that seem to outrightly contradict it. All throughout the NT Paul and the other apostolic authors speak of evil as involving cosmic forces, powers, demonic agents, Satan, etc. Evil is not talked about as a lack of goodness, but an utterly real group of forces of darkness. Obviously we need to work hard at interpreting this language, but I don’t see a way to make it square up with the Augustinian notion without very intentionally bringing a pre-determined axe to bear on the Bible.

Now, of course this will bring about the oft-thrown down gauntlet that “you’re ontologizing evil!” (here’s looking at you, Horstkoetter). In response to that I find myself inclined to say “So?” Saying that evil exists or has some sort of being is not, prima facie problematic as far as I can see. Now, to be sure it would be problematic to claim that evil and God are both equally ontologically ultimate; that would be to end up Manichean. But that is decidedly something different than recognizing that evil has (contingent) being in some sense. Obviously that one needs to be unpacked more, but at the very least I’m hoping to forestall the facile accusations of Manicheanism that are so readily made these days.

Augustine and Self-Constituting Narration

Posted by on September 1, 2009 9 comments

Brian Horne’s essay “Person as Confession” is an interesting look at what Augustine was perhaps “doing” in writing his Confessions. This has clearly been a source of debate among scholars of Augustine for some time, but Horne’s analysis certainly poses some interesting questions. Why, for example did Augustine assume that people would be interested in reading about his own spiritual development? Did he even have an audience in mind?

Horne suggests that Augustine’s unstated motivation in writing the confessions is actually quite different. Augustine was not primarily writing for others but rather for himself. What is going on in the Confessions is “the deliberate creation of a ‘persona’, the ‘I’ or subject of the narrative.” Horne goes on:

It is no accident that so many writers on ‘narrative theology’ go to Augustine’s Confessions as a primary text, the classical example (outside the biblical text) of the genre of ‘narrative theology.’ It does exactly what narrative theologians want a text to do: it presents a theology by telling a story, or, perhaps, to put it the other way around, it tells a story in such a way that the theological implications are unmistakable. We take this further: in the Confessions we have the attempt at discovering meaning in a life and imposing an order on chaos by means for relating and forming into a narrative (a human history) selected pieces of previous experience. It is, in a real sense, the re-creation of the person by the recollection of the past; and the process by which this is done is highly selective. (p. 68)

What Augustine in doing in the Confessions is an  act of constitutive self-narration. Augustine is constructing his persona, his very self in recounting his story. This is seen most clearly in the central role that memory plays in the Confessions. This trajectory reaches its apogee in Book X, chapter 17 when Augustine actually identifies personality with memory:

O my God, profound infinite complexity, what a great faculty memory is, how awesome a mystery! It is the mind, and this is nothing other than my very self.

Thus, for Augustine, personhood itself is found in memory. To be a person is to remember. As such, Augustine’s exercise in telling his story is, in a very real  sense, Augustine’s own exercise of becoming a person:

Memory and personhood are co-terminous, hence the necessity for the subject to tell his own story. The ostensible motive for Augustin’s writing of the Confessions was the ethical one: the encouragement of his readers in their struggle to live the Christian life; but might not the real, though unacknowledged, motive have been the ‘achievement’ of his own personality? Like Proust who has to relate the middle-aged Parisian Marcel to the Marcel who was a child in Combray, the Marcel who was an adolescent in Balbec, and the Marcel who was obsessed with Albertine; so Augustine has to integrate the various Augustines of the past (the Manichee, the neo-Platonist, the youth of powerful sexual energy and emotion) with the man who finds himself Bishop of Hippo. And it is only memory that can be used for this function: without memory the person cannot exist. (p. 71)

If this sort of reading is correct, perhaps we can say that Augustine is the first “pure” narrative theologian in the modern sense. And it also rasies questions about the nature of the Augustinian self and what relation it has to the modern self.

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.

