What's After Theology?

What’s After Theology? James Callahan (2019) But the effect of our in-between conditions – the real threat we are warned – is that our incredulity toward grand, encompassing, totalizing schemes and corresponding anthropology, leads inevitably to pluralism… which is just another way of saying we must create room for forms of relativism… which is just another way of saying post-colonial impulses are entertained… which is just another way to say there is no such thing as Truth or a carapace under which we can hide… which is just another way of saying Christian theology is not only impossible to sustain but also unnecessary. After Knowledge One significant feature of questions about Christianity and post-colonial concerns this question of truth—the possibility that we may say we have it, specifically. So incredulity, cynicism, pluralism and relativism combined effectively eliminates any credible discussion of truth because it dismisses any credible admission that we are right and everyone else is wrong (or only partially right, but they don’t know that). The exception I appeal to is that incredulity may also be the opportunity to breed humility—a humility that is to be experienced once we have shifted our concern from associating truth with objectivity to associating truth with our best explanations for the present time. Even further, that pluralism is not always relativism, and truth is possible but we may admit we get there differently. Paul Lakeland put such exceptions this way: “The loss of faith in utopias and grand designs opens onto a more limited but achievable attention to local initiatives, tactical forays in the direction of a more human life in the here and now.”1 Eschewing either/or as well as both/and suggestions does not necessitate the rejection of truth or discussing truth limitedly as ‘the truth for me’ or ‘anything goes as long as it works for you.’ Rejecting the way we have spoken about truth has led some to an antitheism, but this should not frighten us into hiding from the challenges that brought us to this point. The tendency to pull back in nostalgia will not rescue us; living after Descartes and the demise of indubitable starting points means we must look elsewhere and differently as we look. So Nicholas Wolterstorff observes: Most emphatically it does not follow that the Christian cannot have any confidence in what he believes. Nor does it follow that none of what the Christian believes has the status of knowledge. All that follows is that our reading and interpreting of Scripture does not provide us with a body of indubitably known propositions by reference to which we can govern all our acceptance and nonacceptance of theories.2 To avoid the routine association of Christian faith with indubitability requires that we experience a genuine repentance regarding the Cartesian Anxiety, a genuine disassociation of truth with objectivity, and a conversion to the explanation that truth is another way of speaking of what we do with the gospel—saying what we do as Christian people. It is more about saying that we are of Christian faith than saying how Christian faith really is. The actual practice of what this looks like—recasting how we ask questions of truth—is helpfully addressed by the Christian theologian Nicholas Lash: . . . as the world that we call ‘modern’ draws swiftly and dangerously to a close, some good things that have been hidden for a long time are beginning to be visible again. 1 Lakeland, Postmodernity, 9. Reason Within the Bounds of Religion, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 62. 2 One of these . . . is the possibility of liberation from that obsessive search for solid starting-points which so preoccupied the modern mind. . . . Perhaps the deepest reason for surrendering the modern search for safe and solid starting-points is that none of us, in fact, ever begins at the beginning. Finding ourselves somewhere, we do our best to work out where we are and what to do about it, to make some sense of things, to find our way around. Instead of wasting time casting about in search of absolutes, of a kind of safety, a possessed security, of solid ground beneath our feet that simply is not offered to us—neither by science nor Scripture, not by popes or presidents, not by proofs of private revelations—we would do better to get on with the business of trying to help each other take our bearings on a dark and dangerous road. . . . Those who are in the habit of reading Heidegger, or Wittgenstein, or fashionable French philosophers may find the tone of these last remarks of mine somewhat ‘postmodern’ in flavour. In this respect, at least, postmodernism seems to be a matter of rediscovering that the starting-point, for all of us, the place at which we all begin, is, as a . . . medieval master put it: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—in the middle of the journey of our life (Dante, Inferno, I.I).3 The wasted time of searching for absolutes is, to Lash, not to be confused with abandoning a taste and desire to comprehend truth; too often those who question Lash’s and others’ postmodern comments simply assume Lash has abandoned the search for truth. Instead, what Lash observes is that so much of the world (not just the Western world, but in a global-economy, simply, most of the world) has been preoccupied with uninterpreterable starting points (absolutes which somehow escape being subject to questions of meaning and authority), without the admission of involvement and vulnerability. 