Stanley Hawerwas - On Retirement, Citizenship, and the Church of the Future

Learning to Love the Enemy [Stanley Hauerwas]

Published on Jun 7, 2016. Jesus' teaching in Matthew 18 is central for Christians coming

to love the enemy. Particularly important is that we never forget that God is the enemy

we most fear. To be confronted and to confront those that we have wronged and have

wronged us one of the central practices for Christians to practice neighbor love.

Nothing to lose: YDS alum Stanley Hauerwas on retirement, citizenship, and the church of the future

http://divinity.yale.edu/news/nothing-lose-yds-alum-stanley-hauerwas-retirement-citizenship-and-church-future

by Ray Waddle

January 6, 2015

“The work of theology is never done. That is very good news. The work of theology can never be done alone. That is even better news.” - Stanley Hauerwas

Now that Stanley Hauerwas ’65 B.D., ’67 M.A., ’68 M.Phil., ’68 Ph.D. has reached emeritus status at Duke Divinity School, his idea of retirement is to work on three books, preach regularly, and take up a (part-time) post as chair of theological ethics with the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Stanley Hauerwas“I can’t figure out how to be retired,” says Hauerwas, who officially retired at Duke in 2013 after 29 years of teaching there. “If I’m retired, why do I have so many deadlines? The reason is, I can’t say no to people. I need to learn to say no!”

At age 74, Hauerwas is still writing and speaking, still thinking about the meaning of church in contemporary times—still doing the work of a theologian and public intellectual known for far-ranging ideas and a mischievous spirit. One of his forthcoming books, The Work of Theology (Eerdmans), explores matters such as “how to write a theological sentence” and “how to be theologically ironic.” Another is The Difference Christ Makes (Cascade Books), which includes lectures delivered on the occasion of Hauerwas’s 2013 retirement, and his response. The lecturers included YDS’s Gilbert L. Stark professor of Christian Ethics and academic dean, Jennifer Herdt.

The trouble with modern education

“Being a Christian has not, and does not, come naturally or easy for me,” he once wrote in an essay posted at ABC’s Religion and Ethics website. “I take that to be a good thing because I am sure that to be a Christian requires training that lasts a lifetime.”

His thoughts about the state of the faith today continue undeterred. In today’s intellectual and economic climate, it becomes clearer to him that churchgoing and Christian identity are getting harder for millions to sustain. The daily habits of postmodern experience make it more challenging to fit the Christian story into one’s life.

“The growth of churches in the 1950s and 60s looks now like a kind of mirage,” he says. “People thought we were doing OK. Because of the momentum of the civil rights movement, people thought church was providing a good witness here or there. Now people are increasingly aware that we’re in trouble. Charles Taylor had it right in The Secular Age: In earlier times it was virtually impossible for people in the West not to believe in God, but now many find it easy or unavoidable.”

One of the problems is the nature of modern education, he says. In The State of the University (Blackwell, 2007) and elsewhere, Hauerwas has argued that the sidelining of theology in a liberal arts education degrades the liberal arts’ contribution to public life. The pursuit of the knowledge of God should be part of the overall academic pursuit of knowledge. Theological inquiry should take its place as a vital tool in the aims of education—the formation of individuals who bring imagination, skepticism, perspective, humility, and critical thinking to the work of citizenship, democratic reform, and economic justice.

He says the marginalized place of theology in turn domesticates theological conversation, damaging the confidence of educated churchgoers, who now often lack a vigorous idea of why they believe or how their belief can speak to the times.

“It’s not clear to me these days, for instance, what it means to be a citizen,” he says. “It would be helpful to the discussion if Christians worried more about it. I think citizenship ought to be about the obligations we have to each other here in this historical, geographic setting.”

An alternative to our unfaithfulness

Hauerwas believes the church of the future will be a leaner, smaller, but more committed “colony,” and that will be no bad thing. The much-reported decline of Christian influence and power should give churches a new liberation from culture captivity, a freedom to speak the truth.

“Once you’ve got nothing to lose, hell, you’re free! You no longer have to keep your language hidden in your back pocket. I think God is giving us the next step, helping us discover that the secular way isn’t enough. It won’t sustain life.”

The church’s witness and practices remain central. The discipline of prayer, the love of the poor, and the gospel power of friendship with God and others are direct challenges to the spirit of the age, including rationalistic abstractions that lead to violence.

He offered this definition of church in a 2014 interview with “Thinking in Public”: 

“That through Jesus Christ, very God and very man, we gentiles have been made part of the promise to Israel, that we will be witnesses to God’s good care of God’s creation through the creation of a people who once were no people, that the world can see there is an alternative to our violence. There is an alternative to our deceptions. There is an alternative to our unfaithfulness to one another through the creation of something called church. That’s salvation.”

