Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

-----

Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Commentary - Catherine Keller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Commentary - Catherine Keller. Show all posts

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Catherine Keller - "I Can't Breathe"


Police and court officers stand guard in front of Manhattan Criminal Court as
protesters demonstrate against the the death of George Floyd. | Source: AP

“I can’t breathe”: The whole Earth
echoes the cry for justice

by Catherine Keller
June 8, 2020

Sometimes a metaphor turns into a metaforce. “I can’t breathe” — the cruelly literal words of Eric Garner turned into a metaphor for the condition of black lives in 2014. When those words were repeated by George Floyd, the repetition of the same pattern of police brutality unleashed an immediate and unrelenting national uprising, unprecedented in its global solidarity for racial justice. Its metaforce will not be contained.

Look at what the very phrase contains, working subliminally, with an eerie depth resonance: “I can’t breathe” writes itself across mass demonstrations at a moment of mass death by a disease that kills by asphyxiation. We’ve known for weeks that COVID-19 kills with an obscene discrimination — African Americans are dying from the virus at three times the rate of white Americans.

The fact that George Floyd tested positive for coronavirus does not alter the charge of murder. But the coincidence is rife with epochal meaning. It amplifies the mounting cry for a justice that would not just check police violence, but transform an economic system in which black and brown people disproportionately lack adequate medical care and live in asthma-producing neighbourhoods with polluted air, zones of greater industrial pollution and fewer trees to absorb the excess carbon.

In its specific American manifestation, but also at its origins, the virus presents not just as a medical but as an ecological crisis. Of course, at this moment the pandemic has fallen into the background of the demonstrations. The masked marchers are taking a knowing risk. But they are not being reckless; theirs is the courage of a priority. If the virus spreads from these mass gatherings, the tragedy of this epoch will be intensified. But the virus will not quell the metaforce of a race, a people, a world, running out of breath.

Do the discriminatory brutality of the police and the racial impact of the pandemic together warn of the suffocation of our very world? A global eco-asphyxia? It turns out that breathlessness is no mere metaphor for the dangers of global warming. Many of us do not realise that there is a profoundly discomfiting materialisation of breathlessness on the horizon. We may not know that phytoplankton — microscopic organisms forming the oceanic base of the food chain — produce at least half, and possibly 85 per cent, of the oxygen we breathe. The phytoplankton seem to be steadily succumbing to ocean acidification driven by climate warming. “I can’t breathe” could be the cry of the entire human species by the end of the century.

My point here is precisely not, “Never mind the issues of one race; save the human race.” It is rather that the metaforce of breath will not go away. And neither will the resistance to the systemic mechanisms of suffocation, symbolic and material, that control much of what we call civilisation. That resistance is becoming insistent. The more mindfully it can carry the intersections of race with ecologies human and nonhuman, the more powerfully the metaforce can materialise.

This does not mean watering down the message of black lives mattering. It means supporting it on all sides — in its particularity. Political changes need the clarity of this particular crisis. They do not need us to get trapped in a zero-sum game of competing issues. But the choices of priority get devastatingly difficult. As a biologist and climate expert recently wrote, in view of the fact that already disproportionately more black and brown consider climate change a crisis than white people do: “Look, I would love to ignore racism and focus all my attention on climate. But I can’t. Because I am human. And I’m black. And ignoring racism won’t make it go away.”

Being human right now will mean embracing the mattering of black lives along with the living matter of our planet. A growing mass of us must be — may already be — learning to hold the intersections, the planetary connections, in consciousness, the knowing-together that fosters a broad enough coalition, and therefore a deep enough transformation.

At this point, another register of breath appears. Call it spiritual. A lot of us practice yoga, or some sort of mindfulness meditation. We know that breath is not some airy metaphor, but the rhythm of life itself. The aching force of “I can’t breathe” can be felt in the pores of your body right now, with each inhalation, each exhalation. Slow them down. Take them deep. You may practice a yoga of world-solidarity with every breath. And in the Western traditions, there lingers still the Hebrew ruach, the Greek pneuma — both ancient words for “spirit,” which mean first of all “breath.” The old Holy Ghost comes haunting our politics.

It just so happens that the President’s posing with the Bible to sanctify policies of police brutality took place on the day after Pentecost. Pentecost commemorates the moment when, as the Book of Acts tells it, the Holy Spirit as wind blew the disciples out of hiding and into the public to demonstrate. The pneuma, instigating planetary solidarity, breathed into them every known language.

The metaforce of breath inspires and conspires. It can also expire. Is it the “Breath of Life” itself — the very life of the manifold, mattering lives of the Earth — that now echoes the cry, “I can’t breathe”?


*Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. She is the author of Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public and the forthcoming book, Apocalypse After All?

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Catherine Keller - Parenting & the Uncontrolling God


Catherine Keller on the Uncontrolling God
http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/catherine-keller-uncontrolling-god

Guest Post by Catherine Keller
November 15th, 2016

A friend describes a process she learned as a mother: “I never did try to control my kids, there were too many of them to do that. I had three children in two years, and it became very clear early on (such as day one), that control was not possible. Instead of getting in their way and trying to run their play, I had to arrive at some other mode of being with them as they are.”

