How are we to live?
This seems to me to be one of the most difficult questions we face, while also being one of the most fundamental. I just attended a colloquium where we talked about issues of formation, curriculum, and openness to being challenged/unmade, departing from an essay by Amy Hollywood that thought from a series of documents issued by a Harvard College steering committee, paying special attention to the way religion/faith were set apart from reason and critical inquiry. The discussion stirred up a number of foundational questions in me that I'd like to think about. My thoughts are still rough, but I wanted to get them out there and hear what you might have to say.
One place to begin is the goals we associate with our various educational institutions. Technical institutions don't have much difficulty in answering this question: their purpose comes down to training students with certain skills that enable them to move their fields forward. While some might have traces of heart--featuring special programs, for instance, in conservation or accessibility technology--we can generally imagine the institution as functioning in a self-interested, rational, economic way: it attempts to train students as well as possible in the most popular fields such that its students go on to succeed and it can attract new, high-quality students.
While the rhetoric often becomes murky and unclear, liberal arts institutions generally at least pay lip service to some more noble aspirations. While often facing criticism from those demanding greater pragmatism in education, there is generally language of training people to be good citizens or serve socially just causes or work for democracy. The key I want to focus on here is that the liberal arts are about creating certain sorts of people. It is about forming people to experience their world in a certain way, to think along certain vectors, to assign value in certain places. Such formation can be hard to defend in an intellectual-economic environment that emphasizes practical, quantifiable, marketable skills. One could say that it becomes difficult to experience classes in critical theory as anything but a waste of time; it becomes difficult to think about why we place value in certain modes of thinking, in particular habits of life. Education becomes about the pursuit of truth configured as the acquisition of facts and the methodological apparatus needed to build one's knowledge. We can't see how it might be possible to think and live differently, and when such shimmers of possibility do break through, they are quickly crushed for not living up to the values that form the way we think but which remain almost entirely hidden from us.
I guess what I want to draw attention to is the the immensity of the extent to which we are simply formed and go through life entirely blind to why we see and think and value the way we do. One of the things that critical study of/in religion provides is great resources for thinking about ourselves. Far from being a discipline concerned with either 1) the minimally practical collection of facts about what those odd religious folk over there do, or 2) the entirely unpractical navel-gazing of pretentious eggheads, critical studies of/in religion give us the resources to actually ask the most difficult and important question of all: How are we to live?
We're all taught how to live growing up, and many of us rebel and inhabit alternative lifestyles at some point, but how often do we really think about what is our primary value, about what motivates the rest of what we do. We all have numerous values. Any list could be quite long, including: accumulation of wealth, serving the common good, family, friends, success, making an impact in the world, popularity, etc. When we really start to think about these myriad "surface" values and the relative weight we assign to them, they start pointing back towards a much smaller list of more core values which tend to be harder to define, but which could generally be sorted into "hedonistic" and "noble" values. Of course, if we have learned anything from thinking critically, we know that values that are ostensibly noble may contain a hedonistic core. At the same time, if our interest is in formation rather than judgment, we need to approach our basic human needs to feel loved with acceptance, while remaining on guard to the inevitable human temptation to hypocrisy.
In my nobler moments, the most basic value that I find myself drawn to is that of truth, but truth as practice rather than possession, as it most commonly is thought of. I want to configure truth as a particular way of engaging with others, as a way of being in the world. By looking at our world as more than just "facts"--themselves particular constructions of authority and knowledge--but as also, given our human involvement, a field of meaning and value, we are forced either to 1) deny everything but the strictly factual as having to do with truth, 2) claim one particular expression of meaning and value as ultimate and divinely true, 3) entirely abandon truth, or 4) rethink "truth" as a way of living, as a process that admits our own finitude and incompleteness but which resists nihilism with a commitment to understand the world with critical humility. "Living true" in this way entirely transcends the religious-secular divide: both are made uncomfortable but both are also secure insofar as they exist and thus deserve respect and attention. The actual work of engaging with the other is the hard part of course; when the rubber meets the road we risk getting burned. We need to cultivate a way of finding security in engaging with the other such that we may be undone, but I'll leave that topic for another day.