Theology moves in many directions

Retirement finds him reading a customary range of authors and subjects—novelists David Foster Wallace and Marilynn Robinson, theologian Herbert McCabe, a recent book by Timothy Chappell called Knowing What To Do: Imagination, Virtue, and Platonism in Ethics.

“My reading has always been gregarious and unplanned – I read what people tell me to read,” he says.

Amazon link

Asked about his YDS days, Hauerwas says he retains a lasting image of professor Robert L. Calhoun standing in class lecturing about the history of doctrine, shortly before Calhoun’s retirement. A much-beloved teacher of historical theology, Calhoun (1896-1983) taught at Yale from 1923 to 1965. Hauerwas has great enthusiasm for Scripture, Creed, Theology: Lectures on the History of Christian Doctrine in the First Centuries (Cascade, 2011), the book that gathers Calhoun’s lectures on the subject.

“George Lindbeck dedicated much energy to compiling his lectures and editing the book, and he wrote a terrific introduction. I think every YDS student should read it,” he says.

Even a brief chat with Stanley Hauerwas on the subject of theology moves in many directions – economics, citizenship, friendship, fiction, imperialism, and the elusive nature of God.

Amazon link

“I love the quote from theologian Robert Jensen: ‘God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from Egypt.’ The critical word is ‘whoever.’ The identity of God is something we don’t know and can’t know. It’s exciting to me that we can’t know all the things God does or is capable of doing or even what God is. It’s idolatry to think we do know. A lot of people think they do know and a lot of the time the result is violence.”

The author of more than 40 books, Hauerwas addresses his restlessly diverse interests in an essay he wrote for YDS’s Reflections journal in 2013, the Fall issue. Titled, How to (Not) Retire Theologically, the essay won the Associated Church Press’s Award of Excellence for best theological article that year. It will appear in his new book The Work of Theology.

Book Description

A "how-to" book on theology from a world-renowned theologian.

In this book Stanley Hauerwas returns to the basics of "doing" theology. Revisiting some of his earliest philosophical and theological views to better understand and clarify what he has said before, Hauerwas explores how theological reflection can be understood as an exercise in practical reason.

Hauerwas includes chapters on a wide array of topics, including "How I Think I Learned to Think Theologically," "How the Holy Spirit Works," "How to Write a Theological Sentence," and "How to Be Theologically Funny." In a postscript he responds to Nicholas Healy's recent book Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction.

"What we believe as Christians," says Hauerwas, "is quite basic and even simple. But because it is so basic, we can lose any sense of the extraordinary nature of Christian beliefs and practices." In discussing the work of theology, Hauerwas seeks to recover that "sense of the oddness of what we believe as Christians."

In the essay he writes: “That I cannot stop doing theology given the way I have done it also accounts for the range of my work. I confess when I think about the diverse topics I have addressed it not only makes me tired but it elicits in me a sense of embarrassment. I am not smart enough to know what needs to be known in order to address questions that range from the nature of personal identity to the ethics of war. But I have a stake in both of those topics, and many more, if I am to do the work I take to be the work of theology.”

He concludes: “The work of theology is never done. That is very good news. The work of theology can never be done alone. That is even better news.”

Biblical Hermeneutics in a Post-Truth Culture

When developing a postmodern contemporary theology one of the first problems that drew my attention was the problem of how Christians interpret the bible. Because of the church's many deeply held sacrosanct traditions and beliefs it quickly became the one area that must be examined and talked about if progress was to be made in hearing God's Word again rather than our own uncharitable belief systems. Consequently, over the past decade or so many "practical or pragmatic" discussions have been occurring in the theological community across any number of levels of bible topics for the very reason that the theology of biblical interpretation is in transition. And it must be if the church has any hope of getting through the hard-bent realities of post-truth cultures doubling-down on secularizing (or segregating) cultural/societal beliefs resistant to the Spirit of God working across our tightly integrating global cultures. Resistance by the church to God's will and work creates a climate of spiritual darkness that chains everything-and-everybody to policies of inequity, injustice, and untruth. The church then becomes a body politik for these injustices rather than a mediating force for the love and goodness of God. Theologians and church people are beginning to understand this dilemma as seen in the quote below by David Congdon.