3 The Beginning and the End of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 161-162. Elsewhere Lash put the matter this way in his work Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles' Creed (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993) 2: “Theologians spend much time arguing where they should begin. This is a largely futile exercise because, if one thing is certain in this life, it is that none of us begins at the beginning. We find ourselves somewhere, discover something of what went before, of how things went in order to bring about the way they are. Growing up is largely a matter of learning to take bearings. A more fruitful question than “Where should we being?” would almost always be “Where, then, do we stand?” Welcoming Vulnerability Science (in some classic formulas) makes assertions of absolutes and necessities, as does a community’s sacred texts and/or traditions in the form of God’s commands (but the question of how they are to be used by Christian people, and the question of to whom they apply, are hardly easy, objective questions for Christians). Popes make infallible assertions and presidents are known to assume as much authority; and private revelations are, by virtue of their privacy, immune from interpretation in a manner contrary to the desires of the private subject. Lash rejects the strategy that assumes that once one establishes such starting points one is justified in triumphantly dismissing further consideration—a Cartesian fundamentalism, if you will. Lash, like other non-foundationalists, argue against the notion that indubitables, basic beliefs, or presuppositions cannot be challenged or are logically immune from criticism (views held by classical foundationalists or Cartesians, and Reformed epistemologists). What they do assert is an arguably Christian affirmation that human knowledge is limited and/or fallible, but it is also a significant means of making sense of human life; so Charles S. Pierce offers: “there are three things to which we can never hope to attain by reasoning, namely, absolute certainty, absolute exactitude, [and] absolute universality.”4 This fallibilism, for Pierce, coheres with the rejection of absolute individuals (Lash’s popes, scientists, etc.); it is the teaching “that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy.”5 Lash elsewhere addresses these topics as he refers to “The Task of the Theologian” as “the quest for truth”—which is just as much a quest as it is genuinely concerned with truth. We live in a fragile world that experiences a great irreverence for arbitrary affirmations of truth in morality and politics, for example, and with good reason. Lash 4 C. S. Pierce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1931-35), 1:141. 5 Ibid., 1:171. suggests that we have responded and coped with this fragility in three ways. The first option is nihilism: For the nihilist, the crumbling of our constructions holds no surprises because he knows that ‘truth’ is a fiction, and that all our projects laden with illusion—are temporary windbreaks against the onrush of chaos. The nihilist correctly appreciates that all our constructions are, indeed, but card-houses if their ‘truth’ resides only in our attempts to make them true; if the goal of our quest is only ‘internal’ to our striving. And he is convinced that there is no other ‘truth’ than that which we illusorily create; and that the object of our striving exists only in imagination.6 In contrast there is the response of what we just referred to as Cartesian fundamentalism, which Lash calls “absolutism.” The absolutist seeks to ensure the permanence of our constructions by ascribing absolute status to whatever patterns of relationship, language and self-interpreting narrative, of economic, legal or political order, we have so far succeeded in fashioning. The absolutist correctly appreciates that, if there is truth, it resides in how things are, not in how we would have them be; that the ultimate ground of truth lies not in human judgments, but in that which makes it possible for true judgments to occur. But that absolutist incorrectly supposes that the ways in which we have succeeded in making things to be is how they ultimately and appropriately are. The absolutist construes truth as reality grasped, as possession to be preserved against the ravages of time and change. The absolutist is an idolater.7 What is troublesome, according to Lash, is that both nihilism and absolutism are responses based in fear, perpetuating terror or responding to terror. Instead, he offers a third kind of response which is responsive to what is well founded in both nihilism and absolutism. Nihilism appropriately raises the challenge of illusion, but in Christian faith, 6 Nicholas Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986), 9-10. Ibid., 10. 