The Church Which Restores - Spiritual Reformation in Action

In the category of "I hadn't thought of that before" has been a recent Reformation class I've been taking on the lives of the four "Major Reformers" of old Europe: Martin Luther (Germany), Huldrych Zwingli (Bern, Switzerland), and John Calvin (refugee from France fled to Geneva, Switzerland). Up next, John Knox, after which we will study some of the "Minor Reformers" in the Fall of 2018 next year. Significantly, under these major figures was born the Protestant Reformation of 500 years ago from the Catholic Church. Not ironically, during the intervening 500 years of "Reform," Protestantism has spawned multitudes of church divisions, schisms and sectarian splinter groups, marking it with its formative history of "dissent" within its own ranks for one reason or another. But in historical context, the Church of the reformer's day was more a state-church than a local body of believers; one whose spiritual practises were deeply intertwined with state politics making each corruptible for their own reasons as each bound community life and business into their coffers of economic gain and power. In reaction, the spiritual reforms occurring 500 years ago were as much about political agitation as they were about unworthy spiritual teachings and practises.

Conversely, 500 years later, it seems both Catholics and Protestants have more in common with one another than apart as each religious branch leads the way back into their communities (or parishes) of Christian service to the poor, hungry, homeless, and overlooked. But still, the political dagger of Damocles hangs thinly in the air above the church's head as an ever-ready earthly temptation made the more difficult in releasing when suckling at the tits of political office and its representatives. The harsh reality is that the church continually struggles with the strong temptation to recreate Christianity into irreligious forms of statism based upon particular beliefs and practises which has risen yet again under the auspices of a body of church doctrines collectively known as conservative evangelicalism diversely spread across both the Catholic and Protestant faiths.

Is it any wonder then we see the church splintering once again under major spiritual reforms of faith affiliations (or "non-faith affiliations," as example, consider the spiritual refugees of the "nones and dones" having left the church) as each faith, or non-faith group, protests their agitations across America and the World against self-serving nationalistic campaigns of propaganda, economic rape, and loss of personal liberties? Each emphasizing some overlooked, or under-appreciated, aspect of worship and service, but mostly in "protest" to the actions of the "politically-ensnared" evangelical church seeking to incorporate non-Christian state policies and actions across non-evangelical communities resisting and speaking out against them. Communities of protest-and-resistance wishing to safeguard a political constitution and federacy of democracy built upon life, liberty and freedom, rather than be robbed of their heritage in the bright daylight of state and corporate thievery!

In the much needed world of revival it usually comes down to the awful truth that oppression in any form - be it spiritual, political, or economic - is unwanted. Its tyranny demands its overthrow. Its self-enrichment demands its impoverishment. Once there were the Martin Luther's of the German/Catholic reformation; more recently, the Martin Luther Kings of Civil Rights; and now, there awaits the voices of today's church to arise and break off the chains which would bind its heart and people. Let us not be naive... each generation is accountable for its own spiritual reforms against the disfigurements of corruptible churches preaching another gospel not representative of the gospel of Christ. And unless this is done we more willingly seem to choose our own oppressions not realizing the harm it is creating more broadly across a constitutionally-freed, but politically-ensnared, federal democracy. In the end, we remember the Reformation for all the good it can potentially do but weigh it in its balances for all the harm it can produce when reforming for the wrong reasons back to its own ends.

R.E. Slater

November 2, 2017

*As a side note, I've included the article below not as a criticism to postmodernism's important rigors placed upon modernism; nor for a capitulation to more fundamental bible teachings; but to warn that for every good intention there may arise a poorer result than intended. If secularization is a bad thing than its converse arises in a new awareness of God in all things rather than in none, as is held here by myself and the author. But the result of secularization is certainly from the foundation stones of modernism which has stripped us of God  and left any yearning for the spiritual abandoned unless we rethink our academics, philosophies, and intentions, which, as you know, this website here intends to re-balance with its sense-and-sensibilities approach to both the secular and divine. - res

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Author: Brad S. Gregory
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012 574 pages
ISBN: 978-0-674-04563-7

The Unintended Reformation:

How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

 http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/book_20120820_1.htm

Reviewed by Thomas M. McCoog, SJ

August 20, 2012

Time magazine’s ‘Is God Dead?’ issue of 8 April 1966 shocked me. It was not the message – any undergraduate could discuss Nietzsche’s madman’s proclamation that we had killed God – but the medium. Time articulated the views of the educated middle-class, read by the man on the Clapham omnibus and by the woman in the pew. That they would even consider the question, especially, if I may place the issue within Roman Catholicism, during Vatican II exhilaration, was indeed noteworthy.

During the subsequent forty years, Christendom morphed into post-Christian (Western) Europe. Politicians denied any connection between Christianity and the new millennium. Signs on London buses announced ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ as if theism were life’s sole irritant. The Oxford philosopher, Richard Dawkins, a major backer of the Atheist Bus Campaign, characterised theists as delusional and dismissed the God hypothesis in his bestseller, The God Delusion (2006). The late journalist Christopher Hitchens asserted, as expressed in the subtitle of the American edition of his attack, God is not Great (2007) that ‘religion poisons everything.’ Cambridge physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking dismissed God, or at least his God-of-the-gaps, as unnecessary in A Brief History of Time (1988). There have of course been counter-arguments, for example Roman Catholic theologian John F. Haught’s reply to the new atheists in God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, [Sam] Harris and Hitchens (2008), but overall God has taken a beating. Reason apparently has finally completed the promise first displayed during the Enlightenment and dispelled the fading shadows of medieval faith. Some indeed now wonder whether any questions will remain if the ‘God particle’ has in fact been discovered. In bookstores, serious religious and theological works are currently stored cheek-by-jowl with books on astrology, tarot cards, New Age and neo-paganism. In today’s multicultural cafeterias, one may mix and match religious beliefs and moral principles to conform to one’s palate. The culture of ‘whatever’ has reduced claims to objective truth to subjective comfort. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, commenting on recent financial scandals and the prominence of a Gordon Gecko, ‘greed is good’ mentality, notes: ‘We are reaching the endgame of a failed experiment: society’s attempt to live without a shared moral code. The 1960s applied this to private life. The 1980s applied it to the market’.[1] But how can we regain a common code of ethics, especially in a society that has defined diversity as its fundamental guiding principle? ‘How did we get here from there?’ if I may paraphrase a Stephen Sondheim song from Merrily We Roll Along. The book under review provides an answer.

Brad S. Gregory completed his doctorate in history at Princeton University in 1996. Currently he is the Dorothy G. Griffin Associate Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Notre Dame. His doctoral thesis served as the basis for Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), a justly praised, comparative study of Protestant and Catholic martyrs with a distinct thesis. Repudiating contemporary, secular, ‘reductionist’ analyses of martyrdom, Gregory argued cogently for the re-introduction of religion:

‘The act of martyrdom makes no sense whatsoever unless we take religion seriously, on the terms of people who were willing to die for their convictions. When we do, the intelligibility of martyrdom hits us like a hammer’ (p. 350).