R.E. Slater

January 25, 2017

* * * * * * * * *

From David Congdan, IVP Academics -

"...This is true, but I think the problem goes far deeper. Evangelicals are in the habit of viewing certain sources of knowledge—specifically, the Bible, but also their own traditions, beliefs, and practices—as being beyond scrutiny and critique. Their divine sanction renders them immune to historical and scientific testing. Assessing the truth-claims of Christianity represents a lack of faith. Having grown up in this tradition I know all too well how one learns from an early age that anyone who challenges one's beliefs must be an enemy of God, and thus an enemy of truth.

"The cultivation of this way of thinking over many years produces the conditions in which a "post-truth" culture and politics can easily thrive. If one is inculcated in the belief that one's theological ideas are unfalsifiable, then it becomes very easy to believe that one's political ideas are also unfalsifiable. Scientists say the world is billions of years old? It's a lie because the Bible tells me so. Historians say the conquest didn't take place as narrated? It's a lie because the Bible can't be wrong. Scientists say that humans are responsible for climate change? That must also be a lie because my faith community tells me so.

"It has long been acknowledged that evangelicals have a very difficult time with hermeneutics. The word hermeneutics refers to the science of interpretation. Hermeneutics arose because the old traditions could no longer be taken for granted; texts and theologies came under scrutiny in modernity as people became conscious of the way history and culture condition how people see the world and themselves. To acknowledge the challenge of hermeneutics is to acknowledge that all of our thinking and speaking is conditioned by our time and place. But this means opening ourselves to critique and testing as we become aware of the diversity of perspectives.

"All of which is to say, the evangelical resistance to hermeneutics is a key contributor to the creation of a "post-truth" society. If evangelicals want to address our political crisis, embracing the problem of hermeneutics is an important first step."

* * * * * * * * *

Resources

Wikipedia - Biblical Hermeneutics

Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Hermeneutics

Additional resources I would consider apropos would be in the postmodern sciences, social sciences, including the philosophical areas of the orthomorphology of linguistics, existential narrative, Continental Philosophy / Radical Theology using the Hegel stream of tradition (Peter Rollins et al), Relational Process Theology (Thomas Oord et al), Stanley Hauerwas' insights into the pragmatics of prophetic interpretation, Peter Enns and Greg Boyd's "Incarnational" writings (Jesus-centric), and so forth as have been reviewed here over the years. What is not needed is a continued dependance upon a biblical literalism but a grown-up, full scale, postmodern acquisition of how we see-and-understand things than translate them into our world to act upon or ignore. - R.E. Slater

* * * * * * * * *

Defining Biblical Hermeneutics

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/defining-biblical-hermeneutics/

How Biblical interpretations, or hermeneutics of the Bible,

affect the way we read the scriptures

Ellen White  •  09/03/2016

This Bible History Daily article was originally published in 2011.

It has been updated and expanded.—Ed.

---

This vellum copy of the Gutenberg Bible is owned by the Library of Congress. The Gutenberg Bible, the Vulgate (Latin) translation, is the first book printed using moveable type. Printed in the 1450s in Mainz Germany, this is one of only 48 copies that still survive (11 in the United States), and is considered to be one of the most valuable books in existence. Photo: Raul654’s image is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

For as long as there have been Biblical texts, there have been Biblical hermeneutics, or Biblical interpretations. One definition of hermeneutics (given by Bernhard W. Anderson in a piece he wrote for Bible Review) is that Biblical hermeneutics are “modes of [Bible] interpretation[s].” In another Bible Review article, James A. Sanders offered a Biblical hermeneutics definition as “interpretive lens[es]” through which one reads the Bible. Going a step further, the Merriam-Webster dictionary extends its hermeneutics definition to include not only the methods or principles of the interpretations but also the study of those very Biblical interpretations. In short, the hermeneutics of the Bible are the many ways people read the Bible.

Biblical hermeneutics even take place within the Biblical text itself. In the Hebrew Bible, the authors of the Psalms and the prophets often referred back to the Torah and incorporated their own interpretations and understanding of the text from their social locations.

In the years leading up to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., several different Jewish groups had risen to prominence, including the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. Although they were all Jewish, each group had very different Biblical hermeneutics. Definition of what happened to the soul after death, proper temple sacrifice and the importance of studying the law differed among these groups because of their varying approaches. Christianity also began as a Jewish sect, but as Jesus’ followers developed their own hermeneutics in relation to the law and the role of the messiah, it became a distinct religion.