So she invited friends over for them to play with, and chaos mounted. But this is what she observed: “If I were willing and able to let the four or five very young children jostle, master round, explore for about 45 minutes-with the ground rules of not hurting each other or the home-if I just let them go through whatever procedures they needed to go through, they would come up with something that they loved to do together. They would arrive at some game, project, make-believe… That would keep them positively, joyfully engaged for up to three hours. All of them.”

This is a humble parable of creation from chaos. It illustrates uncontrolling love.

Parents and all who relate in love have to “let be.” So do good teachers, pastors, and leaders. As Elohim italicized “Let be” the light? John McQuarrie defines “letting be” as something much more positive than just leaving alone: “as enabling to be, empowering to be, or bringing into being.” Thus our experience of “letting be” may serve as an analogy of “the ultimate letting-be.”

Love does not control. It opens up the space of becoming. The space is not without protective boundaries, not without rules.

The healthy parent is not merely permissive, but constantly teaching ideals of fairness, cooperation, and creative development. This space comprises neither rampant disorder nor imposed order. It opens at the edge of chaos, without plunging into the abyss. It supports the free play of relations — and satisfies desires of both parent and children. This uncontrolling care empowers the children to construct their own “complex self-organizing system.” At least temporarily!

---

If I may push our parable a bit further, the desired into play is not about a private “me and my God” relation but I love open and out into a fuller sociality. “Two or more gathered in my name.” In the communality of genesis things are risky, noisy, messy. But fresh order continues to emerge from the chaos. And while its equilibria do not last forever — “love never ends” (1 Cor. 13:8).

Does God just choose not to interfere with our freedom? The so-called free-will defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence tries that middle road: God permits, but does not cause evil, and so leaves us our freedom. This is close to the chilly deism Calvin railed against.

But usually those who hold this reasonable view also hold out for occasional special or miraculous interventions on God’s part. But then: Why didn’t God manipulate the vote just a bit so that Hitler would lose the election? Or, for that matter, heal my friend’s little sister’s leukemia? Or excise that bad gene in the first place? Or all bad genes?

The free-will defense only works if held consistently. But that is hard to do. To say God “permits” evil for the sake of our freedom implies that God could step in at any time, and as far as history demonstrates, just chooses not to.

The alternative to omnipotence lies in the risky interactivity of relationship. It does not toss the creatures into a deistic void, chilled but autonomous. It continues to call them forth, to inviteThe power of God, if it is response-able power, empowers the others – to respond. In their freedom.

In what sense then is the divine powerful? It can perhaps even be called all-powerful, if that language for the biblical God seems indispensable to some, in this sense: God has “all the power” that a good God, a God who fosters and delights in the goodness of the creation, could have or want to have.

But the point is that this is not the unilateral power to command things to happen out of nothing and then to control them under threat of nothingness. It is another kind of power all together, a qualitatively different power — a power that seems weak when dominance is the ideal.

The metaphor of “power perfected in weakness” tried to make comprehensible the difficult alternative to coercive force: the contagious influence that flows from a radically vulnerable strength. Two thousand years later, we have made limited collective progress in its realization. Perhaps experiments in social democracy, in which persuasion is favored over coercion, and care valued as a supreme public strength, hint at the alternative. Perhaps experiments in gender equality and nonviolent parenting are also advancing, here and there, our metaphoric reservoir.

The One who calls forth good even from the ashes of evil, a good that requires—indeed commands—but cannot coerce our cooperation. A power that makes possible our response.

---

From On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process pp. 88-90 copyright © 2007 Fortress Press. Reproduced by permission. For a more complete treatment of the subject consider purchase of the book, which may be found at the following link: http://fortresspress.com/product/mystery-discerning-divinity-process

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at The Theological School of Drew University. She’s the author or editor of more than a dozen books, her latest being Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.


Monday, November 14, 2011

Catherine Keller - On Entanglement, Interconnectedness & Synchronicity


When reading through Catherine's much appreciated interview it caught my attention if what she was referring to in terms of theological entanglements or spiritual interconnectedness was perhaps the same concept put forth here not  many months ago pertaining to the concept of synchronicity (LOST in Purgatory, "Synchronicity," Part 2 of 2).

I had thought at the time when discovering the concept many years earlier, that this concept was at once singular and multifaceted; rare in observance but readily performed in everyday life; a substance (both metaphysical and temporal) bound to the immortal person and being of God in His power, presence, being and divine embrace of His creation basically understood then, as now, as a "joined collective dynamic."

And so, Catherine draws this same coincidence out from within her own view of process theology, whereas I, whether rightly or wrongly, whether inconsistently and naively, have done the same through my bias towards classical theism (that I have since revised as relational theism; see sidebars for further discussion). Let us then consider her interview and the greater matters of how God works through us, the world, time and attention in mysterious and marvelous ways hidden from us but yet ever in plain view!