19 September 2011
06 April 2011
Theological Plurality
Today in class we were talking about a book that deals with "postcolonial feminist theology" and the complex set of voices, previously excluded, who are being admitted to the academic table and what this means for theology. This involves an incredible plurality of theologies: black, queer, feminist, womanist, mujerista, subaltern, etc. I want to think about what these theologies and the people who write them mean for me, a white heterosexual male from a middle-class family.
The conflict for me comes up about when I can speak. I understand that there will need to be a period when the oppressor does not speak, when the colonized are allowed to speak for themselves, to find their voices and empower each other. Thus, for instance, there may be a period when feminist theology should be left to women, when men should not attempt to speak in that arena. Each of these oppressed groups need to be allowed space to articulate their theological concerns, need time to shape discourse in ways that escape the control of the old white men who have dominated theology.
What begins to worry me is if this persists indefinitely, if there is no sort of unification or conversation. I have always understood feminism, etc., as corrective critiques; they open up new life-giving spaces but not remaining separate from 'that which came before and which continues to exist.' The idea of feminism is that society is messed up and needs to change. The feminist theologian would point out that Christianity has been damaging to women and needs to change. While their efforts might at first amount to trying to articulate other theologies that work for them, the goal, it seems to me, cannot be for women to have one set of theologies and men another. If theology in some way means to speak of what is real, there must be some sort of push towards unity. (Though, of course, any such push would need to be heavily hedged against any of us thinking we had arrived.)
This doesn't, of course, mean that women need to build the bridge. This to me is where the privileged groups can be useful: we can engage the oppressed, the colonized, in conversation, in mutual active listening, that changes both of us. I don't mean to posit some sort of simplistic process where we eliminate our differences. What I want is to be able to talk with a poststructuralist feminist theologian and have my theology change, or be open to it changing. I would also hope that the inverse would be true, though I am not responsible for it. I guess at the heart of what I think it means to be a theologian is to be able to listen to another, to enter into their perspective, to understand where they are coming from, to be able to engage critically with their ideas, and to be vulnerable for having the encounter change you and your ideas. What is anathema to me, then, is a theological landscape with lots of little groups, protected by walls, writing theology only for themselves. The key that moves this whole process, for me, is the recognition that I am finite, a sinner, that my theology is imperfect, incomplete, and that although no one has arrived, by conversing I can open myself to productive change. This requires great modesty, but allows me to actually do something in a postmodern world other than jack off in my own personal closet.
The conflict for me comes up about when I can speak. I understand that there will need to be a period when the oppressor does not speak, when the colonized are allowed to speak for themselves, to find their voices and empower each other. Thus, for instance, there may be a period when feminist theology should be left to women, when men should not attempt to speak in that arena. Each of these oppressed groups need to be allowed space to articulate their theological concerns, need time to shape discourse in ways that escape the control of the old white men who have dominated theology.
What begins to worry me is if this persists indefinitely, if there is no sort of unification or conversation. I have always understood feminism, etc., as corrective critiques; they open up new life-giving spaces but not remaining separate from 'that which came before and which continues to exist.' The idea of feminism is that society is messed up and needs to change. The feminist theologian would point out that Christianity has been damaging to women and needs to change. While their efforts might at first amount to trying to articulate other theologies that work for them, the goal, it seems to me, cannot be for women to have one set of theologies and men another. If theology in some way means to speak of what is real, there must be some sort of push towards unity. (Though, of course, any such push would need to be heavily hedged against any of us thinking we had arrived.)
This doesn't, of course, mean that women need to build the bridge. This to me is where the privileged groups can be useful: we can engage the oppressed, the colonized, in conversation, in mutual active listening, that changes both of us. I don't mean to posit some sort of simplistic process where we eliminate our differences. What I want is to be able to talk with a poststructuralist feminist theologian and have my theology change, or be open to it changing. I would also hope that the inverse would be true, though I am not responsible for it. I guess at the heart of what I think it means to be a theologian is to be able to listen to another, to enter into their perspective, to understand where they are coming from, to be able to engage critically with their ideas, and to be vulnerable for having the encounter change you and your ideas. What is anathema to me, then, is a theological landscape with lots of little groups, protected by walls, writing theology only for themselves. The key that moves this whole process, for me, is the recognition that I am finite, a sinner, that my theology is imperfect, incomplete, and that although no one has arrived, by conversing I can open myself to productive change. This requires great modesty, but allows me to actually do something in a postmodern world other than jack off in my own personal closet.