Subsequently Gregory was more concerned with secularisation and its effect on the study of religion than martyrs and martyrologies. Shorter lectures and articles[2] explore the mentality behind the deplored reductionist approach to religious phenomena; this monograph sets the origins of this mentality in the Reformation itself, the religious phenomenon par excellence later vitiated by social, economic, cultural and gender historians.

Gregory cites William Faulkner’s insight that the past is never really past but continues to be alive. The past in this case is the Reformation: the ‘ideological and institutional shifts that occurred five or more centuries ago remain substantively necessary to an explanation of why the Western world today is as it is’ (p. 7). Beginning with the phenomenological observation of the modern Western spectrum of contradictory truth claims, the author seeks their origin. Six subsequent chapters focus on specific subjects:

• exclusion of God from the natural world;
• loss of objective truth;
• privatisation of religion;
• subjectification of morality;
• the ascendancy of consumerism; and,
• the departmentalisation of knowledge.

Each chapter traces trajectories from the Reformation Ursprung to the contemporary world and in so doing conducts the reader on a crash course on a history of philosophy, of theology, of economic theory, etc., each rooted in the author’s firm grasp and appreciation of Reformation history.

The Six Solas

Gregory summarises the position of the above-cited ‘Neo-Atheists’ thus: ‘the findings of science either prescribe atheism as a matter of intellectual integrity or requite a schizophrenic separation of scientific findings from religious faith’ (p. 29). Faith then is about ‘ineffable feelings’ (p. 65). The multiplicity of religious options demonstrates religion’s subjective character. One generally practises (or lapses from) the religion in which one was born and raised, but does that commitment mean that one’s acceptance of the truth claims of that religion to life’s serious questions suggests the invalidity of rival truth claims? Certainly it should. The fundamental Protestant principle sola Scriptura demanded that Scripture alone be the criterion in the formulation of true answers to the ‘Life Questions.’ Ironically the principle, intended to galvanize Christians around their book, resulted in the proliferation of Protestant confessions as they disagreed over the interpretation of Scripture. Appeals to private revelation and reason failed to halt the centrifugal motion. The result:

‘in principle truth is whatever is true to you, values are whatever you value, priorities whatever you prioritize, and what you should live for is whatever you decide you should live for. In short: whatever’ (p. 77).

Religious hostilities have, for the most part, ceased in the Western world. The destruction and death during the different religious wars that followed the breakdown of Christendom ended with a general, at times reluctant, acceptance of toleration and religious liberty. But there was a price for the separation of Church and State, the transition from the defender of the faith to defender of the faiths: religion’s gradual separation from other aspects of society. Gregory comments on the unintended current state of the United States: ‘freedom of religion protected society from religion and so has secularized society and religion’ [italics Gregory’s]. Protected by appeals to individual conscience with legal guarantees of religious freedom, Americans can believe whatever they wish as long as they obey the law. The age of entitlement was born.

Similarly, moral values have devolved into subjective, personal preferences. As with religious beliefs, one may hold whatever moral values one feels good about as long as one observes the law. Inevitably Western civilisation embarked on a path that resulted in the de facto identification of morality and law. Roman Catholic insistence that morality be grounded in natural law and/or metaphysical anthropology results in frequent clashes with contemporary culture. Gregory blames the ongoing disputes between Catholics and mainline (magisterial) Protestants and the consequent religious wars for the eventual distinction between the public and private spheres. Laws defined public behaviour but left unregulated private behaviour. But here too, as with religion, we are left with a question regarding the definer of the public and the private. Who decides what is God’s and what is Caesar’s? If each prepared a reply, how they would differ!

With the secularisation of society and especially the subjectification of ‘Life Questions,’ knowledge as pursued at research universities became more specialised and barren – scientific in a negative sense. One is reminded here of Chief Rabbi Sacks’s comment: ‘Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts things together to see what they mean’.[3] More damning is Gregory’s contention (as witnessed by the authors mentioned in the second paragraph of this review) that there is a general derision of ‘any firmly held religious belief’ (p. 356) in academia. The secular mission of (principally American) universities demands that they ‘instill enough skepticism to divest students of any substantive truth claims – especially religious ones – that could disrupt the demands of the most important social virtue, namely open-ended toleration’ (p. 359). Protestant reformers opened Pandora’s Box in their attempt to strengthen and deepen Christian life and doctrine. Instead they launched the trajectory that produced the secular ‘Kingdom of Whatever’: the unintended reformation.

Many readers will note that some ‘World We Have Lost’ sentiments seem to lurk behind Gregory’s arguments, but the author argues against mere nostalgia. For him the post-modern world is failing due to its failure to provide sufficient answers to the Life Questions. Said questions remain essential and must be re-addressed. Contemporary society speaks of rights, but can contemporary science discover them in the material substance scrutinised by the finest microscopes? Rights take for granted a natural law, a philosophical anthropology, a creature created in the image and likeness of God: the academy must be unsecularised.

The Unintended Reformation demands much from the reader. Through circa 400 pages of text and 150 more of endnotes, the author leads us through a maze of critical positions. Unfortunately the publisher’s decision to publish endnotes instead of footnotes and to omit a bibliography hinders our progress as we seek the sources of information. The author writes with passion, but not always with clarity. Occasionally the prose runs away from him as sentences and paragraphs seem endless. But is Gregory’s argument convincing? A glance at the many reviews posted on amazon.com reveals the book’s impact. The majority are favourable; some suggest that the Ursprung is a moveable point and could just as easily be placed in the Middle Ages or the Enlightenment. Perhaps. Some commentators claim they have read the book two or three times. If you are worried about the current state of society and interested in understanding it, I recommend you read it at least once perhaps in the context of a course or discussion group, so the issues raised can be pondered and debated.

---

The reviewer, Thomas M. McCoog SJ is the Archivist of the British Province of the Society of Jesus.

[1] The Times, 7 July 2012, p. 23

[2] e.g. ‘The Other Confessional History: On Secular Bias in the Study of Religion,’ History and Theory, 45(2006), pp. 132-49; ‘No Room for God? History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion,’ History and Theory, 47 (2008), pp. 495-519; ‘Can We ‘See Things Their Way’? Should We Try?,’ in Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, eds. Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), pp. 24-45

[3] http://www.chiefrabbi.org/2012/01/12/the-limits-of-secularism-published-in-standpoint-magazine/

Can a Contemporary Reformation Re-Awaken the Church?

Lately I've been listening to the life stories of the "Major Reformers" Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, and John Knox. Though many, many other voices could be added to this list of reformers such as John Wycliffe, Theodore Beza, Martin Bucer, or Thomas More (see the Wikipedia link provided at end of this article), it is a testament to those hardy Reformers of yesteryear who sought to speak the will of God for the church of their time during what would later become known as a Reformational era of spiritual crisis.