Today there are many hermeneutics applied to the Bible. These methodologies range from historical-critical, to post-colonial, to rhetorical, to cultural-critical, to ecological to canonical-critical. These are all types of Biblical hermeneutics. Part of the reason that so many hermeneutics exist is that interpreters have different goals. For example, if you want to understand how Moses’s life in the wilderness differed from daily life in the ancient Levant, you would use an archaeological/anthropological hermeneutic. However, if you want to understand the gender politics between Miriam and Moses in the wilderness, you would use a feminist or womanist approach to the text. Different hermeneutics lead to different types of interpretations. Cheryl Exum famously wrote two articles on Exodus 1-2:10 focusing on the women in the narrative. Her conclusions in these articles appear contradictory, but that is because she used two different hermeneutics (rhetorical and feminist) and each method focused on different elements of the text, which led to different interpretations of the text.

Even archaeology, which is the focus of BAR, is a Biblical hermeneutic. By studying the remains of ancient people and how they lived, and comparing their finds to the texts, archaeologists are able to offer exciting new interpretations. For example, the sacrifice of Isaac is one of the most interpreted stories throughout history. The disturbing narrative about a God who orders his follower to sacrifice his son, but ultimately withdraws this command at the final moment, has caused great discomfort in readers for several reasons. Many of these reasons revolve around the modern revulsion regarding child sacrifice. The world of archaeology provides insight into the practice (or non-practice) of sacrifice in the ancient world, as well as the hilltop altars, which appear in the story. For more on this topic see “Infants Sacrificed? The Tale Teeth Tell” by Patricia Smith in the July/August 2014 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

There are many ways in which you can approach the text, and your method will determine your interpretation. It is important then to be transparent about what is essential to you as a reader and recognize how that impacts the interpretations that you develop. Your interpretive goal will ultimately determine your Biblical hermeneutic.

---

This Bible History Daily article was originally published in July 2011.

It was updated and expanded by Dr. Ellen White on October 13, 2014.

---

Ellen White, Ph.D. (Hebrew Bible, University of St. Michael’s College), was the senior editor at the Biblical Archaeology Society. She has taught at five universities across the U.S. and Canada and spent research leaves in Germany and Romania. She has also been actively involved in digs at various sites in Israel.

---

Read how noted scholars arrive at a definition of Biblical hermeneutics:

• Bernhard W. Anderson, “The Bible: Word of God in Human Words,” Bible Review, June 1997.
• James A. Sanders, “’Spinning’ the Bible,” Bible Review, June 1998.

Badiou on Badiou Reference Material

Alain Badiou

ALAIN BADIOU

simongros.com > Text > Books > Alain Badiou

http://simongros.com/text/books/alain-badiou/

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. He holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School. Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

He teaches popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great ‘antiphilosophers’ (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou’s life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L’Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

1999, Manifesto for Philosophy
1999, Deleuze
2000, Ethics
2003, On Beckett
2003, Saint Paul
2004, Infinite Thought
2004, Theoretical Writings
2004, Handbook of Inaesthetics
2006, Metapolitics
2006, Briefings on Existence
2006, Being and Event
2006, Polemics
2007, Century
2007, The Concept of Model
2008, Number and Numbers
2008, The Meaning of Sarkozy
2008, Conditions
2009, Logics of Worlds
2009, Pocket Pantheon
2009, Theory of the Subject
2010, Philosophy in the Present
2010, The Communist Hypothesis
2010, Second Manifesto for Philosophy2010, Five Lessons on Wagner2011, Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy2011, What Does a Jew Want?
2011, Democracy in What State?
2012, Philosophy for Militants
2012, The Rebirth of History
2012, In Praise of Love
2012, Plato’s Republic2012, The Adventure of French Philosophy
2013, Cinema2013, Philosophy and the Event
2013, The Incident at Antioch
2013, The Subject of Change
2013, Reflections On Anti-Semitism
2013, Rhapsody For The Theatre
2014, Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue
2014, Mathematics of the Transcendental2014, Ahmed the Philosopher

* * * * * * * * * *

Miscellaneous Pictures of Alain Badiou's Lecture Series

at Kendall College of Art and Design, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA

July 14-18, 2014

Alain Badiou @ KCAD, GRR, MI (July 2014)

Alain Badiou @ KCAD, GRR, MI (July 2014)

Alain Badiou @ KCAD, GRR, MI (July 2014)

Creston C. Davis introducing Alain Badiou @ KCAD, GRR, MI (July 2014)

Alain Badiou attendees @ KCAD, GRR, MI (July 2014)

Luncheons with Alain Badiou, GRR, MI (July 2014)

Alain and Winter Badiou leaving KCAD, GRR, MI (July 2014)

Philosophy - Columbia University Press Insurrection Series

INTERVIEW WITH CRESTON DAVIS, SERIES EDITOR FOR INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

http://www.cup.columbia.edu/static/interview-creston-davis-insurrections

The following is an interview with Creston Davis, co-editor of the series Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

Question: As both a psychoanalyst and a political theological philosopher, how does your angle on the series differ from other editors?