R.E. Slater
November 14, 2001

* * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness:
An Interview with Catherine Keller
November 2, 2011

*Beatrice Marovich is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University in Madison, NJ. She also works as a writer, editor, and communications consultant, specializing in ideas at the crowded intersection of theology, philosophy, faith and public/political life in North America.

Before I knew anything much at all about theology, I knew about creationism—theology’s old anti-evolutionary fracas. I knew, in other words, that in the worst case, theology and science were at war. In the best case, I assumed, they had a rather awkward relationship—something like bad first date. And then I read Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (Routledge, 2003).

What occurred was nothing short of a paradigm shift. What Keller was up to was beyond me—in the very best way. She wasn’t doing apologetics (defending theology from its outside objectors). Instead, she was pulling playfully from the feisty texts of her tradition (in this case, the first book of Genesis, the creation story) in order to cast an evocative, spirited, poetic web over the cosmos that scientific research was revealing to us. I realized that there was no one else I’d trust as much to help me wade into this ancient discipline—theology. Here, Keller speaks with me about her forthcoming book.

BEM: Let’s start simple. The book youre currently working on is called Cloud of the Impossible: Theological Entanglements. Perhaps the first question I should ask is: What is a “cloud of the impossible”?

CK: Well, it’s a metaphor that just engulfed me and wouldn’t let me go. I tried to work with other names. But it wouldn’t go away, this little cloud.

It comes from Nicholas of Cusa, who’s a theologian of the 15th century. It’s a phrase that he uses in his book called The Vision of God. When he talks about the cloud of the impossible he’s talking about the cloud that, at a certain point in your spiritual journey, you just can’t avoid if you want to evolve. The cloud that you simply can’t not enter, if you’re not going to settle for clichés and incoherencies, or repressed questions, in your spirituality.

So this cloud that you have to face… what is it? Well, for him, it’s a point of dire contradiction. It’s when two different things that you believe come into conflict and contradict each other.

What does the cloud of the impossible have to do with God?

Cusa says that we have to face the contradictions that the cloud confronts us with. The fundamental contradiction that haunts him throughout all of his work—and attracts him as well—is that we are utterly finite creatures who don’t have the capacity to grasp the infinite, which is God. So it’s a contradiction between finitude and the infinite.

But the contradictions, for me, can also be the contradictions between our life calling and a relationship to a loved one, or the contradiction between our ecological awareness and our economic practice. In his cloud meditation, Cusa suggests that these contradictions (which seem to be utterly resistant to our reason, which strike us as utterly impossible to resolve) suck us deeper into the cloud. We’re drawn ever deeper, until we hit a wall. We come to an awareness of a wall that seems to be woven of these intractable, irreconcilable opposites.

But Cusa describes this as the wall of the coincidence of opposites: coincidentia oppositorum. It’s the very realization that these opposites are interwoven that points to something else, a sort of third way. It’s a struggle to get there. There’s a kind of logic of “either-or” that has to be overcome. But then a gate opens and, at least for a moment, one is in paradise. This moment never lasts. But, for Cusa, the experience of the divine is precisely that: coming smack up against this contradiction and then, if we hang in there, the opening.

Is this the impossible?

That’s the impossible transmuting into possibility itself. It’s the possibility within the impossible.

Your book is also going to cover a kind of correlate phenomenon of impossibility in the world of physics?

I’ve been fascinated with a kind of quantum apophasis*. What we face in this field is a kind of fundamental contradiction between relativity theory (which is classical) and quantum physics, which “unsays” the laws of classical physics. I think this contradiction is its own cloud.

Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia opens The Fabric of the Universe with a dramatic image of physics being under a dark cloud, which is this basic contradiction. So a lot of physicists are looking for the coincidentia oppositorum between these not entirely reconciled sets of laws. But the contradiction itself isn’t something that I, as a theologian, am looking to solve. I’m more interested in a phenomenon that comes out of this cloud, out of what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”—quantum entanglement.

In classical physics, nothing can happen faster than the speed of light because no signal can propagate faster than the speed of light. But what was showing its ghostly face in quantum entanglement is a kind of influence that seems to be instantaneous and seems to take place between two connected particles, no matter how far away they are. So, rather than become more and more indifferent to one another the further away they are, these particles will forever respond to each other instantaneously as though you are effecting both of them in the same way, at the same moment [known as the Laws of Mutual Entanglement - res].

They’re entangled?

Right. It looks like, from a certain point of view, nothing is separate from anything at all. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson puts it, in her book Gut Symmetries: our separateness is a sham.

But what is a theological entanglement?

My book [laughs]. It’s a way of understanding our sometimes spooky, sometimes trustworthy, relationships… theologically.

Theological entanglement is a way of reflecting on our relationships—all of our relationships, at once, together. When we do this, we get to such an impossibly infinite place that, I think, we resort to God language. The metaphors of the divine, of a love that permeates all things instantaneously, an embrace that holds everything everywhere in its mindfulness, a spirit (even a holy ghost) that has the character of spooky action at a distance is a metaphor by which can gather our very mysterious interdependencies (as creatures) on each other.