An era before there was any Protestant church or denomination knowing only one Church Universal - commonly thought of as the "Church Catholic" - which spoke for God as His singularly appointed magistrates of spiritual administration since the days of the Apostles of the Early Church. By this time 1600 years of church history had come-and-gone revealing the church's priestly commissions to be spiritually wayward and corruptible requiring deep reform away from the practises of priestly indulgences and misguided Christian teachings. Teachings which withheld God's people from the hallowed halls of His love and grace, mercy and forgiveness, as readily seen in the spiritual practises of Christian worship becoming more form than function, more works-righteousness than true faith.

At the time, the seat of church government was under the papacy of Rome having tightly integrated itself into each regional government calling itself Christian as well as into each community parish overruled by a local bishop. This then lead to a regional system of church governance overruled by a series of church Archbishops who reported directly to the Vatican and its board of Cardinals otherwise considered the Church's protectors of the faith and fatherly regents of commission.

Into this churchly dispensation came the priests of the Catholic Church who were trained and taught in the holy halls of their commissions greatly learned and greatly read in the Bible of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Some of whom began to notice that what was being judged by God through his prophets in the OT, and later by Christ Himself and His Holy Apostles in the NT, were similarly being practiced in the Church itself during the years of their calling. To wit, one-by-one, these Spirit-burdened priests began to agitate in their ranks calling for a purifying fire of deep reform.

One such priest was Martin Luther having stepped forth on the Eve of All Saints Day (still observed by many churches in deference to the "Devil's Eve" of Halloween) by announcing his willingness to debate any priest, bishop, archbishop, or cardinal over a list of erroneous teachings of the church at any given date or time. Those teachings he considered to be most egregious were later known as Luther's "95 Theses" which he had nailed to the doors of the local parish church as would any regular communication be announced of similar manner in that day to be read by the community at large. Hence, Luther's proposal was more or less a public notice to all who felt deeply as he did about the many spiritual wrongs he was noticing within the Church's ministries.

As I have said, I have been attending a very short introductory class through Calvin College (Grand Rapids, Michigan) over a four week period to learn of the lives and stories of the Reformation's four Major Reformers who were central figures to the schism breaking across the Catholic Church. In the Fall of 2018 would be another class to discuss the Minor Reformers of the Reformation era, all of whom would have a contributive influence to the reformation of the Church of God.

Accordingly, these early Reformational breakaway church groups became known as "Protest-Groups, " or, "Protest-ants," willing to leave their parish to re-align their faith and beliefs into a new kind of churchly dynamic. One they felt was more biblical, more ordained of God, more worthy of Christ's calling and Passion. One of the first of these groups to be born from this growing schism were the "Lutherans" of Germany readily following the strong voice of young monk named Luther no longer content to do "business as usual" under the rule of the Papacy.

For myself, knowing very little of the reformers spawning this post-Renaissance movement, I quickly realized it led the Church into new ways of adaptive thinking as it responded to the impact of a new cultural renaissance occurring in the fields of the arts and sciences. A renaissance which had launched a hundred years earlier and was beginning to grow at a rapid rate of change across poly-lingual societies soon leading into a major historic era of European Enlightenment and early Modernity. 

And although the Reformation was strictly a religious undertaking within the Church itself it was also laying the important groundwork for revisualizing God and the Christian faith in new and significant ways which would be later necessary to its own religious life and culture. However, when it did not, we then see an era of Victorian despair occurring across religious societies unable to grasp the depth and meaning of human industry and discovery (cf. Victorian art, poetry, literature). And by failing to envision God in new ways also failed to lead society in its responsibilities of human and ecological care as older religious systems fought resistance to necessary spiritual reforms leading to a kind of spiritual destruction and death. It also led me to realize once again the importance of contemporary Christians today who similarly labor around the world impassioned by the Spirit of God to the tasks of post-modernal contemporary enlightenment-and-reformation which are occurring 500 years later after the European Reformations.

It is here, in the 21st Century, I and others are finding it importantly significant that the church again revise its orthodoxies to positively participate in a post-industrial, post-modern reawakening of global ecological awareness, technological revolution, and scientific discovery, so that the Christian faith might live again in important ways it cannot live under old line thinking, study, worship, and service. Indeed, if it does not then Christianity will consequentially be relegated to the sidelines of mysticism, mythology, and superstition, even as we see occurring now with the growing gulf between Christian fellowships, associations, and sects, as they double down into their closed systems of religious faith and folk religion.

Rather than allow this, the Lord has tasked his prophets and prophetesses, priests and priestesses, with illuminating how the church might participate with the contemporary world in a sociological relevance that might grant significant revelation to those seeking truth and enlightenment in the multiple pagan endeavors of naturalism, cultism, occultism, and atheism, to mention a few. If the church does not then we leave an important Christ-filled mission bereft to the world around us to redact and refill in spiritualizing invigorations, forms and functions, less than Christian, but most certainly spiritual, as attested to in the four areas just mentioned.

I find then that re-integrating the Christian faith within a postmodern framework must also confront the growing post-truth despair found in churches and societal turmoil as an important witness spanning the gulf between the Christian faith and a growing number of unChristian mysticisms; unChristian reflections searching for a kind of spiritual enlightenment; or, unChristian hopes which lead away from a redemptive meaningfulness to life, ministry, work, and social behavior.

This then is the basic task set upon the hearts and passions of today's global prophets and priests of the Church called to its renewing Reformation. It is the deep need for another Christian  Re-Awakening spawning an Orthodox Reformation both Protestant and Catholic, religious and liturgical, missionary and service-oriented, into all the areas of Christian endeavor, academic teaching, worship, and understanding. Through the years Relevancy22 has identified a few of these Christian movements and leaders as attested to in its roll call of  topics, blogger links, and study resources.

Even so, God is breathing His revelations across the world in lands far away and alien to Western civilizaiton, into the lands of Asia, India, Africa, and South America. It is a Wind testifying to the need of humanity to reorder its chaotic turmoil back to the very thrones of God that it might have a witness to a world leaving the church behind to its superstitions and mythologies unless it regains an adapting theology which is willing to grow up and mature to testify of the God we love and adore in a post-modern world.

Having begun in the 1990s, there is developing a new hope for the Church being attested to in a steady stream of contemporary witnesses to the Christian faith of Spirit-filled men and women having grown and being knit together as one community advocating a new reflection of the Christian faith that may allow its much needed post-Reformation to grow and take shape into ten thousand reflections of the Divine Light of the Son of God and His redemption brought into this old earth by the guiding hand of the God of Creation, Atonement, Revival, and Resurrected Life.

As such, it is not unlike the reformers of old God has used in the life of the Church - from its very first Church Fathers of the early Christian centuries to the Medieval and Reformational Reformers of the Medieval Ages, to the Great Awakenings of the American and British eras of the 1700's and onwards, to the Revivals of South America, Asia, Africa, and Middle East both in the past and lately, as the Spirit of God lays upon the hearts of men and women His heavy hand of guidance, groaning, and passion to awaken the hearts of us who cannot see, nor hear, nor even feel the Wind of God blowing across our hearts and souls, to come taste the Divine Bread and Wine of our Salvation.