Human Being as Gratuity and Futurity

Posted by on August 27, 2008 9 comments

Previously I’ve charged David Bentley Hart with proffering a primarily protological ontology. But here he strikes a more resolute eschatological note:

“Both our being and our essence always exceed the moment of our existence, lying before us as gratuity and futurity, mediated to us only in the splendid eros and terror of our in fieri, because finite existence — far from being the dialectical labor of an original contradiction — is a pure gift, grounded in no original substance, wavering from nothinness into the openness of God’s self-outpouring infinity, persisting in a condition of absolute fragility and fortuity, impossible in itself, and so actual beyond itself. Becoming is an ecstasy, and nothing besides; it is indeed a constant tension — between what a thing is and what it is not, between its past and its future, between interior and exterior, and so on — but it is not originally a violent departure from the stability of an original essence. Our being is simply the rapture of arrival . . . creaturely becoming, in its original and ultimate truth, departs from no ground but simply hastens to an end . . .” (p. 244)

Here at least, Hart seems to posit a decidedly eschatological ontology in which our being is constituted by its apocalyptic orientation towards of God’s future. Good stuff.

Bringing One Another into Being

Posted by on July 3, 2008 6 comments

I seem to keep returning to Douglas Knight’s The Eschatological Economy.  I certainly think that it deserves to be counted among the best theological books in recent years.  One suggestive claim offered in the book involves, in a sense, a heightening, or a radicalization of what in recent years has come to be called a relational ontology.  However, Knight moves beyond the tired (though true and necessary) assertions that “to be is to be related.”  Rather he looks more closely at the relationship of being and action in the context of an ontology of communion, or what he refers to as a doxological ontology.  Here he claims, rightly in my view that “Being and doing are one and the same thing.  The work of each creature is the being of all other creatures.”  

The crux of this issue, and what makes this ontology truly radical in its construal of sociality (and sanctification, which Knight discusses later in the book) is that it unites being and action, not in my own individuated selfhood, but rather in the community of the church in which we actively bring one another into being in and through our actions on one another.  We “suffer” one another and as such are given ourselves.  The action of all other creatures in relation to me is my being.  It is not merely my well-being, but my very being.  However Knight goes further.  ”It is not only the being but the freedom of other creatures” that is constituted by the action of others toward us.  ”The freedom of all creatures is the task of all other creatures, and it is sustained only by live relationship with all other creatures.”

All of this of course is ultimately from God.  It is God whose action constitutes our being and sustains us as creatures.  ”The freedom of humankind is the task of God, and very subordinately it is the task into which God introduces human beings.  Under God we bring one another into being.”  This notion, of our action bringing on another into being and freedom is quite radical.  It reorients our notions of growth and holiness, and their relation to our own disciplines and practices.  The actions and practices we undertake ‘on our own’ are not so much for our own personal growth, improvement, or transformation as they are for the liberation of others.  I pray, offer hospitality, and study, not so that I become a certain sort of spiritual person, but rather so as to be taken up into God’s work of bringing God’s children into being and freedom.  As I pray I become part of God’s economy of growing us up into “the freedom of the children of God.”  My prayer frees the other, just as their prayer and hospitality free me.  Sanctification is not the development of the self, but the formation of the other.  The ultimate aim of disciplines and practices, what Knight refers to as paideia, is the offering of doxology to the Triune God in the form of a community of holy agapeic love.  I cannot bring myself to where I need to be to rightly participate in this doxological communion.  I can only be brought there by the other.  By the Triune God who through Christ and the Spirit re-forms us through a whole nexus of graced mediations, most centrally the church, who under the word strives as a body to bring all its members into the fullness of Christ.  And that is the fullness of being.

The Metaphysics of Discipleship

Posted by on June 11, 2008 17 comments

Perhaps the recurring issue in discussions of Christian discipleship regards simply whether or not it is something that Christians should think they can actually do.  Not long into the established church’s history the notion became prominent that the ethics of Jesus, particularly as recorded in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) and other prominent texts in the gospels (cf. Luke 6:17-46; 14:15-34), simply cannot be done by people who live in the real world.  They are rather “counsels of perfection” which are either only for a specific clerical or monastic caste (as in Medieval Catholicism) or they are simply there to remind us all of our complete inability as sinners to conform to God’s commands (as in Luther and most of Protestantism after him).