We are constituted, in every moment, by our relations. Some of them we compose, but they comprise the conditions in which we are composed. Theological entanglement is a form of what’s called “relational theology.” Entanglement is meant to give a more physical, and spooky edge to our interconnectedness.

This isn’t just about the apophasis of an infinite God, but about the element of unknowability in all of us—as creatures made in the image of the unknowable. It looks, even from the vantage point of quantum indeterminacy, that every creature has an element of the unknowable or unpredictable to it. For every electron, you’re unable to measure (simultaneously) its location and its momentum.

What do you think your readings in quantum physics have done for your theology?

My study of physics strengthens my faith, because it exposes the depth of the mystery of what theologians call the incarnation. There is a way in which various branches of science, in a kind of postmodern vein (the corners of scientific fields where reductionism has not obtained for decades) the mystery of our interdependence is actually fleshed out with a kind of precision that I think theologians should be aware of. The universe that is showing itself in various fields, (not just quantum physics, but the fractals of chaos theory, for example) is a universe far more appealing to theology than was the [classic] universe of the past 300 to 400 years—made up of bits of dead, impenetrable matter, interacting predictably in a mega-machine.

The more you get into these cutting edges of science, the more the mysterious materializes. It turns out, even, that what we call “matter” is ultimately a kind of myth. You can’t really say this, as a theologian. It sounds like you’re trying to turn the actual world into some kind of illusion. That’s not what I’m talking about. Rather, I’m saying that what we call matter is something much more mysterious, subtle, apparently interconnecting faster than the speed of light, just pulsing in its inter-linked processes with the unknown. I think all of us have a lot to learn there. Clearly the scientists are not going to be, for the most part, reflecting on the possible meanings of their own science. That’s not what they’re trained for. This is why transdisciplinary work is so crucial.

Should we be afraid to reflect, theologically, on the meaning of scientific data, or the findings that come out of scientific research?

We should be careful. We should do a lot of reading before we jump to conclusions. But I think that’s true for any form of responsible thinking. There’s a lot of great, accessible material out there today, however. So I don’t think there’s any real reason to be afraid. To cite Cusa: the problem is not our ignorance. That’s unavoidable. But if we realize the shape of our ignorance, then we can learn a lot more.

And we don’t have to be afraid that we can’t know it all. We can’t all be physicists. I’m always very knowing of my own ignorance of the natural sciences. So I’m grateful for how much is being communicated across disciplinary boundaries. And I hope that this can, increasingly, go both ways. Perhaps, now, as the planet heats up and cooperation—not just between disciplines, but populations—becomes more and more a matter of life and death, there will be more interest in transdisciplinary conversations.

Perhaps theologians, pastors, spiritual leaders, people who are spiritually attuned to irreligious forms of creativity, will find some new ways to communicate about these things. But if science is left out of the mix, we will always be off in lala land. We need the incarnational practice of taking into account the most precise knowledge we can find, in the face of the mystery of our embodied existence.

As a theologian, what do you think is left out of the mix if God, or the divine, isn’t entangled with other forms of knowledge?

I think if God-talk simply drops out of sophisticated discourse and is just replaced by a wide range of philosophical, spiritual, poetical metaphors that avoid the Abrahamisms of the past, what’s left behind is simply our consciousness of who we are. That is, if we shift into atheism in the name of being in the know, we’re actually shifting into an unknowing ignorance.

We’ve been comprised by these traditions, massively. So to think that we can simply repudiate them by dismissing their more vulgar and clichéd forms is to do violence to what the prophetic and poetic strands of atheism always were: a more spiritually and affectively alive sense of life.

It’s possible to avoid God-talk for long stretches of time. Any canny Christian can do that, in order to make friends and influence people. Or just to get relief from bad clichés. But, at a certain point, one has to face up to the profundity and brilliance of the conceptual work that was done in the Western world for more than 1500 years, when it was dominated by the discipline of theology.

But we don’t want to reduce post-Christian criticisms of Christian idolatries to mere anti-faith, either. It wouldn’t do justice to the depths of the agnostic and atheist traditions which are, themselves, deeply prophetic traditions. Still, I think it’s important to stay mindful of God-tropes. Being mindful of these metaphors doesn’t necessarily cause us to believe in them. But we might find that the whole language of belief falls short of what’s meant by faith, anyhow—faith has never been a matter of little bits of knowledge parading as certainty.


COMMENTS

I find this subject fascinating and look forward to seeing Keller's book; however, it is somewhat disturbing for Keller to refer to "theology" and assume Christian theology only, and for the article to neglect to mention important influences that predate Cusa like the fourteenth century Christian work "The Cloud of Unknowing"**; not to mention far earlier apophatic works from Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish sources. Indeed, Keller's discussion of opposites reminded me of nothing so much as the Zen way of putting the conscious mind into crisis by posing riddles — koans — which scramble the brain's tendency to make sense and order out of everything. And while Zen is not considered a theology, as such, including Buddhism in a discussion of "unknowing" is surely appropriate.