Even so blows such a Divine Wind as it tears down and uproots all old and impervious Christian faith structures resisting the Lord and having become devolved and unlovely to the name of Christ. More heathen in its forms of worship, more pagan in its portrayals of Christ, and similarly destructive to the Word of the Lord when living within their closed structures of religious systems unable to renew themselves under God's guidance unless they first be torn down and uprooted to hear again the living Sepulcher's tolling God's life-giving Altars to stand forth, repent, and be born again into the hope, grace, mercy, and forgiveness of the Gospel of Christ.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

October 28, 2017

Links to the Reformation and Reformers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformers

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Martin Luther’s Greatest Contribution

http://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/martin-luthers-greatest-contribution

by Thomas Oord

October 25th, 2017

Christians around the world are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Not just Protestants, even many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians are celebrating!

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses on Castle church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Most Christians today who read the document Luther posted would find his theses bewildering. But this event and many others before and after brought great change to the world.

Luther’s Theology

As Christians celebrate the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation on October 29, many will correctly praise Luther for his courage.

Theologians like me who study the details of Luther’s theology often have mixed feelings about his ideas. Some of what Luther said is applicable today; other things are not. Some aspects of Luther’s theology should be left in dustbins of history.

Luther was an enigmatic figure with an odd personality. He was prone to hyperbole (all those “solas,” for example) and just plain weirdness. Few today would lift him up as a moral example. But Luther is rightly praised for his courage and conviction.

Reforming

Luther’s greatest legacy and the greatest legacy of the Protestant Reformation is less about the specific theology he proposed. It’s more about the general need for changes in theology.

The Reformation reminds us that Christianity is not a static religion. It moves, adjusts, and transforms. Times change, people change, and the gospel of Christianity changes too, at least to some extent.

Some things in Christianity seem constant. Jesus is always central, although how we understand him varies over time. Love is central too, although what love demands seems to change. We could add other seemingly timeless aspects of the Christian faith.

Debates about the essentials and nonessentials in Christian faith will continue. The consensus varies from generation to generation.

Jesus may be the same yesterday, today, and forever, but the Christian faith is always in process. The Spirit is always doing a new thing!

Time for a New Reformation

It’s time again for something new. Every 500 years or so, something major seems to occur in Christian history. We’re due.

It’s time to ask ourselves, What will Christianity look like tomorrow? Who will Jesus be interpreted to be? What does love require in the present age? How should we now live?

Answering these questions is our present task. But we’re not the first. Change agents, revolutionaries, and theological entrepreneurs like Martin Luther have come before.

So let’s celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation by raising a glass to Martin Luther!

ps... When you’re celebrating Luther’s birthday on November 10, light a candle for me: I was born on that same date 482 years later! - T.O.

Kwok Pui Lan - Chinese PostColonolism and the Need for Theological Innovation

Kwok Pui Lan with Professor John Cobb

On postcolonialism, theology, and everything she cares about

http://kwokpuilan.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-rich-past-for-positive-future-for.html

by Kwok Pui Lan

March 5, 2017

*Presented at the “New Frontiers in Theology” Conference

at Claremont School of Theology on February 17, 2017

A Rich Past for a Positive Future for Theology

As an Asian postcolonial feminist theologian, my relationship to the Christian past is multifaceted and ambivalent. My reading of the Bible and the long theological tradition is never a “natural” reading, arising out of a living tradition that shaped my culture. For example, I wondered how the termsousia and hypostases in the debates on Trinity could be translated into Chinese and whether there would be equivalent concepts in Chinese philosophy.

So why do we have to study the Christian past? Sometimes my students put this even more bluntly, “Why do we have to study the dead white guys?”

We study the past because we want to learn different models of how theologians addressed social, political, and ecclesiastical issues of their time. Take for instance, this year we are commemorating the 500th anniversary of Luther’s posting of the 95 theses. The questions that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Münster raised for the church and wider public remain with us to this day, such as, the source of authority, the shape of liturgy and the meaning of sacraments, the visible and invisible church, the relation between the two kingdoms, and the relation between the established church and radical reform impulses.

Kwok Pui Lan teaches theology and spirituality
at the Episcopal Divinity School and is the author
of Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology

A highly relevant question for today might be “How can the Church be reformed so that it might respond to the challenges of the Trump era?” Although the Chinese may not have an event equivalent to the Reformation, the Reformation provided a mirror through which to look at the relation between religion, politics, and power at a watershed moment of the early development of capitalism and modernity.

Without learning from the past, we impoverish ourselves because we are left with the tyranny of the present. We can easily lose hope and fall prey to cynicism and despair. This is especially important in the United States because historical literacy is low and people seek immediate relevance. Facebook and social media outlets can make us obsessed with the immediate present. Learning from history allows us to maintain a certain distance and to have a broader perspective when examining our present time.

Given that we have such a long and rich theological tradition and so many theological giants before us, there is also the danger of the tyranny of the past. We might become so immersed and inculturated into certain modes of theological thinking, patterns of argument, and the common vocabularies of a certain theological tradition and our minds be so colonized that we are unable to see the horizon beyond or dare to take the road less traveled.

Theological innovations often begin by posting radical questions to the past. The feminist theological movement wrestled with the validity of past tradition. Mary Daly argued that the Christian tradition is so sexist that it is irredeemable, while Letty Russell spoke of a usable past. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza offered a revisionist history of Christian origin, and Rosemary Radford Ruether recovered the lost voices of Christian women in history.

Many theologians who have found their cultures and traditions left out from the dominant theological tradition have recovered their histories through the use of slave narratives, alternative archives, oral history, literature, and myths and stories to create a colorful tapestry of theologies. Today, theology is a global enterprise and we must pay attention to the global contexts shaping human lives and our theological imagination. Theology is contextual, but our contexts are deeply intertwined today. We need to find ways to educate ourselves about how others are developing theologies to respond to common concerns of our time. This must be a sustained and deliberate effort and not something to do only when we have time.

I wish I knew when I began to study theology that this would be a life-long vocation with many twists and no easy answers. Our work is harder because, unlike Luther and the reformers who stood in the vanguard of the intellectuals of their time, we as contemporary theologians have to defend our existence in the academy and larger society. When Christian theology is in a defensive posture, the marginal voices within it could be even more marginalized or suppressed. A danger for theological movements is that they become reactionary or ossified over time and fail to respond to new challenges. There is often much excitement when a theological movement begins, but as it becomes institutionalized or domesticated, it needs new reformers and discussants to keep it alive and on the cutting-edge.

Facing the future, theologians have important roles to play in the Trump era. Latin American theologians reminded us that we must distinguish between the worship of God and the worship of idols. When people are mesmerized by populist claims such as “Make America Great Again” and the representation of the President as pseudo-Messiah, theologians must challenge idolatry and alternative facts. In the battle for truth, we stand on the shoulders of giants such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Y. T. Wu, Oscar Romero, Mercy Oduyoye, Tissa Balasuriya, Desmond Tutu, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Ivone Gebara, and others. When the country begins to look inward, we need theologians and leaders of faith communities who are cosmopolitan in theological outlook, astute about world politics, and have a deep sense of American multiracial and multicultural history.