Now of course this whole discourse of perfection, impossibility, and the real world is problematic on numerous levels.  If you want to see them all blown out of the water, just read Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus.  However, here I want to focus on at least one underlying issue that informs how we even imagine the shape of any discussion about discipleship.  The first thing to be observed is that, no matter what, whenever we read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount we all have a sense of its radical hardness.  Even if we believe it is possible, we know its not very likely.  However, if we avoid lifting these discourses of Jesus out of their narrative context, things get more interesting.  They get intersting in that Jesus seemed to think the very opposite in regard to the message he was preaching: ”Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).

In Jesus’ view, the call to discipleship that he was preaching was not something hard and burdensome, but rather a call to leave such burdens behind.  Jesus seems to think that discipleship is easy, and that by contrast it is restless striving of the Gentiles and the burdensome commands of the priestly elite that is hard (cf. Matt. 6:32; Luke 11:46; 12:30).  In other words, Jesus viewed his call to radical discipleship in a way that is exactly opposite from how we view it when we encounter it.  What is to us an impossible demand that must have some other explanation is for Jesus the call to anarchic liberation from the dominating forces of slavery and death.

What I want to suggest then, is that the call of Jesus to discipleship is not merely a moral call to a really, really difficult way of living for the sake of becoming virtuous.  Rather it is a call that fundamentally challenges the conventional metaphysics of violence whereby we construe the entire shape of the cosmos.  The call to discipleship is a call to nothing less than a subversion of conventional metaphysics. A call which suggests that it is in fact supremely difficult to live in this world as a murderer, a liar, or an adulterer.  As Stanley Hauerwas has rightly remarked, becoming a liar is a substantial moral achievement.  Practicing these acts are what is hard; they are what put us at odds with the shape of the cosmos.  Truth-telling, confession, the love of enemies, and the sharing of possessions are not, according the metaphysics of discipleship what make for a difficult life.  Rather they are the true shape of human life which, if entered into constitute a cessation of striving against the grain, of kicking against the pricks.  In other words, it is the case, as John Howard Yoder said, that “people who bear crosses are working with the grain of the universe.”

None of this is to suggest that discipleship will simply take no effort.  The world, which we have come to know in Christ as ultimately bearing the shape of resurrection rather than final death, remains a contested place.  The powers of death and slavery continue to rage against the Lord and his Messiah.  However, the shape of the universe has been constituted anew in Jesus’ resurrection.  As such it is those powers and the lives of slavery that attend them that are ultimately out of place in this world.  It is lives of sin, violence, and indifference that are ultimately futile and unattainable.  Because Jesus has been raised, his love, which completely defined the shape of his life is inexhaustible.  His love has been terminated by death and yet it still lives.  If this is the case then there is no boundary that can threaten the victory of that love.  If this is true then the only actions in this world that are ultimately possible, that ultimately will not be undone are the actions of radical discipleship, that is to say, the actions of radical love.  If we wish to push this line of inquiry to its furthest point, we might even dare to say that only the kind of life that Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount is ultimately possible.  Such is the sort of description that coheres with the metaphysics of discipleship and resurrection.

The Kenotic Subject

Posted by on May 11, 2008 5 comments

“The kenosis of God creates the possibility of a human subject very different from the consumer self.  The absolute uniqueness of Christ cannot be subsumed under any more general categories of being.  If God is God, then God must always be beyond our comprehension: si comprehendis non est Deus.  We are, nevertheless, invited to participate in the Trinitarian life through Christ and the work of the Spirit.  But in order to do so, we cannot grasp, we can only submit.  We cannot stand back from the world and survey it; we must simply take our role in the drama that God is staging and give ourselves to it.”

–William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 81.

The Ontology of Telekinesis

Posted by on February 28, 2008 8 comments

It’s always interesting what the American superhero genre does to reveal the contemporary zeitgeist.  While I wouldn’t doubt that children of all epochs have wished they could fly or had super strength, the American superhero mythos is a particular phenomenon which reveals all manner of interesting thins about the Western understanding of power and selfhood.  This has been well documented by John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in their excellent book, The Myth of the American Superhero.  They note a variety of key themes in the superhero genre, particularly is continuity with the classic Old West genre: the lonely hero who ventures into a community from outside of it, saves it, and must then leave and continue his heroic isolation for the sake of others (think Superman’s ‘Fortress of Solitude’ here).  Now, of course the superhero genre is multifaceted and there are exceptions to this standard narrative (Spiderman being a notable one).  Here, however I am interested more specifically in the very idea of “super powers” themselves and what the fact that such powers are an object of fantasy in our culture says about our understanding of selfhood and identity.

