What Is Radical Theology?

WHAT IS RADICAL THEOLOGY?

R.E. Slater

Radical Theology at its most radical extreme would promote the death of God in all things, instances, and being within society and without. That theology in its most radical form is a theology that is an anti-theology. In essence, not simply saying "there is no God" but that "the God who exists has left us with only the residual effects of His image and being still lingering in its latency."

Meaning, that as the Creator-Redeemer, when God died on the cross of Calvary He purposely, and affectively (not effectively), left mankind to its memory, and lingering effects, of Himself. A memory now clothed upon by creation itself and by humanity itself. In this way, all traces of God still linger in God's creation without the actually presence of God Himself within that creation. In effect, God has been reborn into His creation as part of His creation in a more intricate way than before His death.

So that in God's absence rest His divine DNA - or imprint - upon a world that struggles to reconcile itself with the fact that it alone now stands in the place of God as remnants - or testimonies - to once was before God's transformance as Spirit to Incarnated Spirit.

In another sense, the eternal God not only "left" Himself as He once was before He died, but was substantively transformed by His "divine death" to be "resurrected" from His divine "otherness" into a divine "oneness" with a creation which was once excluded from His holiness and divinity. Meaning that the God who might have been separate from His creation in some sense by His very nature is now more a part of that creation by resurrection and transformance than ever before.

In essence, Christianity awaits a future resurrection in Christ that has already occurred within Christ Himself personally. Ontologically. Metaphysically. Within very God Himself. That God's own death eventuated into His immediate transformance by resurrection within, and into, the very world He created and was separate from. Thus, the Redeemer is transformed by His own death and resurrection which same event now resurrects and transforms this very world we live upon. Even ourselves.

And so then, the disturbance we feel within our spirits is to the "void of God's absence" to His other presented-ness is now a fuller, truer disturbance to our very selves and this very world. That God has died but has also been transformed, or raised, within the very creation He to and for - to effectively create both a void and to fill it in the same instance with Himself.

Thus, leaving creation and mankind with the awesome, and very disturbing, task to "fill that void" by acting as God in the place of God who fills us with His absence, and resurrected presence, into a world once separate from God.

Not that we - or creation - have become God ourselves. But that in the vastness and the diversity of the world as we know it, God's image PERSISTS in some sense of an INSURRECTED form. A form that would resist sin while aslo transforming creation as a holy residence for God's holy spirit that pervades itself very nature with the God that was and is and is now becoming. Not simply become... but becoming. With us. And with this world.

Thus, filling the Christian image of "renewal by rebirth" or "salvation by being born again" with a more profound meaning than when we first thought. That God has birthed Himself within His created world. Making sin and death even more pregnant with meaning because of His very presence that sin and death would struggle against to refuse its fundamental transformance of the constitution of our intent and promise as transformed creations of God.

So who do we pray to if God is dead? A mystery that is marked as a paradox  wrapped up in an enigma to the Christian man or woman seeking a God no longer "out there" but "within here"?

Are we praying to ourselves? To a created world/creation as an incorporate entity of divinity? To a collaboration of the past, present, and future "NOW" of  synthetic and pervasive redeemed event?

Or, better yet, "Where is God?" If He is no longer here with us as an anthropomorphosized "personable" God of spirit? Or no longer here with us as a Greek/Hellenized subject of deified heavenly Being? As finite beings we find God's "otherness" to our "humanness" unnerving and  much misunderstood.

Or, asked yet another way, "Was this God of Christianity that we worshipped ever as separate and other from us as we once had thought?" Which gets to the ideas of panentheism v. pantheism. The former attests to God's separateness from creation but joined-ness to creation by presence and image (basic Christianity). The other attests to God's unreality and that creation was ever its own creation and divinity (basic Hinduism).

Purposely, Radical Theology addresses these questions by questioning our very epistemologies and theologies we have grown up with. It is an anti-theology to our Christian traditions and classic doctrinal statements. But at its heart is the very Christian doctrine of redemption and resurrection that says "If ever God was once separate from His creation He can be no longer (or is no longer)." That by His salvific death through Jesus God has been transformed within His very being to become us even as He Himself as died to Himself. This is radical theology's radical message.

So, who do we pray to? We pray to God who has become part of us, and with us, and in us, and of us ourselves.

Is humanity divine? In a sense, yes. We are filled not only by God's image, and by His presence, but by His very Self both in Spirit, in purpose, and in redemption.

Was God ever separate from His creation? Perhaps yes and no. Yes, as its creator. And no, because creation was ever an instance of God become "unspirit" to a created world given volition by His decree. And separated from its Creator by this very divine fiat that gave to it its volition. A volition that chooses both life and death. Good and sin. Holiness and evil.

And lastly, for an atheist to claim "There is no God" is the very same reason an atheist will doubt just as the Christian will doubt. Each feels God's absence "in their bones" but each come to differing testimonies and conclusions.

Perhaps the point of agreement between both is God's absence and what this now means. For the atheist it means God is here amongst us in our midst in a radically transformed way that we don't even realize.