7 as in trustfulness, is the insistence “that truth is not reducible to illusion: that there is imperishable truth in our constructions, truth that has its ground beyond all human endeavor in immunity from human folly and self-deception; in reality that infinitely transcends our projects and imaginings.” This Christian faith concerns the mystery of God. And this faith “is the practical acknowledgement that we have only illusion to fear.”8 Now concerning the absolutist, Lash has (as we observed in his comment about idolatry) a harsh but encouraging appraisal. The absolutist appropriately understands that “the stability of our constructions—of patterns of language, relationship and organization—is indispensable for human life and freedom.” Truth is grounded, not in human judgment but in that truth makes human judgments possible and real. Yet, Lash does not wish to “identify ‘truth’ with its particular expressions and achievements.” He concludes: “Fearful of illusion, and perceiving any such absolutization of particular constructions, to be idolatrous, it pursued the quest for truth along the path of dispossession. Faith in God, and in God alone, is inherently iconoclastic.”9 The heretical intimation of Lash’s statement (especially in more conservative circles) is that we cannot find in “science nor Scripture” safe, secure and solid absolutes; a notion troubling to many modern Christians because we tend to have as much confidence in science as we do in Scripture (and maybe even the same type of confidence: wishing to interpret the Bible scientifically, for example). Lash’s problem is not with Scripture as God’s word; the trouble arises when we assume that our affirmations of what the Bible teaches are somehow disengaged from the admission that we are making those affirmations, in a particular time and for the purpose of understanding our times. God’s word, the Bible, alone is sufficient for our task, but the Bible is never, practically speaking, alone.10 8 Ibid. Ibid., 11. We observe that Lash's realism is that which is often referred to as “middle-distance realism”; it is predominantly descriptive (i.e. realistic in ordinary life), can be taken as either pragmatic or cynical, and concerns what is conceived to be actually possible in a specific circumstance. See J. P. Stern, On Realism (London: Routeledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 10 We do note the aspiration of Luther in this regard, cited in Gerhard Ebeling, Luther, An 9 Religionless-ness Instead of granting certainty, confidence and an objectively conceived grand narrative, the troubles presented with representing Scripture go to the heart of the character of Scripture’s presenters themselves. As Lash contends, what the subject of Scripture raises should first and foremost be troubling to Scripture’s presenters. A most interesting example of such sentiments is found in an open letter from indigenous groups of Peru to John Paul II on the occasion of a Papal visit to their country. The letter invited the Pope to take the Bible back to Europe! John Paul II, we Andean and American Indians, have decided to take advantage of your visit to return to you your Bible, since in five centuries it has not given us love, peace, or justice. . . . Please take back your Bible and give it back to our oppressors, because they need its moral teachings more than we do. Ever since the arrival of Christopher Columbus a culture, a language, religion and values which belong to Europe have been imposed on Latin America by force.11 What the Bible purports is read and directed back toward (and against) those who have presented the Bible. This raises questions in at least two respects: the first addresses the appropriateness of imposing Scripture by acts of violence (physical, social and/or intellectual); and second, it is obvious (to some Peruvians) that Europeans have simply failed to read and understand their own Scripture thus invalidating any claims to appropriateness. It may be that the Andean and American Indians reject in its entirety Introduction to His Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1970), 45-46: “O that God should desire that my interpretation and that of all teachers should disappear, and each Christian should come straight to the Scripture alone and to the pure word of God! You see from this babbling of mine the immeasurable difference between the word of God and all human words, and how no man can adequately reach and explain a single word of God with all his words. It is an eternal word and must be understood and contemplated with a quiet mind. No one else can understand except a mind that contemplates in silence. For anyone who could achieve this without commentary or interpretation, my commentaries and those of everyone else could not only be of no use, but merely a hindrance. Go to the Bible itself, dear Christians, and let my expositions and those of all scholars be no more than a took with which to build aright, so that we can understand, taste and abide in the simple and pure word of God; for God dwells alone in Zion.” 11 Pablo Richard, cited in Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). the message presented by European Christianity, but