"Religious" cultures did not, for the most part, emerge in isolation. Historians find increasing evidence of cross-cultural influence that goes back thousands of years (recalling that peoples interacted through trade, conquest, and settlement before times for which we have written records). Historians of Western religion are pointing more and more to outside influences on Christianity by noting that Thomas Aquinas and other European theologians read the Jewish thinker Maimonides, who in turn is thought to have been influenced by Islamic philosophers such as al-Farabi and al-Ghazali, who themselves were heirs to ancient Greek and other philosophies. And back into the mists of time and place the influences go.

For this interview to make it appear as though Cusa put something new together when there are many earlier sources (even if one stays within the Christian tradition) is alarming. To neglect to even mention "The Cloud of Unknowing" when the title of Keller's book is clearly a reference (if not an homage) to that important work is something of a travesty.

Indeed, the focus on Christianity in this article — not overt yet obvious to the reader — adds fuel to a polarization of traditions which is, sadly, becoming increasingly popular today. Writers of such pieces need to be very careful to avoid reinforcing such misconceptions.

Keller's thinking about quantum mechanics and religious mysticism has been anticipated by a number of thinkers. For example, the 1996 edition of "The Cloud of Unknowing" (published by Doubleday, text edited by William Johnston [1973]) features a foreword by Huston Smith, in which Smith writes about the importance of quantum mechanics to our consideration of works like "The Cloud". I'm sure (at least one would expect) that Keller pays due credit to earlier thinkers — and to earlier works than Cusa's from around the world — in her book, but a sentence or two in this article would have sufficed to put her work into context.

– Beth, Dept. of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst


* * * * * * * * * * * *
 

DEFINITIONS
  
*Apophasis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis

IN GENERAL

Apophasis was originally and more broadly a method of logical reasoning or argument by denial—a way of describing what something is by explaining what it is not, or a process-of-elimination way of talking about something by talking about what it is not.

A useful inductive technique when given a limited universe of possibilities, the exclusion of all but the one remaining is affirmation through negation. The familiar guessing-game of Twenty Questions is an example of apophatic inquiry.

This sense has generally fallen into disuse and is frequently overlooked, although it is still current in certain contexts, such as mysticism and negative theology.

IN CHRISTIANITY

An apophatic theology sees God as ineffable and attempts to describe God in terms of what God is not. Apophatic statements refer to transcendence in this context, as opposed to cataphasis referring to immanence. It stands in contrast with cataphatic theology.

Apophatic theology (from Greek ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι - apophēmi, "to deny")—also known as negative theology or via negativa (Latin for "negative way")—is a theology that attempts to describe [the transcedent] God, or Divine Good, by negation. To speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.[1] It stands in contrast with cataphatic theology that speaks to the immanence of God.

In brief, negative theology is an attempt to achieve unity with the Divine Good through discernment, gaining knowledge of what God is not (apophasis), rather than by describing what God is (cataphasis).

The apophatic tradition is often, though not always, allied with the approach of mysticism, which focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or the conditioned role-playing and learned defensive behavior of the outer man.


Apophatic Theology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology

In negative theology, it is accepted that the Divine is ineffable (inexpressible), an abstract experience that can only be recognized or remembered—that is, human beings cannot describe in words the essence of the perfect good that is unique to the individual, nor can they define the Divine, in its immense complexity, related to the entire field of reality, and therefore all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided; in effect, it eludes definition by definition:
  • Neither existence nor nonexistence as we understand it in the physical realm, applies to God; i.e., the Divine is abstract to the individual, beyond existing or not existing, and beyond conceptualization regarding the whole (one cannot say that God exists in the usual sense of the term; nor can we say that God is nonexistent).
  • God is divinely simple (one should not claim that God is one, or three, or any type of being.)
  • God is not ignorant (one should not say that God is wise since that word arrogantly implies we know what "wisdom" means on a divine scale, whereas we only know what wisdom is believed to mean in a confined cultural context).
  • Likewise, God is not evil (to say that God can be described by the word 'good' limits God to what good behavior means to human beings individually and en masse).
  • God is not a creation (but beyond that we cannot define how God exists or operates in relation to the whole of humanity).
  • God is not conceptually defined in terms of space and location.
  • God is not conceptually confined to assumptions based on time.
Even though the via negativa essentially rejects theological understanding as a path to God, some have sought to make it into an intellectual exercise, by describing God only in terms of what God is not. One problem noted with this approach, is that there seems to be no fixed basis on deciding what God is not, unless the Divine is understood as an abstract experience of full aliveness unique to each individual consciousness, and universally, the perfect goodness applicable to the whole field of reality[citation needed]. It should be noted that this is also a kind of definition, namely that the Divine is an experience, which - because of the very definition of apophatic theology - the then Divine cannot be.


Cataphatic Theology

(sometimes spelled kataphatic) theology is the expressing of God or the divine through positive terminology. This is in contrast to defining God or the divine in what God is not, which is referred to as negative or apophatic theology.