Creston Davis: This series is so much fun to be part of basically because we all share the same commitment to opening up radically new forms of thinking and practices. And that is so very rare these days especially because the entire academic scene has become sickeningly conventional and thoroughly corporatized.

So it speaks volumes about the courage that Columbia University Press has in pushing the limits and boundaries of traditional orthodox thinking so intrinsic to forms of American feminism, neo-conservatism, liberalism, religion, politics, aesthetics and so on that only serve as ideological masks behind which corporate power strangles academic and political freedom. What I like about the projects we’re doing in the series is that they are not afraid of the basic element of desire. And it was both Lacan and Augustine, a psychoanalyst and a theologian, who weren’t afraid of tracing out the infinite possibility of where desire goes.

Our series is so liberating because it’s not married to an identity politics looking to preserve a certain predetermined zone of “desire”; no, we don’t accept this “zone” we penetrate it for the sake of understanding new horizons, new rhythms, vibrations, and energies. For me, the question is always the question of: What do we love? What do we want? And make no mistake about it these are dangerous questions in today’s conventional world.

In particular, my work has always been closely related to European philosophers like Badiou and Laruelle (in France), Sloterdijk (in Germany), Zizek (in Slovenia), Katerina Kolozova (in Macedonia), Negri and Vattimo (in Italy) and, of course, Zabla (in Spain). Recently, for example, when I was lecturing in Poland I got to know the legendary philosopher, Tadeusz Sławek who was instrumental in forging new lines of scholarship when he invited his close friend, Jacques Derrida to give some lectures in the 1990s. Now we are pursuing publishing Derrida’s lectures in a book for the series.

Another project we are pursing, with the help of Carl Raschke, is translating Hannah Arendt’s last manuscript entitled “What is Politics?” which will continue to add to the conversation about the meaning of the political for our time.

Finally, my forthcoming books seek to contribute to psychoanalysis and continental philosophy while being attracted to the insurrectionist movement. I’ve finished one book (with Alain Badiou) on the philosophical and psychoanalytic foundations of early America. Another book I’m doing with Santiago will be on the precise relationship of Vattimo and Zizek’s practice of communism. So, I think I’m able to contribute to the success of the series in these exciting ways.

Q: Can you elaborate on the insurrectionist commitment to The Real, as understood by Jacques Lacan?

CD: One can never overestimate how crucial Lacan’s idea of ‘The Real’ is especially when you contrast it with the obsession over security today. Everything is about security, liability, protecting your wealth, power, and social status. But this is a dangerous message to believe in because life can never be lived in the frozen fear about security. Life is about risk-taking, about growth, it is, above all about that surplus that springs forth from making a risk: To fall in love, to live with the poor, to fight for justice these are the actions of life. Lacan’s idea of the real witnesses to this surplus that no matter how hard we tried to make the world conform to our corporate and administrative standards there is something else beyond.

That is what our commitment is about. It’s about a concrete and materialist commitment to that surplus of a life lived to openness and joy and not the law and security. Slavoj, Clayton, Jeff and I have seen the collapse of academic and political freedom in the United States with the growth of the “liability industry” which functions like a neo-Fascist logic terrorizing professors into conforming to the status quo. But our insurrectionist movement takes a stance against this political and academic tyranny by risking freedom. Lacanian psychoanalysis gives us tools for breaking out of this conventional mode and into forms of expression that don’t conform to the values of corporate lawyers and the wealthy. In short, we are faithful to this X-factor, that liberation is fundamental to human existence.

Q: Clayton Crockett referred to the structure of the forthcoming manifesto as reflecting Heidegger’s Fourfold - Earth, Sky, Gods, and Mortals. Can you describe how the use of this structure will lend itself to an explication of insurrectionist theology?

CD: Yes, Ward Blanton, Jeff, Clayton and I have been writing our insurrectionist manifesto that will finally position religion, philosophy and psychoanalysis in a positive new direction.

Clayton came up with Heidegger’s Fourfold as a way to present and schematize our insurrectionist theology:

1 - I like how we are doing this because you can think of Earth in much more profound ways than simply a passive planet—we think of it as energy via the triadic theoretical structures of Hegel-Nietzsche-Deleuze, where substance becoming subject within a movement of infinite energetic differentials.

2 - Sky is intrinsically and inescapably a mediating, spiritualized element through which the divinity discloses itself.