24 March 2011
God: A Nice Metaphor?
So I'm apparently in a cynical mood, and I want to consider if it makes a difference to say that the God our theology and such refers to is "real," as opposed to just being a nice, useful metaphor for something about the human experience. My hypothesis is that, barring fundamentalist accounts of the Christian life, what we say about the ultimate existence of God doesn't matter.
The way I want to get into this is through considering historicity in biblical hermeneutics. Lots of people get twisted in all kinds of knots arguing about what "the historical Jesus" actually did and said, whether there "really" was a flood, etc. For many people, this is a huge tripping point in their faith. I would hazard that much of people's difficulties here have to do with our flat understandings of the truthfulness of myths. It is interesting, though, because there are generally elements of myth that people are ok with. When Jesus speaks in parables, people don't worry if there actually was a prodigal son, as the purpose of the story is not in an account of what actually happened, but in an account of how things actually are. They communicate a truth about being a Godly human, they gesture past themselves. We could read much of the Old Testament in a similar way. Why does it matter, after all, that God spoke to a man through a burning bush? There are many answers to this question, but none of them require that we also hold that God actually spoke in this particular case in this particular way. Now, these stories may serve as matters of precedent, demonstrating that God is able to act in certain ways, or does certain things, but we could, in theory, hold that the story tells us how God acts without needing to hold that God acted this was in this particular instance. Similar things could be applied to the creation stories.
People generally get much less comfortable, however, when we de-historicize the gospels, which baffles me. Why does it matter that Jesus was resuscitated on the third day? The only way I can see Christianity making sense is if Christ inaugurates a manner of life here on earth. Questions of an afterlife are trivial in comparison. The resurrection makes far more sense to me as the proclamation of the continuing presence and relevance of Christ than it does as an assurance of heaven. And even if heaven is important to us, we can still believe we're going to heaven without a bodily resurrection.
To go the final step, then, if we have a Christianity that is geared towards changing things on earth, that makes decisive changes in people's lives, that does all this stuff, why do we need God? What if we simply say that every "experience of God," mystical or otherwise, is actually explainable through psychology. Why do we need God anymore? We can still say that Christianity is of crucial importance in reforming people to live together in life-giving ways. What if Christianity, instead of being a religion specially ordained by God, is a religion specially insightful into the human condition? God only serves as an assurance that avoids the messiness of life. We can understand all our theology as a nice metaphor, and I don't think it would really change what we do. Of course, I think most people would freak out at the idea, but really, what difference does God make? It seems to me a rather un-Christian squeamishness to insist that God is not, in fact, dead. We can still proclaim the resurrection and let it do its work on us, but does the ontological status of God really matter?
The way I want to get into this is through considering historicity in biblical hermeneutics. Lots of people get twisted in all kinds of knots arguing about what "the historical Jesus" actually did and said, whether there "really" was a flood, etc. For many people, this is a huge tripping point in their faith. I would hazard that much of people's difficulties here have to do with our flat understandings of the truthfulness of myths. It is interesting, though, because there are generally elements of myth that people are ok with. When Jesus speaks in parables, people don't worry if there actually was a prodigal son, as the purpose of the story is not in an account of what actually happened, but in an account of how things actually are. They communicate a truth about being a Godly human, they gesture past themselves. We could read much of the Old Testament in a similar way. Why does it matter, after all, that God spoke to a man through a burning bush? There are many answers to this question, but none of them require that we also hold that God actually spoke in this particular case in this particular way. Now, these stories may serve as matters of precedent, demonstrating that God is able to act in certain ways, or does certain things, but we could, in theory, hold that the story tells us how God acts without needing to hold that God acted this was in this particular instance. Similar things could be applied to the creation stories.
People generally get much less comfortable, however, when we de-historicize the gospels, which baffles me. Why does it matter that Jesus was resuscitated on the third day? The only way I can see Christianity making sense is if Christ inaugurates a manner of life here on earth. Questions of an afterlife are trivial in comparison. The resurrection makes far more sense to me as the proclamation of the continuing presence and relevance of Christ than it does as an assurance of heaven. And even if heaven is important to us, we can still believe we're going to heaven without a bodily resurrection.