So here I will venture a perhaps indefensible thesis:  Within the superhero genre, broadly speaking, the ultimate superpower is telekinesis.  Moreover, the very idea of telekinesis as an ultimate superpower implies a very specifically modern ontology.  Telekinesis is, of course the ability of move and manipulate objects with one’s mind.  While flying, having super strength, and telepathy are certainly important superpowers, when it comes right down to it, the person with telekinesis will win every time.  This is seen most clearly in NBC’s Heroes which chronicles the exploits of a wide range of “ordinary people” who develop “extraordinary abilities”.  The main villain of the series, Sylar is a fundamentally insecure watch-maker whose dysfunctional maternally-instilled drive to be “special” drives him to murder other people with abilities, and through his own (somewhat vague) power, absorb their abilities for himself.  In the course of the series he has acquired more than half a dozen unique abilities, but out of all of them the only one he generally uses is telekinesis.  And it is precisely this ability that makes him an object of fear and terror.  Bullets shot at him are flung back at their caster, people with super strength are immobilized and easily decapitated by his finely tuned ability to manipulate things simply with his thoughts.

Telekinesis is the ultimate superpower in the Western imagination precisely because it embodies the ability of total immediate control.  The possibility of controlling ones environment and other persons simply through thought is the zenith of the desire for unimpeded control and mastery.  An insecure, timid watch-maker named Gabriel Gray is transformed into the all-consuming power-monger of Sylar simply by gaining the ability to move things with his mind.  Indeed, one of the things that Heroes shows in a distinctly clear manner is the way in which the quest for immediacy, power, and control issues in the creation of monsters who lose touch with any sort of co-humanity.

The American mind imagines telekinesis as the ultimate super power precisely because it is the apogee the modern ontology.  In a world in which persons are self-enclosed individuals who exist in fundamental strife with one another, the lure of total immediate control is precisely what is most desired.  The Siren’s song to the modern mind is precisely to lust after such a vision of total immediate control.  Telekinesis, then embodies within the American superhero mythos the Promethean height toward which modern humanity reaches, and in reaching it loses their relational and creaturely nature.  The ontology of telekinesis is the ontology of modernity, the desperate drive to become the Nietzschean  übermensch.  Indeed, whether inadvertently or not, one of the things that the superhero genre, and Heroes in particular shows most clearly is the inherent incompatibility between exercising dominating power and being human.  To be human is to eschew the kinds of power that are the objects of fantasy in the world of superheroes.  To take up the reigns of power is always to imperil or eviscerate one’s humanity.  To be human is to live in essential vulnerability.  When this vulnerability is forsaken for the pursuit of power, any chance of living a truly human life vanishes into the void of the eternal antagonism between superheroes and supervillains.

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. 

Basic Ontology: A Meditation

Posted by on January 18, 2008 5 comments

The truth of the matter is that giving life away isn’t the least bit sexy or heroic. Frankly it’s often the most draining, shitty way to live that you could ever think of. After all, giving life away means that often your life is going to end up being consumed by those around you. In the end living a life of self-giving can only end in being used up. At least that’s how it often feels.

And how do you keep on with that sort of life when all it does is stretch you thin? You expect it to be cathartic, but often the tears, the pain and the nights of groaning leave you with nothing but more shell and less substance than you ever thought you’d feel.

Worse, though than all the unresolved pain is the trivialization of pain that goes on in your own head. In some ways it is far worse to suffer the pain of those weathering hell and death than to have your own hell to fixate on. The great pleasure of personal suffering, is after all, that it, at least is mine. At least that I can hang onto, name as my own and present to others as something that is unique to me.

Living a life of self-divestment and mutuality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when it starts meaning that more often than not you won’t get to hang onto even your own pain and suffering but must learn to share even that with others. What could be more offensive to our pride than the fact that we have to let others into our own prideful graspings and the bitterness that we so often feel makes our life interesting? When we are gripped by the realization that we have to live a life of self-giving even to the point of parting with the pain we so desperately cling to as our own, then we have perhaps begun to plumb the depths of what life in Christ means.