To speak of God or the divine kataphatically is by its nature a form of limiting to God or divine. This was one of the core tenets of the works of St Dionysus the Aeropagite. By defining what God or the divine is we limit the unlimited as Saint Dionysus outlined in his works. A kataphatic way to express God would be that God is love. The apophatic way would be to express that God is not hate; or to say that God is not love, as he transcends even our notion of love.

Ultimately, one would come to remove even the notion of the Trinity, or of saying that God is one, because The Divine is above numberhood. That God is beyond all duality because God contains within Godself all things and that God is beyond all things. The apophatic way as taught by Saint Dionysus was to remove any conceptual understanding of God that could become all-encompassing, since in its limitedness that concept would begin to force the fallen understanding of mankind onto the absolute and divine.
 


* * * * * * * * * * * *


**The Cloud of Unknowing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing
The Cloud of Unknowing
Author(s)Anonymous
Original titleThe Cloude of Unknowyng
CountryEngland
LanguageMiddle English
Subject(s)Spiritual guide to contemplative prayer
Genre(s)Christian mysticism
Publication datelate 14th century
Followed byThe Book of Privy Counseling


The Cloud of Unknowing (Middle English: The Cloude of Unknowyng) is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide on contemplative prayer in the late Middle Ages.

Manuscripts of the work are today at British Library and Cambridge University Library. [1][2]

History and influence

The Cloud of Unknowing draws on the mystical tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Christian Neoplatonism[3], which focuses on the via negativa road to discovering God as a pure entity, beyond any capacity of mental conception and so without any definitive image or form. This tradition has reputedly inspired generations of mystical searchers from John Scotus Erigena, through Book of Taliesin, Nicholas of Cusa and St. John of the Cross to Teilhard de Chardin (the latter two of whom may have been influenced by "The Cloud" itself). Prior to this, the theme of "Cloud" had been in the Confessions of St. Augustine (IX, 10) written in AD 398.[2]

This work had already become known to English Catholics in middle 17th century, later ascetic and Benedictine mystic, Augustine Baker (1575-1641), wrote an exposition on its doctrine. Today a transcript of the work dated 1677 is at the Ampleforth College , apart from several at the British Library. English mystic Evelyn Underhill edited an important version of the work in 1922. [3]

Description

The book counsels a young student to seek God, not through knowledge and intellection (faculty of the human mind), but through intense contemplation, motivated by love, and stripped of all thought. This is brought about by putting all thoughts and desires under a "cloud of forgetting", and thereby piercing God's cloud of unknowing with a "dart of longing love" from the heart. This form of contemplation is not directed by the intellect, but involves spiritual union with God through the heart:
"For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. And you must step above it stoutly but deftly, with a devout and delightful stirring of love, and struggle to pierce that darkness above you; and beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love, and do not give up, whatever happens."[4]
In a follow-up to The Cloud, called The Book of Privy Counseling, the author characterizes the practice of contemplative unknowing as worshiping God with one's "substance," coming to rest in a "naked blind feeling of being," and ultimately finding thereby that God is one's being.

The practical prayer advice contained in The Cloud of Unknowing forms a primary basis for the contemporary practice of Centering Prayer, a form of Christian meditation developed by Trappist monks William Meninger, Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating in the 1970s.[5]

Quotations
Ch. 39-40 quotation: other versions
Evelyn Underhill (1922/2003)
And if we will intentively pray for getting of good, let us cry, either with word or with thought or with desire, nought else nor no more words, but this word “God.” For why, in God be all good.. Fill thy spirit with the ghostly bemeaning of it without any special beholding to any of His works—whether they be good, better, or best of all—bodily or ghostly, or to any virtue that may be wrought in man’s soul by any grace; not looking after whether it be meekness or charity, patience or abstinence, hope, faith, or soberness, chastity or wilful poverty. What recks this in contemplatives?.. they covet nothing with special beholding, but only good God. Do thou.. mean God all, and all God, so that nought work in thy wit and in thy will, but only God.[6]
Middle English original
And yif we wil ententifly preie for getyng of goodes, lat us crie, outher with worde or with thought or with desire, nought elles, ne no mo wordes, bot this worde God. For whi in God ben alle goodes.. Fille thi spirit with the goostly bemenyng of it withoutyn any specyal beholdyng to any of His werkes whether thei be good, betir, or alther best, bodily or goostly—or to any vertewe that may be wrought in mans soule by any grace, not lokyng after whether it be meeknes or charité, pacyence or abstynence, hope, feith, or sobirnes, chastité or wilful poverté. What thar reche in contemplatyves?.. thei coveyte nothing with specyal beholdyng, bot only good God. Do thou.. mene God al, and al God, so that nought worche in thi witte and in thi wile, bot only God.[7]
From a description of how to practice contemplation (from chapters 39 and 40):
When we intend to pray for goodness, let all our thought and desire be contained in the one small word "God." Nothing else and no other words are needed, for God is the epitome of all goodness.. Immerse yourself in the spiritual reality it speaks of yet without precise ideas of God's works whether small or great, spiritual or material. Do not consider any particular virtue which God may teach you through grace, whether it is humility, charity, patience, abstinence, hope, faith, moderation, chastity, or evangelical poverty. For to a contemplative they are, in a sense, all the same.. Let this little word represent to you God in all his fullness and nothing less than the fullness of God.[8]
From elsewhere (chapter 23, The Book of Privy Counseling):
"And so I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest."[9]