this cannot be simply disentangled from the matter of the essential invalidation of Scripture’s message by Scripture’s presenters. A message that is strange to Scripture’s representatives in European garb. The subject we are really getting at is the strangeness or otherness of Scripture. This is an almost necessary theme among Christians arguing against Christianity. So Karl Barth wrote of the “strange new world within the Bible,” and cautioned: “The question, What is within the Bible? has a mortifying way of converting itself into the opposing question, Well, what are you looking for, and who are you, pray, who make bold to look?” He continued: Ere long the Bible says to us, in a manner candid and friendly enough, with regard to the “versions” we make of it: “These may be you, but they are not I! They may perhaps suit you, meeting the demands of your thought and temperament, of your era and your ‘circle,’ of your religious or philosophical theories. You wanted to be mirrored in me, and now you have really found in me your own reflection. But now I bid you come seek me, as well. See what is here.”12 The world of the Bible is the “other” world that resists assimilation and integration with our ways of knowing, our pursuit of singular knowledge, and our wills. This is not to say that we are kept from understanding the Bible or saying clearly that the Bible’s message is certain, but that “our problems” and the Bible’s answers are two different things.13 After all, “all religions may be found in the Bible, if one will have it so; but when he looks closely, there are none at all. There is only—the ‘other,’ new greater world!”14 12 Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. and ed. Douglas Horton (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1957) 32-34. 13 Employing Barth’s suggestions have led a cadre of North American theologians to develop a literary notion of intratextuality to characterize the totalizing claims of the biblical text (the ‘world of the text’) without overstepping and thereby nullifying or violating the confessionalcanonical character of the ‘world of the Bible’. James Callahan, Clarity of Scripture, 249-272. 14 Barth, Word of God, 42. In a similar fashion, and with similar pastoral concerns, Dietrich Bonhoeffer advocated reading Scripture over against ourselves rather than simple for ourselves. But instead of simply saying that Christians could return to premodern and Western Christian advocacy of the Christian religion, Bonhoeffer suggested we faced an entirely new type of challenge. We live in an essentially religionless world. Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rests on the ‘religious a priori’ of mankind. ‘Christianity’ has always been a form—perhaps the true form—of ‘religion’. But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless—and I think that that is already more or less the case . . . —what does that mean for Christianity? Bonhoeffer reads his circumstances as genuinely pointing in the direction of a religionless cultural existence. Maybe even (especially?) this means that “the western form of Christianity . . . was only a preliminary state to a complete absence of religion. . . .”15 This leaves Christians of faith in a tenuous circumstance: “It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our ‘Christianity. . . .’”16 15 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1972), 280. Bonhoeffer, in contrast to Barth, did not appeal to revelational positivism (as in, objectivism) in order to sustain his appeal to the uniqueness of the biblical text. Exemplary of the path traced out by Barth is argument of David Wells regarding the recovery of “the biblical mind” and “biblical religion”—conceived of as an either/or “liberation.” See his, No Place for Truth, 258-282. On the discussion of Barth's revelational positivism within twentiethcentury theology see, Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology: Theology without Weapons (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999); Charles Marsh, Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Andreas Pangritz, Karl Barth in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000). The accusation from Bonhoeffer that Barth follows a “revelational positivism” is precisely concerned with the question of theology’s boundaries in relation to Scripture, and displays Bonhoeffer’s concern that for Barth theology becomes less than present witness and more of an isolated and thereby uncritical form of biblicism (thus silencing both Scripture and theology). 