We must develop a culture of resistance in the churches and rid ourselves of Constantinian Christianity in order to see clearly the life and ministry of a postcolonial Jesus. Americans have not been comfortable seeing the connections between empire and Christianity. Middle-class American Christianity has so successfully adapted to the individualistic culture that religion has often become a private affair.

The Christian message of sin, atonement, justification, and salvation has been thoroughly individualized, if not psychologized, such that they have relatively little social import. We look at Jesus as primarily a religious figure, separated from the highly politicized and volatile situation of his time, an era filled with periodic popular revolts and protests against Roman colonial rule. We must recover that the Jesus movement was a resistance movement against Pax Romana. Jesus was not a passive religious leader, but took an uncompromising stance against the Roman Empire and its client Judean and Galilean rulers. Jesus’ revolutionary message is relevant to our time more than ever as we struggle against pax Americana.

Do I think theology will have a positive future? My answer is yes. When I began to study theology in the early 1970s, Gustavo Gutierrez had published A Theology for Liberation Theology for a few years. [But] Mary Daly had not published Beyond God the Father. As a doctoral student, I witnessed the development of Womanist theology, Mujerista and Latina theology, Asian American feminist theology, and gay and lesbian theology. Today we have [a great] such a plurality of voices arising from racial and ethnic communities in the U.S. and from faith communities around the world.

In the 1960s, some of the avant garde theologians launched a series of books with the title “New Frontiers in Theology” and their aim was to facilitate “discussions among Continental and American theologians” and the discussants were all male. Here at this conference, we have such diversity of theological voices, and this should give us hope for a positive and more inclusive future.

- KPL

John Caputo - "You're Looking for Nothing"

Obviously I have a choice when choosing to read about contemporary radical theology and radical hermeneutics. For many philosophers in this space it seems the choice is that of agnosticism or atheism. But what about the Christian theologian who chooses to approach these subjects as a Christian theist? Who chooses to believe that there is a God and that this God has spoken through both His Word (special revelation) and through His Son Jesus Christ (as incarnate revelation)? A God who has spoken in the language of the people then, and through the language of His church now, of Himself, His ways, His purposes, His salvation?

As such, what then could be the attraction of this radical study if it seems more driven by a/theism than by theism? For myself, it is the potentiality which it holds in opening up the reading of God's Word more dynamically to today's church and societies-at-large so that its core messages may be heard in a relevant way again. That it is this very thing of "language" itself which holds back God's revelation to those seekers today living in contemporary, post-modern, post-secular, post-Christian times seeking to rectify the newer findings of academics to the older classical expressions of Christianity. That for myself, and others, we are finding promise in this task through studies in Continental philosophical thought and explorations of nascent Radical Theology.

But for the scholastic, modernist theologian seeking to know God through biblical study there is any number of hurtles to leap over as presented to him or her through contemporary academia. But knowing that this is a valuable space to struggle over, the earnest theologian works all the harder to bridge this gulf or chasm of message, knowing, and being. Moreover, we're not pretending that the Bible isn't locked within a linguistic time and space (sic, ancient cultures, dialectics, ancient local and regional understandings, philosophies, a plethora of narratives, speakers, and genres, etc) nor that it's temporal language is as universal for all forthcoming eras as it is commonly made out to be by today's classically trained preachers and disciples of the Lord. But what we're asking is how, and in what way, is God now speaking to today's civilizations as differently from past ancient societies 2000 to 4000 years ago?

The struggle then is to rightly identify God's movement of His Spirit across men's hearts and the eras to come - and especially this present era - as ethics and moralities seem to have changed with time and event itself even as God's Spirit seems to move across the spaces of the heart of this world speaking calm and assurance against its many evils and willful oppressions. And so, where one philosophical era appeared sacrosanct for all future eras to come we now know that each generation has its own philosophical struggles it must contend with. And that for this last  era - a secular, modernistic, and industrial one at that - it was its materialism, consumerism, and many gross depravities which seem to have separated the church from its message of God's grace and peace. And that for this present postmodern era which we are now here processing and questioning our past of all things we have been taught and believed, there seems to be yet another gulf or chasm as deep and wide as the one between humanity and person and work of God Himself. That in order to describe ourselves, our beliefs, our connections with this world, we must re-describe everything with a "post+" descriptive phrase attached to everything marking us as distinctly different from our worthy predecessors.

And if we are proposing a new theology of the Bible in the sense of enlarging its core messages which have been as of now hidden by our modernistic theologies, doctrines, and dogmas, than perhaps its time to unlock them with the help of today's more contemporary thought as found in Continental Philosophy and perhaps, Radical Theology. What this means is that today's postmodern biblical study is no longer founded on a Westernized analytic-scientific structure of "biblical systematics and dogmas" but on a post-modern, post-secular, post-Christian Continental approach of biblical poetics, genre, narrative, existentialism, and phenomenological exploration of biblical themes both past and present in making sense of God and His Word for these present times. So that if this postmodern gospel feels and sounds radically different from the previous modernistic one, it really is, based upon the generations it must now minister and connect to.

As such, we must demand of ourselves, as well as our Christian theological communities, to remain open to new discoveries and narratives of how the Spirit of God is now speaking into this world through His postmodern church of today and not of yesterday. In the older language of some, perhaps we are in a new "spiritual dispensation" much different from the one we once knew built on the great tragedies and distortions of sin and evil, failure and lapse, unto a postmodern generation seeking new studies, witness, and connections with the Divine and with the antiquated world of classic Christian teachings. This is the great difficulty the postmodern theologian now must embrace in order to re-speak God's Word to humanity. It is not an easy task made all the harder sin's adamant blindness and refusal to relent of the securities it once knew in Christianity past. But for the a/Christian wishing to find God in the rhetoric of today's dogmatic churches it seems an impossible task even as it can be for the postmodern theologian looking for new words, categories, and connections to present the God of all grace and mercy in the bible even as it had come through Christ Jesus our Lord and Saviour.

So that for the Christian theist, ultimately we struggle with the meaning and message of Jesus. Certainly, to today's Millennial generation we now see the Christian gospel revisiting its missions to the lost, the poor, the lame, and the sick. As a result the church itself is also moving into a heightened sense of this mission in representing the oppressed, addressing the injustices of this world, and seeking to uplift those who have the least societal or political power as mediators between the harsh cold world of capitalism to that of social justice and democracy. That ultimately the outcomes of Jesus message, if measured in earthy terms of the here-and-now, is that of a gracious, merciful humanitarianism. Of a gospel that seeks to bring in the kingdom of God now and not latter. That lives its Christian lives in the present tense of work-witness as versus seeking to escape this life through a journey of mysticism and escapism. That the works of faith must rival the belief of faith if faith is to be meaningful at all. And that without works faith is dead and religion rules by its empty creeds and confessions.