To go the final step, then, if we have a Christianity that is geared towards changing things on earth, that makes decisive changes in people's lives, that does all this stuff, why do we need God? What if we simply say that every "experience of God," mystical or otherwise, is actually explainable through psychology. Why do we need God anymore? We can still say that Christianity is of crucial importance in reforming people to live together in life-giving ways. What if Christianity, instead of being a religion specially ordained by God, is a religion specially insightful into the human condition? God only serves as an assurance that avoids the messiness of life. We can understand all our theology as a nice metaphor, and I don't think it would really change what we do. Of course, I think most people would freak out at the idea, but really, what difference does God make? It seems to me a rather un-Christian squeamishness to insist that God is not, in fact, dead. We can still proclaim the resurrection and let it do its work on us, but does the ontological status of God really matter?
23 March 2011
Answers: Inbreaking of God or Breaking of god?
In thinking about how to pick up from yesterday, I want to think about what I see as two conflicting yet appealing ways of thinking about the meaning of True religion. What they share is the basic observation that there are certain common patterns of human activity, religion being one of them. Basically, the many critics of religion are right: religion is often an opiate of the masses, a way for people to work out their psychoses, a grounding myth we no longer need. Religions do serve to motivate great violence, they bind people into oppressive situations. Of course, religions also sometimes provide the resources for resistance and can motivate liberation. The larger point I take to be true, and which flies directly in the face of the liberal types who say that every religion is partially true, or that all religions lead to the same place, is that religion is a purely human activity which doesn't correspond to God. Religions are made by people.
So, this is the first move that both approaches take. Both also don't stop here, there is something that comes after. The first approach is the deconstructive. I could list authors here, but basically this approach says that all our religions are false but there is a certain Truth in the undoing of ourselves, in recognizing ourselves as wrong. Christianity has a special place, because within it we can find the resources of an undoing of ourselves. We find God dead, all our hopes dashed into the ground, and so on. This has really powerful ethical bonuses, and I think this is a much needed space to occupy in a dialectical life. I don't think a community can really occupy this space indefinitely, though.
The other approach involves saying that there is a God who is very unlike all the gods the religions have made up, and that although we are perpetually tending to misunderstand God and cannot approach God on our own, God has decisively revealed Godself in Jesus Christ in a manner that effects the undoing of all our religions and begins the slow process of reworking us into a different way of life. This approach is really great too, I think. There is a temptation to triumphalism that can be avoided if on really sits in the understanding that all our ideas about God and religion were overturned, and true ones have just begun to take root, and so we can't always quite tell what is ours and what is God's.
Both these approaches feature a God that is not obviously known and yet is. The big difference is over how God is thought of. Perhaps these approaches are compatible, as both have us more or less working on our own, with God sort of subtly influencing things, calling us in certain directions, and while both might allow the caveat that God could do something drastic, the normal way of God working in the world is more subtle, more nuanced. The key point I want to drive at here is that we can have a God who definitely exists and is working in history, working to reconcile humanity, and that profoundly affects the way we live our lives, but we don't see God handing us down The Definitive Book On How To Live Our Lives. We live as though God is, but God is absent.
So, this is the first move that both approaches take. Both also don't stop here, there is something that comes after. The first approach is the deconstructive. I could list authors here, but basically this approach says that all our religions are false but there is a certain Truth in the undoing of ourselves, in recognizing ourselves as wrong. Christianity has a special place, because within it we can find the resources of an undoing of ourselves. We find God dead, all our hopes dashed into the ground, and so on. This has really powerful ethical bonuses, and I think this is a much needed space to occupy in a dialectical life. I don't think a community can really occupy this space indefinitely, though.
The other approach involves saying that there is a God who is very unlike all the gods the religions have made up, and that although we are perpetually tending to misunderstand God and cannot approach God on our own, God has decisively revealed Godself in Jesus Christ in a manner that effects the undoing of all our religions and begins the slow process of reworking us into a different way of life. This approach is really great too, I think. There is a temptation to triumphalism that can be avoided if on really sits in the understanding that all our ideas about God and religion were overturned, and true ones have just begun to take root, and so we can't always quite tell what is ours and what is God's.