The worst thing in all this is the profound alienness that attends every act of selflessness. With every loving word I utter, every loving embrace I offer, part of me screams that I am a fraud who will soon be found out for what he truly is. This is, of course as it should be. If our acts of selflessness and love felt like something of our own we’d at best be a walking contradiction and at worst an arrogant blasphemous example of someone who thinks they don’t need Christ to remake their identity.

But there is often nothing harder than being brought face to face with the reality that we are from beginning to end constituted by others. How stricken we can be when we learn that in the end nothing is really ours at all. What do we have that we haven’t been given? Sure, we create illusions of “earning” what we have. But those things are just that, illusions. At the end of the day everything we have is a gift that we could never secure or guarantee for ourselves.

Often, of course the illusions are more comfortable. Living as a “self-made man” (what an idiotic statement that is!) is a compelling, enticing temptation. But all of that really is just a temptation to self-deception. Deep down we know that all we are is given to us (or taken from us) by those around us. Lives are shaped, hearts are formed, loves are crafted in and through the gifts we give to, or withhold from one another.

The ultimate horror of living in the culture of illusion is that the gift of life poured out for us, on which we depend for our very being is never guaranteed to be returned to us when we expend ourselves for the other. Or at least all we can see is that the greatest saints, who have selflessly expended themselves to the fullest lie cold in their graves.  The cross cannot guarantee the resurrection.

It is the common perception of the sovereignty of death that the resurrection forever shames, exploding and imploding all at once. In Jesus, God divests himself of his own life completely and to the fullest, and yet through his complete and total self-expenditure – and only through it – are the abundant gifts of resurrection life flung forth into the raging, crooked universe. Here is the ultimate scathing glory of the resurrection. The resurrection forever affirms that amidst all the illusions of possessing and withholding our lives for ourselves, that the givers of life shall never be stifled. The resurrection forever shames and mocks the demonic wisdom that claims that life is a matter of having and getting.

The glories of broken bread, blood poured out, flaming tongues and embraced strangers stand forever in unshatterable witness against any wisdom that would shame a life devoted to self-giving and the unrestricted welcome of the stranger. At the end of the day, despite its crooked brokenness and alienated aloneness, the cosmos is everywhere charged with the goodness of God. Those who are so fortunate to be able to taste and share a life of self-giving are indeed working with the grain of the universe.

So we should forever be grateful for the unsexy, for the unfun, for ugly, for the awkward, for the life-takers, for those who would stretch us thin and see us expend ourselves to the point of death. In Christ we learn that the life-stealers, the biters and the devourers are not the adversary to be opposed, but the estranged friend to be loved, even to the point of being consumed.

Do we dare live as if this were true? Do I dare? Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know at all. But on my best days my vision is clear enough to see that the resurrection of the expended Christ into God’s glorious future mocks any life lived to myself. The God who gives until he has nothing left and then gives again forever shows that any life held onto is life extinguished into a hell of my own making. “Abandon hope, all you who enter here” is perhaps inscribed not on the gates of hell but on the hearts of any who would seek to look inside themselves for life. And in the end, that is hell, isn’t it?

But thanks be to God who has de-possesed us from ourselves in Christ! Thanks be to the God who does not live to himself or die to himself but always to and for us, his unworthy, beloved creatures. Only because God doesn’t live for himself or die for himself can we follow in that pattern and dare to believe that none of us lives to ourselves and none of us dies to ourselves. So thank him! Thanks-giving is the ultimate act of being de-possesed. In thanks we acknowledge that what we need for life is ultimately outside ourselves. Thanks, perhaps is the only true form of praise. For it alone mirrors and participates in the self-divestment and unrestricted giving that characterizes the very life of God.

Death, Martyrdom and the End of Words

Posted by on January 17, 2008 10 comments

I like words.  No, I love words.  I confess that I especially love theological words that I can often italicize, either because I like to emphasize them or (even better), because they are Greek or Latin words, the mere transcribing of which lends credibility to any argument.  Ekstasis, perichoresis, hypostasis, circumincessio, logos incarnandus, unio mystica, kenosis, plerosis, prolepsis, eschatos, koinonia, visio dei and other such fabulous words and phrases are ones that I want to throw into my writing whenever possible.  And I will continue to do so.