And so, we must ask ourselves, can we find value through continental philosophy and radical theology in helping the church re-discover the God of the bible through employing a new form of radical hermeneutics? Of questioning what we thought we knew by what we really don't know without defacing the past work of the church in its many past doctrines and historic struggle to be faithful to the God of the bible? If yes, than we do approach these subjects as Christian theists wishing to uplift not only the Name but the Person and Work of Jesus Christ who is more than a myth to our faith. To be able to read a/theists like Jack Caputo in the accompanying article below and to understand his struggle with the bible has been removed by his own philosophical logic and words. To understand why he has such a great dissonance with uncharitable Christian dogma even as he stretches out for words to find the inherent power of the Creator not only outside His creation but resident within it through Christ's death and resurrection.

No, it is not hard to see the questions rolling out of Jack's questioning spirit even as the world's many atrocities and civil wars have thrust the innocent to ask "Why, O God, have you forsaken us in our hour of need?" Seeking to find the transformative power and spiritual engine of God's faithfulness only to find Him seemingly absent to our deep personal needs. And so, the postmodern theologian says, "Perhaps, God has forsaken us." Or, "Perhaps we have forsaken Him to find the judgment of sin upon our heads." Or, "Perhaps, God has come as the Both/And. As both an external power-and-presence as well as a renewed internal power-and-presence heretofore unknown except by Jesus' resurrection (what Jack will dutifully call "the insistence of God"). As the Creator-Redeemer God we creatures would expect no less than to be amazed at the "both/and" contingency of God who through His Spirit speaks to our troubled hearts in tones of silence and plenty, want or need, austerity and judgment, mercy and forgiveness. For the willing seeker lost in the darkness of this world it can be overwhelming even as much as it is for the questioning observing asking "Why?"

Who then is this Creator God come to this infinitely amazing world we live in? Who has given to us the gift of life to live in-and-for Him with all the promises of His presence, grace, and mercy in our lives against all the heartaches, defeats, and harms that this wicked world can provide in His place? Who speaks through the lives of modern day Pauls like the German Theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, having died for his faithful confession by Nazi oppression. Or who speaks through the countless lives of Christian martyrs at the hands of brutal oppression in these wicked days of our seemingly pointless world we live in? Can doctrines mean anything when we see such evil?

For many, the answer is no. At which point an a/theism arises to be measured in the sifting words and stratagems of men and women seeking a God who is silent - if He is there at all. But for the Christian theist this direction does little good, and so we cling to the bible all the more, and to the incarnate life of the Christ we have come to know as personal Saviour. If we must substitute men's words for the bible than let it be on the basis of questioning past misdirections of Christian dogma rather than the very God Himself who has communicated to us by word and by deed. Not in the pre-postmodern forms of past classical doctrines but in an expanded postmodern thought and communication of examining God's Word to our own words, and thoughts, and beliefs. And it is in this exercise perhaps we may come to hear the Spirit of God afresh questioning the church's harsher doctrines of judgment when the very God Himself had spoken in the language of love to all who would come to Him through His life of ministry and the cross.

And so, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we might come to learn to speak of a "religion-less religion." Or, with Frank Schaeffer, having rejected a hard nosed conservative Christianity, discover a kind of a/gnosticism or a/theism towards the irreligious institutions of the Christian church. Or, with Peter Rollins, born into the times of the Irish Troubles of warring Belfast between Catholic and Protestant faiths, to see past his existential search for non-dogmatic forms of Christianity to a risen church preaching a humanitarian Jesus marked by personal death and resurrection. If so, than perhaps we have a post-modern Christian message to yet determine, deliver, and preach of God's Words, doctrines, and teachings as servants of Christ. To be post-modern day apostles committed to deconstructing God's Word in order to re-construct His beauty, majesty, and glory to come.

R.E. Slater

November 9, 2015
revised November 12, 2015

John Caputo and Peter Rollins in live debate

You’re Looking For Nothing:

John Caputo Responds to My Work

by Peter Rollins

(Updated) July 07, 2015

*[additional comments mine added for better clarity - r.e. slater]

John Caputo has long been a monumental influence in my life and work. From the first time I randomly picked up one of his books (On Religion) in a little bookshop in Belfast back in 2000, to the present day where I’m working through his stunning philosophical memoir Hoping Against Hope (I’m honored to be writing the forward), he has been a constant guide, mentor and conversation partner. Not only this, but over recent years I have been able to get to know him personally and come to know him as a friend.

Recently, while at a conference in Turkey, John was asked about my work and he expressed some concern about the Lacanian turn I had made, particularly with my interest in Žižek. This comment was posted up on the “What is Pyrotheology” Facebook page and generated some interesting dialogue.

I must admit that when I read the comment I was very pleased. The idea that John was commenting on my work, let alone engaging seriously with it, meant the world to me. He had already publicly endorsed me in 2011 when he, controversially, put together a panel dealing with my work at a philosophy conference he facilitated called, “The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion” (his last conference in Syracuse before retiring). But the fact that he was still taking my work seriously was very affirming.

Yet he was concerned that the comment might be taken out of context. So today he clarified what he meant on the “What is Pyrotheology” page.

His comments might be of interest to those of you who are keeping an eye on the direction of my work. In addition to John’s comment I have also included my small and inadequate response, as well as a link to a short post I wrote in the aftermath of John playfully claiming I was a crypto-Calvinist at my Belfast festival in April 2015.

Update: John recently sent me an email response to my comments that I have added below

John Caputo’s comment:

As my comment about regretting the influence of Žižek on Pete’s work has drawn some comment, I think it’s a good idea for to clarify what I am saying, lest anyone think I was criticizing Pete, whom I love dearly and have always supported as best I can and was decidedly not criticizing. In fact, it was the opposite. I was in the middle of saying that my hope is that Pete’s work will catch a wave, a big book, say, that will move him on to the next level and widen his circle of influence. I then added that my main fear is that, under the influence of Žižek, his audience will be narrowed to the radical death-of-God set and that will confine him to a narrower niche. I think his own native genius has a broader appeal than that. [One] that I have understood to lie in exploring the dynamics of undecidability, the undecidable tensions between faith and doubt, theism and atheism, fidelity and betrayal, how to speak and not-speak of God, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and the underlying sense of life that subtends these oppositions. I think that has a wider reach and it would nourish a growing number of people today, like the “nones,” some of whom still go to church but are wondering why, some of whom no longer go to church but still believe something, they just do not know what, people who are “inside/outside” religion. In my view that undecidable flux is crushed by Žižek, where the dialectic is reduced to a dogmatic double negative, no, no. So I was talking about audiences.