Both these approaches feature a God that is not obviously known and yet is. The big difference is over how God is thought of. Perhaps these approaches are compatible, as both have us more or less working on our own, with God sort of subtly influencing things, calling us in certain directions, and while both might allow the caveat that God could do something drastic, the normal way of God working in the world is more subtle, more nuanced. The key point I want to drive at here is that we can have a God who definitely exists and is working in history, working to reconcile humanity, and that profoundly affects the way we live our lives, but we don't see God handing us down The Definitive Book On How To Live Our Lives. We live as though God is, but God is absent.
22 March 2011
Answers: What is the theologian?
I want to try and get at some of the issues Kendall raised for me yesterday. At root I sense two questions: 1) Why God and why in the Christian way, and 2) What does it mean to be a theologian, what does that role involve?
The second question is the one burning in my mind right now, so I'll start with that one. Laying aside all normative and historical concerns, the question of what it means for me to call myself a theologian is intriguing, as I am not seeking any ecclesiastical affiliation, so I don't see myself as becoming an attached thinker/guide for a community or church body. While I want my work to ultimately have some sort of relevance for people other than myself, that isn't my primary motivator. The main reason I study is that I enjoy it, the ideas I pick up really nourish me. And I want to get a job where I can share those ideas with others, hopefully helping nourish them as well. Really, though, what drives me is the desire to know what there is, what there really is. This might be God, understood in some fashion, or might be some more interior truth. I guess my sense is that there really is a reality out there, and though our access to it is imperfect and always fragmentary, we can improve our vision.
Robert Orsi's Between Heaven and Earth really helped me articulate this. He is advocating for an "intersubjective" approach to ethnography in religious studies where we encounter someone other to us but hold on to a shared notion of humanity, rejecting our tendency to create a chasm between us across which understanding cannot cross. This is cool for religious studies as it provides a model where the scholar can enter into the work a bit more, but what I really like is that it helps navigate the space between the monsters of absolute relativism and objectivity. We usually think about the space between these as small or nonexistent, but I'm coming to think that there is actually a large and diverse space between them. Ultimately we cannot speak objectively, but we can transcend our own subjectivity by stepping out of ourselves in a painful reach of understanding with the other. The other--whether human or divine, personal or textual--provides the creative kick in the ass that allows us to see the world in another way.
Now of course, there are lots of other ways of learning to see the world than that provided by religious models. The thing is, I really think theology, understood broadly, is that which allows us to describe the world in a way that matters. To put it differently, if I could say what being a theologian means to me, it means being able to connect descriptions of the way the world is with ways we should live. What I mean is this: all of the sciences and ways of learning about the world ultimately can tell us nothing about what to do. The natural and social sciences can tell us all kinds of things about the way the world works, but it always takes something extra to turn that into a public policy or personal practice. Philosophy is great because, at least in the approach I like, it is concerned with exploring how it is possible to think and live differently. Still, philosophy can't tell us what to do. Ethics might be able to reason out the implications of different moral frameworks, but the ultimate grounding of any of those frameworks has to assume a religious character. (Here I understand religion expansively, to include things like Marxism or New Atheism.)
It is precisely in these questions of what we should do that really arouse me. I want to be clear, there isn't any universal grounding one can give for a worldview or moral framework. We are all adrift in a really deep, really wide pool; no one has touched the bottom, and no one has ever reached the edge. This makes Truth difficult, as we don't have access to any little nub of solidity from which to grow Truth. I still think that Truth makes sense, if we shift it from a propositional to a methodological concept. Instead of thinking of Truth as the correct set of propositions that describe the way the world really is, which in any case is beyond our grasp, what if we thought of Truth as the correct way of approaching each other. Instead of Truth being contact with the bottom of the pool, Truth is the unfolding creation of a massive human raft. This is where the metaphor starts to break down, as the creation of a raft implies rigidity, which is ultimately not what I'm interested in. Instead, it is a way of understanding each other, of approaching each other as different and yet as possessing a common human nature, a method of engagement that leaves us changed. If we have a common human nature, that would suggest that as we learn from one another, from people in diverse contexts, we will begin to see some similarities. Certain questions will reoccur, certain sets of answers will resonate.