However, I would like to suggest that often the mere use of powerful words from our tradition can serve as a way of doing little more than playing a theological role-playing game in which we pretty much just talk a lot of shit without saying anything real.  To say it differently, and with more ironic flair, we often spend all our time doing “ontology” without even wondering about what our musings about the nature of being have to say about who or how we ourselves must be.

Many theologians who have drank from the patristic wells have seen how the Christian naming of Jesus as God, and the doctrine of the Trinity constitute a radical interruption in the history of metaphysics which is incredibly subversive.  To say that life is victorious over death is the to basically crush the larxnx of the entire world’s intellectual history under your boot in one fell swoop.  If Jesus’ resurrection, rather than our inevitable deaths are the true outcome of the world and all human stories, then everything is different.  It is a claim that literally destroys everything we’ve ever thought about the world and resurrects something entirely new in its place.  If life, rather than death is determinative of the being of the world then, quite literally everything is made new.

However, we’re often able to say such things in ways that are so boring and utterly suspect because of the way in which we ultimately fear what it might mean if our radically Christian view of the world might be true.  Do we dare live as if life rather than death will finally triumph?  And not just finally, but now, in my life and in my concrete comings and goings?  The simple fact of the matter is that the wider wisdom of the world constrains our lives in ways that are far to manifold to count.  We live as though self-protection is, at the end of the day, really how things must be done if we’re to really live.  Oh, sure we still play our linguistic role-playing games, and say stuff like “being is ek-static” or “personhood is realized in communio”, but such statements are really just words that are thrown out by a bunch of people who live their lives pretty much on the basis of the “denial of death.”

I intend to malign no one except for myself.  The point I am making is simply this: our ontologies don’t matter unless they are embodied in our lives.  The problem with doing a radically Christian ontology is not that it isn’t possible or that no such radical ontology exists, the problem is that we’re not able to live with the results.  If we truly believe that the resurrection rather than death is the last word about life, that means that we’re going to have to live as if death does not matter.  And we’re just not quite ready to swallow that.  Can we really live in a way that bears witness to our confession that life is more powerful than death.  Can our ontology be an ontology of martyrdom?

The thing is, most of us won’t because if we do then we have to die.  And death, despite our claims and italicized words is pretty much still sovereign over our imaginations.  If I were to state what I think it takes to be a truly great theologian, it would probably be something along the lines of “One who practices the rationality of the martyrs.”  The question for us is whether or not that is a rationality we are willing to follow to the end.

I have no ontology!

Posted by on October 29, 2007 6 comments

In a recent post at Faith & Theology, George Hunsinger and Kim Fabricious go head-to-head in a ‘propositions-off’ about the much-discussed issue of the logos asarkos.  While there is much in that post that I would like, and hope someday to respond to, there was one statement by Hunsinger that particularly struck me.  For his fifth proposition, Hunsinger asserts, “I do not now, nor have I ever, subscribed to an “essentialist” ontology. The reason is that I have never subscribed to any ontology whether “essentialist”, “actualist” or otherwise” [Italics added].  Hunsinger made a similar statement in the 2006 session of the Karl Barth Society in response to David Bentley Hart’s claim that he (Hart) was seeking to explore in his work the metaphysics implied by the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.  Hunsinger insisted, contra Hart that the ontology implied by Christian doctrine is “none whatsoever”.

Now, as I understand it, “ontology” simply means the study of being.  If someone proposes an ontology, they are, as I understand the term, proposing a particular way of understanding the nature of of what it means “to be”.  Unless “ontology” means something very different from what I understand, then it seems to me that Hunsinger’s claim to not hold any particular ontology is incredible to say the least.  Are we to understand that he has no perspective whatsoever on the nature of being, either human or divine?  To even claim such a thing skirts the very furthest reaches of absurdity.  Christian theology has always implied substantial ontological commitments.  Any reading of the creeds and treatises of the church fathers shows how intimately freighted their work is with ontological statements and categories.  The doctrine of the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, and especially the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead are radically ontological claims.  They have everything to do with what “being” ultimately means.