But over and beyond this question of strategy, of reaching an audience, lies an interesting philosophical question, condensed in the “crypto-Calvinism” comment someone made in the Belfast Tricksters meetings. This Pete has glossed in terms of [Lacan's] radical “lack,” which is a lot better than [the extra-biblical systematic term of] “total depravity.” This raises a really good question which, as I see it, concerns how to address our “finitude”—we are conditioned and limited beings who come to be and pass away, fluctuating between being and non-being, as Augustine liked to say. One way is through the myth of Original Sin, a fall from a state of pristine peace and innocence into sin so that we pass our lives in the aftermath of the fall. Freud and Lacan, I think, give us the secularized counterpart to this Jewish myth by way of the Greek myth of fate, of Oedipus, of the impossibility of maternal plenitude, where we pass our lives in the aftermath of this loss. I greet the first myth, which is mostly due to Augustine and grows even larger teeth with Calvin, with incredulity. There never was—either structurally or historically–any such original purity to lose. I greet the second myth with no less incredulity; there never was any such Oedipus triangle to contend with, a point which is developed with some vigor in Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus. I greet any myth of a originary fall or loss with incredulity, as a mythologizing of our finitude. I am a heretic about both these orthodoxies.

How then should we think finitude? In terms of our primordial temporality by which we are structurally turned toward the future, and therefore in terms of the “perhaps,” of an originary possibility. To be born therefore does not mean to “fall” into time from eternity, or to “lack” eternity and to be stuck with time. We are originally, and originarily, temporal beings, and that while decidedly finite is nothing to wring our hands over. Time is our first and last chance. To be born is  [to] find oneself in a nascent state, neither sinful nor sick, but in a state of beginnings, of natality (Hannah Arendt), in an originary open-endedness to what is to-come, for better or for worse. To be sure, this is a risky situation. From the outset, we stand before the promise/threat, and nothing guarantees a good outcome. We have not fallen from somewhere; we do not “lack” anything, which means we are missing something we are supposed to have at this point; we have not “lost” something we were originally given. These myths of fall and loss don’t ring true to me. They’re just too downbeat but more importantly they reflect a misunderstanding of temporality. Rather, our finitude is our dependence. The child is a new beginning and so just beginning and not an articulate autonomous agent. But the world is not just beginning. As soon as we come to be we find the world is already running. That is the first case, our first encounter, with the injustice of an unjust world, and our first, harsh lesson in the logic of the “perhaps,” of the promise/threat. The first injustice is an accident of birth—the terribly deprived and desperate condition in which some children are born, while others have every advantage, immersed in love and in an environment by which they are supported on every side. There is the true lack and loss, the first case of missing something that is supposed to be there, viz., the misfortune of being born abandoned, neglected or in desperate poverty. There is nothing mythic about that, no grand récit about some primordial Ur-event of loss, no metaphysics of the void, thank you very much.

So on my accounting the being of finitude is may-being. That means, on the one hand, that there is no Divine Providence to ensure a good outcome, nothing to guarantee life may not be a disaster, just as, on the other hand, nothing says we are born sick or in sin, living in the aftermath of some mythical lost plenitude or innocence. The temporality of our lives was well described by Kierkegaard as a “repetition forward,” producing what we repeat by the repetition, like a songwriter picking at a guitar trying to find something that does not yet exist, a gradual up-building or on-going construction of the set of fragile, contestable and deconstructible meanings we call our lives. The temporality of this process is not structured around a primal fall, loss or lack, nor around a total or even partial depravity. On the contrary, it structured around an archi-faith in the coming of what we cannot see coming; an originary hope against hope that the future will be better; an originary love of the possibility of the impossible. These three, faith, hope and love, to which I add a fourth, a specter that spooks the whole thing, and sees to it that it may turn out to be a disaster. So these three, plus a little luck, bon chance, which the theologians call grace, and I qualify as the “nihilism of grace,” the grace of life, which is a finite, risky, bracing business.

Whether our difference here is a difference of emphasis I will leave to others to judge, because in the end Pete and I are on the same page, affirming the “difficulty of life” as I called it in Radical Hermeneutics, in the face of which we must learn to laugh through our tears.

My response (John goes by “Jack”):

I’m keen to respond to Jack Caputo’s beautifully written reflections and might do so in more depth on my website. But I’ll say a couple of things now. Before I do though, let me just say that I realize the ridiculousness of me responding to Jack when his work is so much more thought through and penetrating than my own. I am here to learn from Jack, and am so profoundly grateful that he would engage in this way.

Firstly, on the comments related to strategy/reach, Jack is right that my influences at the moment do limit me somewhat. I’ve missed out on at least one very big platform as a result, and it is something I need to reflect on more as I attempt to vulgarize (hopefully in the positive sense of the term) Radical Theology.

Secondly, I just want to make one quick point about the ‘lack.’ I fully agree with Jack that there is nothing we have lost. The point that I steal from Lacan is that the loss comes first (Original Sin), and the sense of loss generates the idea of something that was lost. Loss is constitutive of subjectivity. But nothing lies behind the loss (i.e. no Original Blessing).

I am drawn to Jack’s incredulity toward grand narratives, including the grand narrative of absolute negation. However I tend to see the Lacan/Žižek lack as something primarily related to a logical necessity in the birth of the subject. Anyway, just wanted to clarify that I agree with Jack that there is nothing lost. Indeed the sacrifice is pure gain… the birth of the subject. Just as some pre-societal idilic state of nature is not what was lost by the development of society, but is actually a fantasy created by it. In other words, our castration (as individuals and subjects in society) is not a loss but a pure gain that is experienced as a loss.

John Caputo’s second response:

My view is that the loss does not come first, and to think so is to adopt a corrupt view of finitude and temporality. That’s the truth behind the crypto-Calvinism quip. As Nietzsche said, the “Christian” schema is to think that in producing human beings, nature produced sick animals, and if they are not born sick Christianity will make them sick and pass itself off as the physician. I think psychoanalysis is a lot like that. The paradigm is beings born with a loss (sick, sin) which can be healed by the physician (priest/psychoanalyst).

To say the loss is first is to embrace this very paradigm. The very idea of “loss” is a missing wholeness. It is by definition the absence of something that is supposed to be there but is missing. That is not corrected but brought to its logical conclusion by then adding that the whole is a fantasy, and that we should just learn to live with the sickness/loss and treat it as a gain. That is good advice to someone born with a life-long illness or handicap, a way to try to turn their disadvantage into an advantage, but it is not a paradigm for being human. If it is, it adopts a paradigm of sickness.

L/Z are saying: as there never was a wholeness, treat the loss as a gain. I say: As there never was a loss, there never was an implied completeness. The whole schema—of loss and completeness—is a fantasy. It proceeds from a corrupt or distorted view of finitude and temporality. Or, if that is too strong, it at best describes an aberration or pathology, since some people really are born sick, in body or in mind. In that case it makes up what Heidegger would call a “regional ontology,” a local and contingent condition, not a fundamental ontology. Not a description of being human as such.

The fundamental—I would rather say radical—ontology is the ontology of finitude and temporality. There is nothing about finitude and temporality as such that implies that it is a loss or should be described as a loss (lack, fall, etc). To come to be in time is, as far as I know, the only way to come to be all. It is, in principle, good news, not a loss. It is not a loss that, since it cannot be remedied, should be regarded as a gain; it never was a loss at all. In temporality, what comes first is the beginning, and the beginning is not a loss, but a beginning, a nascence, an openness to the future, and what is made of that nascence all depends… For one thing, it depends on whether this beginning is made under the most desperate and deprived conditions, or under the conditions that would allow it to flourish. Whether the beginning is all but shut down from the start by oppressive circumstances or kept open-ended and futural. We are not born sick, but we are too often born oppressed.