Study of this sort will involve a suspension of the moral, a suspension of our critical evaluative apparatus, in order to really understand the other on their own terms. What so often happens when judgment enters our understanding of an other is that elements of why the other is the way the other is, elements of their own internal logic, are lost. Only through this suspension are we able to understand the other. What Orsi gets so right is that this suspension doesn't involve repressing our own reactions, our own deep gut-sense that something is wrong, but in addressing, understanding, and moving past that reaction. This is where work on the self comes in, for if we are to understand another, we will have to do a lot of work on ourselves.
So, to circle around to the original question, it seems to me that the key characteristic of the theologian is not engagement with the divine on various questions, though this may of course play a huge role, but is in understanding the varied ways others have dealt with those questions. Instead of consulting the divine other, one consults the plural human other. Of course, all this assumes the divine (assuming there is a God) doesn't decide to break in.
but I'll leave that one for tomorrow.
The second question is the one burning in my mind right now, so I'll start with that one. Laying aside all normative and historical concerns, the question of what it means for me to call myself a theologian is intriguing, as I am not seeking any ecclesiastical affiliation, so I don't see myself as becoming an attached thinker/guide for a community or church body. While I want my work to ultimately have some sort of relevance for people other than myself, that isn't my primary motivator. The main reason I study is that I enjoy it, the ideas I pick up really nourish me. And I want to get a job where I can share those ideas with others, hopefully helping nourish them as well. Really, though, what drives me is the desire to know what there is, what there really is. This might be God, understood in some fashion, or might be some more interior truth. I guess my sense is that there really is a reality out there, and though our access to it is imperfect and always fragmentary, we can improve our vision.
Robert Orsi's Between Heaven and Earth really helped me articulate this. He is advocating for an "intersubjective" approach to ethnography in religious studies where we encounter someone other to us but hold on to a shared notion of humanity, rejecting our tendency to create a chasm between us across which understanding cannot cross. This is cool for religious studies as it provides a model where the scholar can enter into the work a bit more, but what I really like is that it helps navigate the space between the monsters of absolute relativism and objectivity. We usually think about the space between these as small or nonexistent, but I'm coming to think that there is actually a large and diverse space between them. Ultimately we cannot speak objectively, but we can transcend our own subjectivity by stepping out of ourselves in a painful reach of understanding with the other. The other--whether human or divine, personal or textual--provides the creative kick in the ass that allows us to see the world in another way.
Now of course, there are lots of other ways of learning to see the world than that provided by religious models. The thing is, I really think theology, understood broadly, is that which allows us to describe the world in a way that matters. To put it differently, if I could say what being a theologian means to me, it means being able to connect descriptions of the way the world is with ways we should live. What I mean is this: all of the sciences and ways of learning about the world ultimately can tell us nothing about what to do. The natural and social sciences can tell us all kinds of things about the way the world works, but it always takes something extra to turn that into a public policy or personal practice. Philosophy is great because, at least in the approach I like, it is concerned with exploring how it is possible to think and live differently. Still, philosophy can't tell us what to do. Ethics might be able to reason out the implications of different moral frameworks, but the ultimate grounding of any of those frameworks has to assume a religious character. (Here I understand religion expansively, to include things like Marxism or New Atheism.)
It is precisely in these questions of what we should do that really arouse me. I want to be clear, there isn't any universal grounding one can give for a worldview or moral framework. We are all adrift in a really deep, really wide pool; no one has touched the bottom, and no one has ever reached the edge. This makes Truth difficult, as we don't have access to any little nub of solidity from which to grow Truth. I still think that Truth makes sense, if we shift it from a propositional to a methodological concept. Instead of thinking of Truth as the correct set of propositions that describe the way the world really is, which in any case is beyond our grasp, what if we thought of Truth as the correct way of approaching each other. Instead of Truth being contact with the bottom of the pool, Truth is the unfolding creation of a massive human raft. This is where the metaphor starts to break down, as the creation of a raft implies rigidity, which is ultimately not what I'm interested in. Instead, it is a way of understanding each other, of approaching each other as different and yet as possessing a common human nature, a method of engagement that leaves us changed. If we have a common human nature, that would suggest that as we learn from one another, from people in diverse contexts, we will begin to see some similarities. Certain questions will reoccur, certain sets of answers will resonate.