Alas, I fear that Hunsinger, in claiming that he has no ontology is really just trying to find a way out of having to have the necessary arguments about theological ontology that would bear on the shape of ones doctrine of the Trinity and Christology.  In claiming that he has no ontology, Hunsinger is trying to insulate his position on central theological issues related to Christology and the Trinity from metaphysical critique.  This is an unfortunate theological move and promises only to contribute to hardened lines and more shrill arguments over the issues in question rather than fostering an authentic dialogue about the ontological perspectives most appropriate to the proper articulation of orthodox Christian theology.

Resurrection and Revolution: Some Ontological Considerations

Posted by on October 27, 2007 9 comments

In some recent conversations at Faith & Theology there has been a lot discourse about the ontological implications of the resurrection of Christ.  Basically, the argument is between those who insist that we must find a “logically prior” ontological ground for the resurrection of Christ in a postulated eternal logos asarkos and those who argue that the resurrection is an unassimilable novum which defines the reality of God and cannot be circumscribed within a pre-existing metaphysical framework, let alone one that postulates an abstract de-fleshed Word which is prior to the revelation of God in and as Christ. 

A brief perusal of those discussions will show you that I favor the latter position.  If I may be permitted to rhapsodize a bit about this question, I would like to synthesize some of the conversations and thoughts I’ve had about this issue recently and see if they yield any helpful contributions to this conversation. 

The essential presupposition that I hold, and which I believe to be supremely biblical is that the resurrection is always and ever again disruptive in the theological or philosophical enterprise. The problem with enfolding the resurrection into a metaphysics, even one that takes it’s “starting point” in the historical event of the resurrection, is that the resurrection eludes our attempts to categorize it within a framework of being. The resurrection is always a complete novum which cannot be circumscribed within a metaphysical system, no matter how dynamic we take that system to be.

This is not to say that the resurrection means we can never talk about being, rather it means we must constantly learn to speak about it in a new key. The resurrection invites and requires theological-ontological discourse, but this discourse must constantly be referred back to the event which birthed it.  The resurrection always sends us back to the ontological drawing board, demanding that we constantly revise our notions of being in its light.  In other words, the resurrection does not simply disclose to us a new metaphysics. No matter what metaphysic we might have, the resurrection overturns it. The resurrection is unsurpassable and insurmountable.  It cannot be domesticated or circumscribed into a metaphysical system in which it is rendered intelligible. The resurrection is always subversive, politically, philosophically, and theologically. The moment when we make it simply a part of a larger system, regardless of how “incarnational” such a system might be, the resurrection ceases to be the permanent revolution that it is disclosed to be. It ceases to be apocalyptic.

An important point that should be noted here is that, while this current discussion is about the ontological revolution of the resurrection which overturns and interrupts any sort of totalized metaphysical discourse, this conversation could just as easily be had in a great many other dialogical modes.  A central example of this is that of Christian ethics.  The resurrection cannot be domesticated within a Christian ethical system or total perspective which then renders its “ethical implications” intelligible.  The resurrection always disorients and calls into question our ethical practices and virtues.  A great example of this is the ethical question of violence.  While a great many Christian pacifists find it easy to fold the cross and resurrection into the ethical framework of Christian nonviolence, such easy assimilation provides an illegitimate way in which the radically disruptive nature of the resurrection is put aside within closed system of nonviolence.  Such a totalized pacifism too easily assumes that we know what “peace” means inevery situation.  It is the resurrection which must always call into question the form of our practice of nonviolence.  The example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s agonistes toward discovering righteous action is instructive on this point.  Any totalized system of ethics, metaphysics, or any other sort of discourse which would render the resurrection of the crucified  immediately intelligible inevitably blunts the disorienting critique which the cross and resurrection pose.  The insights which flow from the resurrection can never take us beyond it into something else.  Rather we are always return to Golgotha and and the empty Tomb and constantly finding the givens in which we take refuge called into question by the translucent luminosity of the Crucified and Risen One who is with the Father.

Now, this is not to equate the resurrection with a permanent sense of deferral, or Derrida’s differánce. The resurrection is actually quite the opposite. It is the overabundant surplus of meaning, not its deferral. The resurrection is not the end of theological discourse, rather it is it center and ever-new beginning. The point about the resurrection being a perpetual disruption in the logic of metaphysical discourse indicates the way in which the subversive nature of the resurrection can never be transcended in our theologizing. We can never construct a metaphysic into which we can “fit” it. This does not mean the end of ontological pursuits in the least, what it does mean is that any understanding of “being” must always be thought and rethought in reference to the resurrection as the revelation of the Triune God.