Popular culture


 

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Catherine Keller - Process, Poetry & Post-Structuralism




Process, Poetry & Post-Structuralism
by R.E. Slater

Side Note: I write this in 2021, ten years after posting here in 2011, to tell the reader that relationality is an immanent quality of process theology even as it cannot be entertained in classic theistic structures which lean heavily on transcendence of the divine - or God's apartness - from creation. Thus panentheism (not pantheism) must go hand-in-hand with relationality.
Too, I came up from the biblical side or Arminianism to get to this point not realising that "Open and Relational" theology is a major tenant of process theology and is more aptly described as "Open and Relational PROCESS" theology. Hence, two sides describing the same coin - one biblically and the other philosophically. Coincidental? Perhaps. Beautiful? Absolutely!
One last, it seemed natural to me to place together open theism with relational theism. Apparently many scholars resisted this joining which felt better together and apart from one another. Which is why I shall go on to always place an open future with a relational future. Eventually Tom Oord go on to become great friends who also came up from the Arminian (sic, Wesleyan) traditions even as I did my own Baptist traditions. Too, we both had to excised Calvinism from our biblical constructs in order to better grasp process theology. - re slater

I would like to propose a synthetic position between Classic Theism on the one hand, and Process Theology on the other hand. To borrow a term from process theology - that had once been considered but later rejected - to call it Relational Theism and go on to then explain this position as "Seeking a Postmodern Relational definition of Classic Theism."

It is an attempt to reconcile classic theism's theistic base without finding the need to move to the alternative panentheistic base of process theology. It neither disavows nor declaims process theology's statements of the Divine but wonders aloud if these statements couldn't better be described through relational terms from a theistic foundation that separates the substantive vs. the pervasive elements of process theology's discoveries back into relational theistic terminology.

And to those open and process theologians who are better versed in this philosophical research than myself, I ask for their help and assistance in developing the argument for the case of Relational Theism as a mitigating position between the classic and postmodern positions. I believe there is a validity to this effort that needs further exploration and a positive voice of research.

I should further note that this synthetic position may be unrelated to Thomas Oord's similarly voiced position that I only later discovered shortly thereafter. And although Oord does seem to lean in the same direction with mine own thinking it seems to require the correspondent terminology and language that currently fills process theology's research and development.

Perhaps, however, I am totally off base and we can only declare for either classic theism/open theology on the one hand, or for process theology on the other, with neither of the twain intermingling between their philosophical bases. Perhaps too, these are simply different halves of the coin, one looking at the Godhead from a deterministic viewpoint and the other from a non-coercive viewpoint. Only time and effort will tell if this is true. In the meantime I would suggest a better familiarity with both positions theological in this post-structural / post-modern age of philosophical denouement within the mystery of the Divine.

R.E. Slater
December 29, 2011

* * * * * * *



Post-Structural Process Theologian
Catherine Keller


Process, Poetry, & Post-Structuralism
with Catherine Keller:
Homebrewed Christianity 112

July 20, 2011
Catherine Keller is clearly one of the most brilliant theologians taking residence on our planet and she is our guest this week on Homebrewed Christianity!! We have done a bunch of process theology on the podcast but we haven’t had a process thinker who connects Whitehead with Deleuze and Derrida so sit back, relax, and get ready for a whole world of new ideas for your theological imagination. Catherine has a ton of books (On the Mystery is a book for everyone), Facebook author page, and a super-spiffy Professor page at Drew University (plus tons of free lectures\chapters for your reading).

Catherine is a theological poet…theology needs more poets!!! Many thanks to Catherine for sharing her imagination and time. May you all join the Nicolas of Cusa fan club.

- Deacon Chris from Australia Calls In (Twitter \ Blog)




Homebrewed Audio Interview
(1 hr 23 min)

Enter website below and press the "play" button on the bottom:




* * * * * * *



~ Some Definitions ~


Structuralism

Today structuralism is less popular than approaches such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. There are many reasons for this. Structuralism has often been criticized for being a/historical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of people to act.

In the 1980s, deconstruction and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language - rather than its crystalline logical structure - became popular. By the end of the century structuralism was seen as an historically-important school of thought because of the movements that it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, as having commanded attention.


Deconstructionalism

A term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading. Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them. Derrida opted for deconstruction over the literal translation destruction to suggest precision rather than violence.

In describing deconstruction, Derrida famously observed that "there is nothing outside the text." That is to say, all of the references used to interpret a text are themselves texts, even the "text" of reality as a reader knows it. There is no truly objective, non-textual reference from which interpretation can begin. Deconstruction, then, can be described as an effort to understand a text through its relationships to various contexts.


Post-Structuralism

Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva.