Study of this sort will involve a suspension of the moral, a suspension of our critical evaluative apparatus, in order to really understand the other on their own terms. What so often happens when judgment enters our understanding of an other is that elements of why the other is the way the other is, elements of their own internal logic, are lost. Only through this suspension are we able to understand the other. What Orsi gets so right is that this suspension doesn't involve repressing our own reactions, our own deep gut-sense that something is wrong, but in addressing, understanding, and moving past that reaction. This is where work on the self comes in, for if we are to understand another, we will have to do a lot of work on ourselves.
So, to circle around to the original question, it seems to me that the key characteristic of the theologian is not engagement with the divine on various questions, though this may of course play a huge role, but is in understanding the varied ways others have dealt with those questions. Instead of consulting the divine other, one consults the plural human other. Of course, all this assumes the divine (assuming there is a God) doesn't decide to break in.
but I'll leave that one for tomorrow.
21 March 2011
Guest Post!
So I was lazy today, and didn't get to writing until late, and by that point was having a great IM conversation with Kendall, who was asking some really great blunt questions. So I decided to take the easy route out and ask her to compile some stuff, because she writes so beautifully, and share that with you here. It's easy for my deconstructive bent to achieve a rather totalitarian status, and Kendall always destabilizes me in the best possible ways. She departs from talking about "being still" in the face of God not assisting in very difficult, painful personal situations. Tomorrow I'll take up the issues she raises. So here it is from my beautiful e.e. cummings.
but what does being still even mean? in hebrew, ""be still" means "raphah," which means to let stack, to give up, to lay down -- and then we are commanded to know that god is god. basically, psalm 46:10 is telling us that god is amazing and perfect and so much more "in the know" than we could ever be and that, consequently, we should trust the past and what we therefore know of god (that he is true, trustworthy, etc.) and rely on him.. basically, that god is god, and we cannot do anything greater than what god to do. god is the final word.
so what do we do, when people who proclaim that we ought to just simply "be still" are not, themselves, engaging with god? and are just "being still" and trust that these people have it right? i mean, i WANT TO. i want to! i want to trust that god is god, and that he has a plan for everything -- that he can make everything good (romans 8:28) -- but it's hard. it's hard because there's so much confusion, and it's so hard to imagine an outside being that has it all in control. everything is so confusing.. and those people that act like they have it together, that they have god all figured out, are likely those who are not themselves engaging with god. are the ones who are just sitting on the sidelines and cheering other people on as they engage with god. those people are the least likely to actually be engaging with god themselves. because they're too scared, or they don't think they have the words, or they don't think that god values what they have to say -- those people are the most likely to just be cheerleaders. and that's fine, that's fine, really. but sometimes those people have the best questions. and i think they should be asking them to god, instead of to the rest of us.
i feel like you just keep saying that social justice is not important (or, alternatively, overvalued), but not saying what the theologian must do about social justice. is it enough for the theologian just to comment that he believes that social justice is important, and not do anything more about it? not mediate or pray or act on it? is it enough for the theologian to say that he believes that scripture ought to be interpreted x or y or z way, but not say how x or y or z question must be interpreted? and of the theologian who says that he is not receiving inspiration for his blog -- what is he doing (praying, mediating, reading scripture, etc.) to receive inspiration for his blog..?
i'll be the first to admit, that i don't know anything. i don't know how one should go about engaging with god, about hard questions or easy ones or even about how to engage with god. but it seems to me that a theologian so focused on engaging with god ought to offer more specific practices on how to engage with god -- or at least, ought to do these things himself?
idk, because it is fine, i mean, to hear someone say that we ought to engage with god in X and Y and Z way. but i've been thru a lot and these ways just don't seem to make sense, in light of these questions, i mean - god always has an excuse. we are unfaithful or people suck or the world is cruel - god has an out. all the time, god has an out. and we're flawed and sucky and human and, i mean, idk. that's it, right? god is almighty and we are lowly and that's it, the end. and i hate that that's the end. i hate that we don't have more word on it. why doesn't god have anything to say to that? why?
and it seems like you come at this from nowhere. i mean, there's no like, personal reason why you find god important, why you think god is the answer to all of this. you just assume that god is the best answer. what is it about god that makes you think that god is the best answer to things... what is it about god that makes you think that the gospel is the best answer to human suffering and loneliness and global problems.. idk. there are just so many unanswered questions here. unanswered questions based on assumptions that you've made that jesus is the answer and that god will come and right all of these wrongs. what if he doesn't? what if god isn't coming to convince us that there is nothing between us and his love (romans 8:30-end)?
you can distance yourself between god and these questions, you can tell other people to be asking these questions.. but, in the end, you have to ask these questions yourself, too. and do they have answers? can god answer them? i believe that it's important to answer these questions, but i don't believe that you're truly asking them. it seems like you're scared.