3,4 - And then there’s “the gods.” But notice when you talk about gods or a God too often ideological structures of power have tried to denude natural powers into a deity, or make absolute a single God, which once again limits infinity by assigning them a personality, an ethnic history, and to political and moral power. We are rethinking infinity in relation to energy, political freedom, and a new collectivity.

Once we reimagine infinity then we can only think mortals in relationship to the three other structures in relationship to our friends Toni Negri and Catherine Malabou’s creative thinking. Needless to say, we are excited about our project that entirely reframes the very meaning of religion, politics, philosophy and history.

* * * * * * * * * *

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

http://www.cup.columbia.edu/series/76


Slavoj Zizek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Editors

The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.

Clayton Crockett on The Conception of Insurrections; An Editorial and Ontological Insurrection, by Santiago Zabala; Read interviews with the series editors Creston Davis and Jeffrey Robbins; Visit the Insurrections page on Pinterest.

On Knowing in the Bible: Is God Dead? Badiou's Reflective Thought for Theology, Part 3

The last several days have found me listening to the French Philosopher Alain Badiou describing his life and ideas in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Kendall College of Art and Design at the behest of GCAS (see HuffPost's article: Something Radical: The Global Center of Advanced Studies). To say this event was surreal would have been an understatement. However, this kindly and gracious man and his wife have spent the past week discussing his philosophy of "Being and Event" by examining his early youth experiences of French colonialism in his homeland Morocco; the Nazi occupation of North Africa and France; his later involvement in the Algerian resistance to French colonialism after WW2; and the philosophical trajectories he has taken on the topic of "Subject and Difference." Especially as this topic related to the political doctrinaires of Fascism, Communism, Maoism, and tyranny, around the understanding of self within society. It has been a thorough undertaking and one that GCAS had arranged masterfully in order to make a complete documentary of Alain's life story.

My own backstory is that of a lay theologian with some university coursework and background in philosophy but nothing formally in a specific degree program unlike most of the attendees whom I have met holding at least one, if not more, Ph.D's to their pedigrees. And so, coming into a setting such as this immediately put me at a disadvantage to the depth of linguistic concepts and ideological structures being knowledgeably discussed amongst participants representing a small cadre of international philosophers, scholars, ethicists, educationalists, sociologists, and the arts, ranging from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Adelaide, Australia, the schools of Switzerland, to the lands of Belarus. Each had come to hear from the man they had read, or studied under, and were in some way associated with, through GCAS' graduate or post-graduate programs as it extended its global outreach beyond the brick-and-mortar walls of academia to help lower the burden of education's expenses while bringing teaching directly to the learner.

Our schedule was as follows:

Mon (10 AM-12:30 PM EST): Badiou in the 1960-70s

Tues (10 AM-12:30 PM EST): Badiou in the 1980-90s

Weds (10 AM-12:30 PM EST): Badiou & the Global

Thurs (10 AM-12:30 PM EST): Badiou in the 2000s

Thurs (2-4:00 PM EST): C. Winter on Africa & Contradiction

Fri (10 AM-12:30 PM EST): Badiou in the 2010s

These included two-hour luncheons with one another and roundtable discussions in the evening from 6-9 pm with Alain and the co-directors of GCAS. It was a thorough undertaking by GCAS who hosted an excellent week of study, sharing, and participation by scholar and student alike.

---

So then, when coming to Badiou's thought and philosophy as a Christian theologian how does one approach the concepts he has constructed so meticulously over a lifetime of historical observation and reflection? One of Alain's descriptions of philosophy is that of a close kinship with theatre whose form imitates life even as "all explanation" is not unlike theatre itself" (sic, clast v. iconoclast). Each has the same goal - that of creating new conditions for thinking about life; or, in providing a different way in which to find a new freedom - some concrete, some aesthetic. And it is our choice as participants in its product as to whether we will be the actors on stage ourselves or to view its play from the seats of the theatre as its dramas unfold. Plato's solution (re: his illustration of "The Cave") was to be on the stage, even as Badiou himself had written many plays in an earlier life in attempt to disclose his perceptions of his times as both playwright and patron.

For myself, I ultimately wish to contemporize and expand the language I use for my postmodern Christian faith but when entering into philosophy's earthly appointments immediately come into conflict with its sublime premises: that all is reason and rationality. As such, I find my Christian faith's theistic basis of knowing self through divine revelation of God's Word in direct opposition to philosophy's premises and assertions. In philosophical  terms, special revelation then becomes merely religious ideology, and must be abandoned in all its forms and structures if we are to proceed on a more proper philosophical basis of deriving our sense of being through the very human means of reason and rationality. Thus is the conflict between human wisdom and the divine of special revelation.