16 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 280. Bonhoeffer envisions the response from those of Christian faith to be one of advancement and mission within the religionless context that, in large part, is a direct result of the demise of the cultural foundation of Christianity. This religionlessness is not to be reversed by nostalgia (as if that could ever be accomplished), but neither is it to be celebrated as good in itself (it is neither just good nor just bad). He wishes to pursue the mission of Christian faith by its own means but within its immediate circumstances. Barth, who is the only one to have started along this line of thought, did not carry it to completion, but arrived at a positivism of revelation, which in the last analysis is essentially a restoration. For the religionless working man (or any other man) nothing decisive is gained here. The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God—without religion, i.e. without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even ‘speak’ as we used to) in a ‘secular’ way about ‘God’? In what way are we ‘religionless-secular’ Christians, in what way are we the ekklesia, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favoured, but rather as belonging wholly to the world?17 What is at stake, according to Bonhoeffer is not the past but the present and future mission of Christian faith in the midst of the present crisis. This gets to the heart of Bonhoeffer’s justification for appealing to the Bible over against ourselves. So Bonhoeffer, again in contrast to Barth, argues that although Barth’s revelational positivism may appear to be conservative (as in nostalgic) it is not necessarily biblically or historically realistic: Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion, and that remains his really great merit; but he put in its place a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, Ibid., 280-281; for a healthy critique of how Bonhoeffer’s phrase has been heard and its implications, see Eberhard Bethge, “Bonhoeffer’s Christology and His ‘Religionless Christianity,’” Union Seminary Theological Quarterly 23, no. 1 (Fall 1967), 61-77. 17 in effect, ‘Like it or lump it’: virgin birth, Trinity, or anything else; each is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which must simply be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That isn’t biblical. There are degrees of knowledge and significance; that means that a secret discipline must be restored whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are protected against profanation. The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up, as it does in the last analysis, a law of faith, and so mutilates what is—by Christ’s incarnation!—a gift for us. Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity is interestingly akin to the Christian theological sentiments found among Mourners³. He urges that we conceive of the Bible as strange and other so as to highlight the great contrasts between the tendency to nostalgically see a justification for our Christian existence within its pages instead of hearing the Bible’s call for faith at our present moment. As strange as this sounds to biblicists and pietists encouraged to daily read the Bible devotionally—for ourselves, Bonhoeffer realized the tendencies this routine encouraged unless challenged. The trouble is not with Bible reading, but with the manner in which one reads. Commenting on his experience at a youth conference in 1932, he wrote: Has it not become terrifyingly clear again and again, in everything that we have said here to one another, that we are no longer obedient to the Bible? We are more fond of our own thoughts than of the thoughts of the Bible. We no longer read the Bible seriously, we no longer read it against ourselves, but for ourselves. If the whole of our conference here is to have any great significance, it may be perhaps that showing us that we must read the Bible in quite a different way, until we find ourselves again. 18 To employ Scripture to correct or challenge comfortable Christianity (too much at home in its social-political setting) was a very necessary tactic in Bonhoeffer’s day. It is also a perennial tactic in the history of Christian faith.19 One need not argue that this 18 No Rusty Swords, trans C. H. Robertson, et al (London: Collins, 1970), 181. Early Christian apologists such as Justin used Jewish Scripture (i.e. the Old Testament) against its original readers; Irenaeus used Scripture as a whole to make his defense against heretics claiming to correctly read Scripture; Augustine appealed to Scripture's main themes 19 contrariness is always necessary, just that one should not suppose that Scripture offers us the kind of absolutes which cannot be challenged directly by genuine Christian people, and rightly so. Starting in the middle (as ironic as that expression seems) does change the complexion of our work as Christians in this particular setting. There is no possible generic, universal common ground, centered evaluating premise. Both the promise of universal reason and the cultural dynamic of liberal democracy are to be regarded as illusions, for example. There is no way to adjudicate disagreements except the complicated practice of conversation between two or more genuinely different conversants. against the marginal readings of the Manicheans; Zwingli and Luther and Calvin offered their appeal to Scripture against the assertions of late medieval Catholicism; as did Pietists against scholastic protestants; as did Wesley and subsequent revivalists against established Protestant Christianity; as did fundamentalists against modernists in the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcenturies; as did evangelicals reacting to the fundamentalism of the moral majority in the 1970s.