The movement is closely related to postmodernism. As with structuralism, anti-humanism, as a rejection of the enlightenment subject, is often a central tenet. Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; one commentator has argued that phenomenologists are post-structural existentialists."

Some have argued that the term "post-structuralism" arose in Anglo-American academia as a means of grouping together continental philosophers who rejected the methods and assumptions of analytical philosophy. Further controversy owes to the way in which loosely-connected thinkers tended to dispense with theories claiming to have discovered absolute truths about the world. Although such ideas generally relate only to the metaphysical (for instance, metanarratives of historical progress, such as those of dialectical materialism), many commentators have criticized the movement as relativist, nihilist, or simply indulgent to the extreme. Many so-called "post-structuralist" writers rejected the label and there is no manifesto.


Metanarrative

In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative (from meta/grand narrative) is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience". The prefix meta- means "beyond" and is here used to mean "about", and narrative is a story constructed in a sequential fashion. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within totalizing schemes.

In postmodern philosophy, a metanarrative is an untold story that unifies and totalizes the world, and justifies a culture's power structures. Examples of these stories are nationalisms, religion, and science, to name a few. Metanarratives are not usually told outright, but are reinforced by other more specific narratives told within the culture. In the case of Christianity, the school Nativity play is a good example of this.


Process Theology
A school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and further developed by Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000). While there are process theologies that are similar, but unrelated to the work of Whitehead (such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) the term is generally applied to the Whiteheadian/Hartshornean school.

For Major concepts - See:

  • God is not omnipotent in the sense of being coercive. The divine has a power of persuasion rather than coercion. Process theologians interpret the classical doctrine of omnipotence as involving force, and suggest instead a forbearance in divine power. "Persuasion" in the causal sense means that God does not exert unilateral control.
  • Reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events, which are experiential in nature. These events have both a physical and mental aspect. All experience (male, female, atomic, and botanical) is important and contributes to the ongoing and interrelated process of reality.
  • The universe is characterized by process and change carried out by the agents of free will. Self-determination characterizes everything in the universe, not just human beings. God cannot totally control any series of events or any individual, but God influences the creaturely exercise of this universal free will by offering possibilities. To say it another way, God has a will in everything, but not everything that occurs is God's will.
  • God and the universe are interdependent realities (panentheism, not pantheism or pandeism). Some also call this "theocosmocentrism" to emphasize that God has always been related to some world or another. This speaks to the idea of immanent relationality.
  • Because God interacts with the changing universe, God is changeable (that is to say, God is affected by the actions that take place in the universe) over the course of time. However, the abstract elements of God (goodness, wisdom, etc.) remain eternally solid.
  • Charles Hartshorne believes that people do not experience subjective (or personal) immortality, but they do have objective immortality because their experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Other process theologians believe that people do have subjective experience after bodily death.
  • Dipolar theism, is the idea that God has both a changing aspect (God's existence as a Living God) and an unchanging aspect (God's eternal essence).

Alfred North Whitehead


Gilles Deleuze


John B. Cobb


* * * * * * *





Our "Spooky Connectedness"
or
"Why I Love Catherine Keller"

by Jeanyne Slettom
November 8, 2011

People who write about process theology can be eloquent and inspiring, or intellectual and demanding, but for sheer poetic beauty no one surpasses Catherine Keller. Catherine writes as a theologian, yes, but also as someone who could as easily have gotten an MFA in writing as an MDiv and PhD in theology. Her writing aims for the liminal space in your psyche, where it emits flashes that illuminate your understanding and point you toward new possibilities.

I was reminded of this all over again as I read Beatrice Marovich's interview with Keller in Religion Dispatches (November 2, 2011, "Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness"). The interview is about a book Keller is writing, called Cloud of the Impossible: Theological Entanglements. In it she brings together Nicholas of Cusa and quantum physics, specifically, quantum entanglement, to reflect on the multiplicity of relations--between people, between disciplinary fields, between human and divine--that comprise our lives.

More than that I hesitate to say--I haven't read the book, only the interview! But her comparing Cusa's either/or "cloud of impossibility," where, as she says, "two different things that you believe come into conlfict and contradict each other," with the particle-wave uncertainty of quantum physics reminds me of my favorite comparison between Whitehead and Jung. Whitehead writes of turning conflicts into contrasts; Jung writes of holding the tension of polar opposities long enough for a "transcendent third"--a third element that includes and transcends the two--to emerge. In both Whitehead and Jung, a useful metaphor is a container large enough to hold opposing ideas without obliterating one or the other.

Our world is in terrible need of that container, give the increasingly dire struggle between economies of life and economies of death. And of course the transcendent third is not necessarily the best solution. We have already seen the polarity of Republican/Democrat resolved into the larger container of Wall Street and shadowy plutocrats--a disheartening development, to say the least, but one that calls not for despair but the search for a still larger container.

It is this--the insistence of possibility within impossibility--that appeals to me about Keller's project. Her language is both theological and scientific, but in preaching language, "possibility within impossibility" boils down to one thing: hope. And no matter what language we speak, that is something we all need.