Nor is this an “ontology of the void” in which the ontological integrity of created being is torn asunder into a constant event of antagonism and rupture.  Rather, it is precisely the resurrection that prevents such an ontology. If we take the doctrine of creatio ex nihilio seriously, then the utterly gratuitous and non-necessary event of the resurrection is the only thing which offers an alternative to such a ontology of the void. For if we all come from “nothing”, there can be no metaphysic within which we can render a theological account of being, let alone one into which we would fit the resurrection. It is the resurrection alone which holds us back from falling into the nihil from whence we were created.  If there is an ontology that flows from the resurrection is always and only an ontology of grace, where our be-ing is located completely outside ourselves in the sheer gratuity of God’s self-giving in the resurrection of Christ.  The resurrection is the de-centering center of any viable theological ontology, establishing our being just as it renders impossible any sort of  metaphysics in which being can be narrated as intelligible in and of itself.  The resurrection requires an ontological revolution that can never become a stable system precisely because our be-ing is located extra nos in the utterly gratuitous act of the resurrection. 

To make yet another feeble attempt to clarify the matter, theological discourse is not supposed to be the exposition of a metaphysic within which Christian claims (such as the claim that Christ was raised) become intelligible. Rather, theological discourse is a doxological and evangelical practice of bearing witnessto the reality of God as defined in Christ. This act of witness is always a stuttering and stammering enterprise which can never have the closure and completion of “metaphysics” as classically understood.  Christians are always limping towards Emmaus, rather than coming in clouds.  We cannot quest after some sort of security, ethically, theologically, or ontologically which goes beyond what God has given us in Christ and the Spirit.  We cannot take refuge in a logos asarkos or any repristination of classical metaphysics.  Rather, all we are given is the security of the confession of faith: “Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.”

John Zizioulas on Intelligent Design?

Posted by on August 3, 2007 4 comments

I’m now reading what I take to be the best book written by an Orthodox theologian in the last 20 years, with the possible exception of Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite.  John Zizioulas’ Communion and Otherness is a masterpiece that is not only beautifully Eastern, but philosophically erudite and which engages meaningfully with Western theology.  Herein Zizioulas further develops, refines, and defends his relational ontology of personhood that he first put forth in Being as Communion.  Central to his new book is properly configuring the relationship between Otherness, Freedom, and Communion, all of which he takes to be ontologically primordial, and in some sense coterminous. 

Here’s a quote which spurred my thoughts in relation to the whole idea of “intelligent design”, a newish favorite idea among apologetically-minded evangelicals.

What the scientist sees today as a relational, indeterminate, ‘chaotic’ universe does not call simply for a creator God, but for a God who is so personal as to be capable of self-modification to the point of lending his very ‘mode of being’ to constitute and sustain the being of creation. (p. 32)

What Zizioulas means by “self-modification” is made explicit in the book where he, following Maximus the Confessor argues that ontologically we must distinguish between the ‘what’ of being (its logos) and the ‘how’ of being (its tropos).  Thus, Zizioulas argues that in Christ, God “modifies” his tropos, his “mode of being” in such a way as to assume humanity and all of creation in such a way for it to participate in the divine life, without thereby confusing the logos of God with the logoi of creation.  Thus, creation has true, ontological communion with God, through his “mode of being” as the incarnate Son.  Thus, there is an ontological relationship between creator and creation, but because it takes place through the tropos of God as the Son, it is not as a relationship of fusion or confusion between divinity and humanity but of communion in otherness, which is to say communion in freedom.

The point I take to be interesting about the above quote is that Zizioulas rightly notes that the dynamic and chaotic nature of the world that is noted today by science points not to the need to posit an intelligent designer, but a Redeemer who will graciously elect to bring created being into communion with an imperishable, transcendent life.  What we see in creation, as fallen is not an intelligently designed world, but a world whose very be-ing cries out for ontological liberation – from death – in the Triune life.  

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