But admittedly, no religion - not even the Christian faith - is without immersion within society's philosophical perspectives. And it would be audacious to pretend that it is lived so separately from this world we live within. Hence, the study of philosophy is to know both thyself, our fellow man, and hopefully, our God, in a fuller, deeper sense. As such, theology must be acquainted with philosophy which itself is a close observer of history, society, movements, and events. Where one looks for meaning in God, the other looks for meaning in event, place, and time. Each carry similar purposes even as each casts a wary eye on the other. For myself, this is not a problem and should be welcomed within the tensions of the disciplines in hopes that in the critique of both disciplines will come an enlightenment to the degree that each might admit the other into the audience of its theatrical stage, if not upon the very stage itself. Each struggling with its own idea of reality and being as versus the real reality that lives and breathes off the stage of performance and show.

---

Now to the topic at hand, that of knowing and being. Badiou presents to us the problem of our postmodern times, namely that "God is Dead" and summarizes it thusly:

"Our times are undoubtedly those of the disappearance of the gods without return. But this disappearance stems from three distinct processes, for there have been three capital gods, namely, of religion, metaphysics, and the poets. Regarding the God of religions, its death must simply be declared.... Regarding the God of metaphysics, thought must accomplish its course in the infinite.... As for the God of poetry, the poem must cleanse language from within by slicing off the agency of loss and return. That is because we have lost nothing and nothing returns.... Committed to the triple destitution of the gods, we, inhabitants of the Earth’s infinite sojourn, can assert that everything is here, always here, and that thought’s reserve lies in the thoroughly informed and firmly declared egalitarian platitude of what befalls upon us here. Here is the place where truths come to be. Here we are infinite. Here nothing is promised to us, only to be faithful to what befalls upon us." (Badiou: Briefings on Existence, pp 30-31)

So then, if "God is Dead," according to Badiou, then how can a Christian faith continue to exist in the face of this statement? More so, how can philosophers such as Badiou be read and used in extending the Christian faith forwards towards an epistemologic declaration of certainty rather than one of an existential despair? (re: a recent sermon's topic which I heard this past Sunday when visiting a more conservative church fellowship declaring its own ground of being and certainty of biblical knowledge).

Notes David Congdon in his research on Badiou ("See What Is Coming to Pass and Not Only What Is: Alain Badiou and the Possibility of a Nonmetaphysical Theology"):

"The question for Christian theology is whether Badiou is merely an antagonist, or whether he can serve as an ally in the task of contemporary theological reflection. And if the latter, under what conditions? (3)"

He then observes towards the end of his research the problem of approaching a subject with a prejudicial set of a priories, or pre-formed assumptions, about a subject - which in this case is my basic theism in opposition to Badiou's non-theistic approach:

"Theological appropriations and translations of philosophical accounts of being and existence are always hazardous endeavors. They continually run the risk of violently conforming each philosophy to fit a presupposed theological paradigm. On some level, this danger is never entirely avoidable, hence the need to critically re-translate and re-appropriate each concept anew, or dispense with them altogether in order to start again on a different footing.

"The goal of this [research] paper has been to demonstrate that Alain Badiou’s mature philosophy is especially congenial to the task of formative Christian theology in the present situation. Badiou provides theology with the terms and ideas to articulate an emancipatory, pluralistic, and nonmetaphysical account of Christian fidelity to Jesus the Christ. The gospel kerygma mobilizes a multiplicity of new communities for the sake of a messianic theo-political witness in the world. Responsible talk of God (i.e., theology without metaphysics) is thus a consequence of this concrete fidelity and always speaks to the ongoing work of subjectivation within a particular situation." (41)

Reading within the pages of David's research will come a beautiful recital of the kerygmatic event of God's being in the world through Christ Jesus' incarnation and resurrection encapsulated within the body of mankind, and more specifically, His church:

"A Badiouan account of nonmetaphysical theology thus understands God to be an unanticipatable event that dialectically unites in Godself both object (site, inexistent, point) and subject (trace, body), without being directly identified with either. God takes place as a local disruption whose singularity embraces ever new situations and new subjective forms. God’s being, we might say, is ontologically located in a transontological event which is transpositionally repeated in the infinite multiplicity of contingent historical worlds. In other words, the above account of the kerygma is here understood as an account of God’s very being - a being that is, in fact, wholly beyond being, beyond the antimony of finite and infinite. God cannot be inscribed within the limits of ontology. The truth of God cannot be described as something that is, but only as something that does. Theology is not a doctrine of being but a doctrine of doing, that is, of God’s own kinetic-kenotic praxis in the economy of grace. God is not a nature or a substance or an idea, but an action, a migration, a proclamation. God happens in the kerygmatic event of Jesus Christ as an apocalyptic interruption of a situation, calls forth a new faithful subject to carry out the consequences of this messianic truth, and repeatedly translates this truth into new contexts. In other words, God translates Godself in the transhistorical movement of this christic-pneumatic event. The subjectivating power of the kerygma is God’s own self-mobilization and self-repetition. A non-metaphysical theology of God-as-event will therefore be apocalyptic, existential, hermeneutical, and missionary." (40)