So the question of the poverty, neglect and abandonment into which children are born is vastly more important problem than what for me seems to be a narrow preoccupation with the psychological fantasy of completeness. If perchance, and I say this only half in jest, this pathology really is such a big problem, and if Lacan is the answer, then we are in bigger trouble than I thought, since only a relatively few specialists have the time, talent and opportunity to figure out what he is saying, and still fewer people have the financial means to afford the treatment!

I am not saying that there are no sick people, no people who need help, and I am not denying that there people who can help them. I think there are genuine counselors, people with discernment and empathy, who in one-on-one sessions and without a big overarching theory of “the” unconscious,” as if there [is] just one, can help us out in a time of need. I actually think Jesus was one of those people and that was part of his success as a healer. Lacanian psychoanalysis is at best a local therapy, not a fundamental ontology.

I am all for denying the big Other, but I think the more radical, the more philosophical way to deny the big Other, which means to break the tyranny of certitude—a project we all share—is what Heidegger calls “overcoming metaphysics,” that is, twisting free from big overarching stories or deep accounts of how things are. A big Story, a big Other, is one of several ways to “arrest the play,” as Derrida said, all of which are variously metaphysical. I think that psychoanalysis for Freud was meant to be science, the final story, the end of the illusion of religion. I take it that in Lacan’s post-modern Freudianism, in particular, the “non-all,” breaks with Freud’s scientism. Right on. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis is a regional critique of foundationalism, focused on the unconscious, indeed on a particular highly sexualized account of the unconscious, not a fundamental analysis of being-human at large. Denying the big Other is only part of the critique of centered, certain, founded, grounded, overarching, ahistorical accounts.

What about Christianity? This I think is really interesting. I think I am the truer Christian in this debate. Unlike psychoanalysis, Calvinism, and the Christian Right—you see the association?—the Gospels seems to me to be singularly unconcerned with sexuality. What concerns them? They are mostly preoccupied with poverty, marginalization, imprisonment, and economic redistribution, which are the very terms in which Jesus announces his ministry (Luke 4:16-21). I’m with Jesus and the kingdom of God on this one.

Lastly, what about Hegel? I also think I am the truer Hegelian in all this. Žižek’s Hegel is very clever, I’ll grant that, but it is at bottom a philosophical corruption of Hegel. Hegel did not try to knock things down or slam them with a “no, no, there never was such a thing.” Hegel thought that whatever is, is true, and that whatever is true is to that precise extent real, but everything has to take its “time” in becoming true. That is an Aristotelianism (which I got from my Catholic Thomism, which explains my aversion to Calvinism) that I share with Hegel, along with Hegel’s deep distrust of Platonic (and Kantian) dualism, which treats time as—you guessed it—a “fall.” So for Hegel, religion is the truth, a form of truth, but it is only the truth in a certain form or figure, and the idea is not to slam it, to declare it an illusion and double negate it, but to figure out this figure, to “interpret” it (hermeneutics), to get at its truth in a way it itself cannot, to “repeat” it in a more radical way. Malabou calls this “speculative hermeneutics,” which is brilliant, because it brings out both the hermeneutics and the lingering metaphysics. I call it “radical hermeneutics,” meaning easy on the metaphysics, please.

Some addition sources:

Here is a short post I wrote that clarifies what I mean by Original Sin

You can follow John Caputo on Facebook here

You can request to join What is Pyrotheology here

Select Comments

I am not very competent at the issues being raised and this area of thought in general. I have some concerns that probably betray a lack of understanding of the work of these great thinkers. I only have skimmed the work of Caputo and Rollins, and an limited to only a few Zizek lectures. Please guide me, by commenting on the following concerns, thanks.

First, isn’t the idea that this fiction of a “fall” or “loss” enables us to access and express an aspect of our existential phenomenological realities? This saudade evoking narrative is particularly helpful to us and already finds itself in a lot of our aesthetic expressions (literature/art). For us to pretend to lose all illusions is to engage the role of the courageous fool, one who just doesn’t get how things are, who follows the naive logic that losing illusion is gaining clearer reality. However, to lose the fiction is to lose reality itself.

Second, the double negation is not so different from the double affirmation, in that they are both actions describing the nature of a certain reality in light of the absolute. The double negative subscribes to an indifferent Absolute “neither this nor this”; on the other hand, the double affirmation subscribes to a constitutive Absolute “this and this”. The former says that the Absolute is beyond (indifferent to) all relative categories, the latter that the Absolute is a composite of all these categories; while the former would contend that reality itself is beyond the categories of theist and atheist, the latter asserts that reality includes both categories.

Third, a “Caputo event” seems much like a miracle, a transgressing of laws of human nature like the relativity of experience or capacity for dissatisfaction. It also seems to have drunk deep of the modernist ideal of progress. Like Badiou’s “catastrophe is better than non-being”, it seems like an urging to act, and urging to create, a guilt inducing obligation and responsibility of making the future exist. As to miracles, if an event isn’t a moving beyond the rules that are in place, if it is merely a repetition, a new stanza of a song using the same language and grammatical laws (or stretch thereof) of the other stanzas, then what is so great about it, why do we limit Hegel to make place for it? Why do we seek to move beyond the temporal triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, to represent the world in an temporal future? The point is that while we may say that Caputo doesn’t really seek to transcend the frame, to limit nature, there is a vibe that he really does want to. This is maybe why we have to introduce a grace, an unknown factor, a chaos or randomness, the possibility of hacking/limiting the laws of nature. This grace is as unnatural and as false as the “fall” or “lack”. It is a fiction that doesn’t work quite as efficiently to access our existential phenomenological realities. In all, the Event thrives in the frame of a cosmopoetics- not of humility but of ambition.

Fourth, there is no future. This is a point of theoretical physics we have yet to contend with. We are limiting the natural realities to make space for our subjective experience. We like to claim that we are not limiting nature and that it is not primarily an anthropoetics but a cosmopoetics. However, where we don’t like it, where “as if I were dead” nature is not convenient, we claim a primacy of the subjective reality, and the importance of factoring it in as well. Why don’t we just say that (just like everyone else) we too are limiting cosmopoetics to make space for theopoetics? Instead of this hair splitting argumentation. Too, is theopoetics a part of cosmopoetics or is cosmopoetics indifferent to theopoetics?

Maybe the true dilemma is one introduced in the second point, about the nature of the absolute. Is it indifferent or constitutive. The Absolute according to what we know of theoretical physics and especially theory of relativity, is open to interpretation: either it is beyond all relatives, or it is constitutive of all relatives. Maybe it is neither of these. Or maybe it is both.

In sum, as you can see, this is from a crude reading, and formulation of what I see the dilemma is, as well as my personal reaponse to these evokative dilemmas. I appreciate your comments. Thanks.

- Anon