For the believer that God is also here amongst us in our midst in a radically transformed way that we don't realize by our classical statements, doctrines, and theologies.

For a radical theologian to say God is dead is not the complete statement of radical theology's belief. It must also say that God is here amongst us in our midst in a radically transformed way that we don't even realize. An event that has historically occurred with fundamental future consequences like yeast is to bread, fire to our spirits, and blood and water to our rebirthing in God.

R. E. Slater

October 19, 2014

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby1

Introduction by Peter Rollins

The People are Naked… Don’t tell the Emperor!

http://peterrollins.net/2014/09/the-people-are-naked-dont-tell-the-emperor/

by Peter Rollins

September 9, 2014

One of the popular trends within the church today involves affirming that doubts are a part of faith alongside the claim that God is faithful to us throughout these doubts. The most recent example of this comes from the Archbishop of Canterbury who said that he sometimes questions whether there is a God. In the same interview he goes on to claim that his faith is not however about feelings, “it is about the fact that God is faithful,” indeed he goes on to claim, “the extraordinary thing about being a Christian is that God is faithful when we are not.”

What we see here initially strikes us as incoherent, for the Archbishop effectively questions whether God exists, while at the same time believing in the “fact” that God does exist. As such, this could be laughed off as the dying attempts of a religious individual to maintain their beliefs (or their job).

However the approach taken by the Archbishop might actually expose a much more ubiquitous structure, one that operates widely within both theist and atheist camps: a structure that the practice of Radical Theology seeks to free us from.

To begin with, let us call the God that the Archbishop continues to affirm (following Lacan) “the Big Other.”

The Big Other is a slippery phrase, one that is initially hard to get one's head around. So let us create a scenario that might make this term a little easier to understand. Imagine being in a teeming nightclub at three in the morning. Looking around the room it appears that everyone is having a great time. There is energetic music, dancing, drinking, flirting and animated conversation everywhere.

Yet, as you look more closely, you begin to suspect that some, many, or even all, of the people in the room are actually concealing a lack of enjoyment. Indeed it feels like there is a veil of fun covering the room that is obscuring another dimension, a veil that seems to be getting thinner and thinner as the night wears on. As you stand in the middle of the room you can’t help feeling that everyone in the club has agreed to keep up a façade. In fact, as you stand there, deep in thought, a series of people become agitated and say things like, “cheer up,” “smile,” or “have another drink.” It is as if you are breaking some kind of taboo by looking pensive.

This fictional scenario is obviously very possible; indeed it might even be very common. While thinking about it, two questions immediately arise,

Who is everyone trying to fool?

What is the point of the pretense?

It is possible that people are trying to convince their colleagues that they are having a good time. But most of us are dimly aware that everyone else in the room is as insecure and awkward as we are. So it starts to seem like we are all actually trying to fool someone else who isn’t in the room.

Those in the nightclub can be said to be engaged in a structural deception of the type found in church. When people sing contemporary worship songs that proclaim “all they want is Jesus,” they are obviously not claiming what is being sung (after all they want lots of other things). Instead they seem to want to convince the God they are singing to that they are the type of person who only wants Jesus (affirming what is called their “Ideal-ego”). In the nightclub the same logic is at work in that some outside god is being treated as a figure that we must attempt to fool by our actions. Of course no one in the nightclub actually believes in such a figure. Yet the belief functions in a material way regardless. There is a subject who must remain fooled by our actions, a subject whose ignorance causes us to avoid a confrontation with our own struggles.

This is a version of the Emperors new clothes, except that we, the people, are naked. Maintaining the illusion only as long as the Emperor [within us] is fooled.

This, in a nutshell, is an example of the Big Other. It is that non-existent entity that we submit to in order to avoid a confrontation with our own internal crisis.

What we witness clearly in the interview with the Archbishop is a doubt over the God proclaimed in the actual existing church, which is cloaked in a belief in a Big Other. For simplicity's sake we can say that there are broadly three possible positions he could take about the God proclaimed overtly in church,

I believe

I doubt

I don’t believe

But none of these need touch his more fundamental commitment to the Big Other.

In the same way, someone could affirm one of these three positions while rejecting the Big Other. Indeed I would say that this is the project of Radical Theology.

The point of all this is to say that an atheist could very well claim “I don’t believe in God,” while still making the move of the Archbishop: unconsciously affirming a Big Other who is able to protect them from accepting the consequences of their position. Just as we witness in the nightclub example, such a belief in the Big Other always betrays itself in some way (such as prayer, listening to religious music, supporting ones parents beliefs etc.).

This is why Radical Theology makes the claim that popular atheism is not atheistic enough. For it only attacks the easy target that is the anthropomorphic God of contemporary Christianity. It has nothing to say about the Big Other. Radical Theology, on the other hand, seeks to expose how the Big Other – that protects us from confronting our own personal, religious and political crisis – is a fiction. Indeed Radical Theology is a project that claims this assault on the Big Other is the core message of Christianity.

What would have been more scandalous and insightful than this interview with the Archbishop would be to hear a high profile church leader saying, “I happen to believe in God much of the time, but I know that, in those moments, the God who would protect me from myself does not exist.”