To see how David arrives at this conclusion I would recommend a close reading of his work and especially the ideas expressed using Badiouian thought behind the deep meaning of Jesus' incarnation into this world, His incarnate death, and incarnated resurrection, for the sins of this world. Especially as encapsulated in the continued paschal-Pentecost event for continued divine affirmation and personal human experience which is revolutionizing the very world that the Redeeming God has created. Though a Christian soteriology of sin is not held by Badiou, in all other aspects of Badiou's work "the death of God" can be capably utilized by theology to verify the necessity of the incarnated resurrection of Jesus as the redeeming Son of God in whose atonement we lie as both subject and event. It defines our being, our knowing, our doing, our hope. And it is in this way that the Christian's sense of being and knowing is reaffirmed, extended, and deepened into the very fabric of life itself, and into the living God Himself, who bespeaks life and death and resurrection:

"In truth, there is no “self-creating” or “self-incorporating” freedom of the individual. There is only the individual who receives his/her freedom as part of his/her newly created identity that occurs in the hearing of God’s word in the kerygma. Therein lies the persistent point of opposition between philosophy and theology: not ontology, but soteriology. Christian faith can travel a long way with Badiou in his exploration of being, event, and subjectivity, but like Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the purgatory of philosophy’s materialist commitments must give way to the paradise of theology’s kerygmatic affirmation that it is God’s gracious action in Christ which alone makes possible one’s incorporation into the new faithful subject." (42)

In summary,

"Despite this crucial caveat, Christian theology joins Badiou in opposing metaphysics and pursuing an emancipatory politics. Theology can learn from Badiou how to speak of a God who is not necessary, who is beyond all necessity.

At the same time, theology learns how to speak of God from within the multiplicity of worlds. Perhaps most importantly, Badiou provides theological discourse with a way of surpassing the traditional bifurcation between subject and object. The object of faith is an unanticipatable divine event in the contingent historical occurrence of Jesus Christ, but this occurrence cannot be articulated or interpreted apart from the subjective consequences that are bound up within the event itself. Not only are these consequences irreducibly theo-political in nature, but they operate locally as contextual manifestations of fidelity within a particular world.

Christian faith proclaims with Badiou the mobilizing word: “See what is coming to pass and not only what is.” If metaphysics concerns “what is,” then “what is coming to pass” refers to the impossible possibility of a nonmetaphysical event that puts an end to the old regime of being and appearing and inaugurates something decisive and new. It is in this ongoing pursuit of something new in the situation that theology will find Badiou to be a provocative and fruitful dialogue partner." (43)

At the last, theology itself finds its ultimate description not in the sense of "being through knowing" (or knowledge) but in the sense of doing, enacting, and presence, in this world as exampled by the very God Himself in His incarnational atonement. Much like the actor who comes off the stage of the theatre to enter into the reality of life's streams with purpose, with resolve, with conviction, so too the church today must come off its own pulpits to live amongst the peoples of the land. Yes, preach Christ. Yes, preach good doctrine and less dogma. But get off the stage of preaching and into the messy lives of people requiring justice, love, kindness, and mercy. To use hands and feet, tongues and voices, to deliver the good news of the gospel in concrete form and fashion. This is the ultimate definition of a good theology. It is a theology of doing. And from doing, becoming. This is because God is, and will be, in the kergymatic re-enactment of the Paschal-Pneumatic (Christ & Holy Spirit) enlivenment of the Christian faith where the church becomes as both paschal-event and spirit-embodiment of Christ and Spirit to the lives of those requiring a "cup of cold water" or a "good word of gospel cheer".

"God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my
witness how constantly I remember you...." - the Apostle Paul (Romans 1.9)

R.E. Slater

July 16, 2014

"See What Is Coming to Pass and Not Only What Is":

Alain Badiou and the Possibility of a Nonmetaphysical Theology

by David Congdon

On Knowing in the Bible: How Can We Know That We Know? Part 1 & 2

Index to past articles on "An Open Faith and Open Theology"