19 March 2011
Contemplation and Being Still versus Take Up Thy Sword for the Poor
I ended yesterday writing a bit about the event of Christ an our inability to really penetrate it. I want to follow that up today and think about our proper mode of relating to this evental God, which I take to be a stillness, a quiet contemplation. This also lines up with a point I made earlier, drawing on Alison, about how "it has already been done" and as a result we don't need to do anything, we instead need to begin to relax into finding ourselves transformed.
This is particularly critical, I think, in the fast-paced, constantly-moving world many of us inhabit. Simply on the level of mental health, taking time to slow down is healthy, but I also think that it is one of the most appropriate ways of approaching God. Part of being human is having this tendency to wind ourselves up around what others think of us, what we want and need, and what must be done in order to secure these things. I think these can all be defensive mechanisms, even social justice concerns.
One of the things I most appreciate about superstar philosopher Slavoj Zizek is that he does not refrain from critiquing the way culture uses concerns about social justice, ecology, and the like. This isn't to say that these things are bad, but if one says anything critical of some social justice-type action, one risks a sort of excommunication, especially in liberalish circles. Certain types of criticism aren't too risky, the most obvious being the co-option of these sort of concerns by capitalism. This is indeed the age of image marketing. People don't just want the cheapest jacket or the best coffee, but want to buy from a company that supports their values. Responsible investing and purchasing isn't necessarily a bad thing, but lets face it, these things also make great marketing ploys. Zizek mentions TOMS, who advertise "one for one," giving away one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair you purchase. My interest isn't so much in whether or not the company is exploiting people, and if so whether such exploitation is morally justifiable, but in the effect such advertising has on us and what parts of us it exploits. It is no longer enough to buy a pair of shoes, with whatever combination of quality and value you prefer, instead an increasing number of products are being invested with additional value. I find it difficult to speak of this issue, as I don't want to quickly resolve that this investment is bad, but I find the uncritical acceptance of this sort of infiltration of values into commerce troubling. If nothing else, why should I look down on my poor neighbor for needing to shop at Walmart?
The other things that bothers me about the discourse surrounding social justice issues is way deployment of social justice language tends to close arguments. Among liberalish circles, we can debate the theological merits of universal salvation, the importance of biblical literalism/criticism, and the place of mystical experiences in religious life, but debate surrounding social justice? How absurd! Again, I don't want to question that, for instance, care for the poor and widows was a huge part of Jesus' message, but social justice often becomes an easy out, a way for liberalish types to quickly find agreement without having to consider parts of Jesus' message that are less palatable to them. This partially springs from the firm conviction I hold that Jesus was about more than just social justice, and that we risk much when we separate his teaching, or his call to care for the poor, from the rest of his message. We certainly lose much of what Jesus was about if we reduce his mission to allowing access to heaven, but we equally reduce him if we make him only about giving our time and money to "good causes." I am concerned at the frenzy of activity I often see amongst the social justice go-getters. Again, I don't meant to say that social justice is unimportant, but I think it is a matter of order (and maybe, but not necessarily, priority); contemplation of God leads us to our neighbor, and care for our neighbor should lead us to contemplation of God. When we miss out on being still before God, I worry for our activists.
This is particularly critical, I think, in the fast-paced, constantly-moving world many of us inhabit. Simply on the level of mental health, taking time to slow down is healthy, but I also think that it is one of the most appropriate ways of approaching God. Part of being human is having this tendency to wind ourselves up around what others think of us, what we want and need, and what must be done in order to secure these things. I think these can all be defensive mechanisms, even social justice concerns.
One of the things I most appreciate about superstar philosopher Slavoj Zizek is that he does not refrain from critiquing the way culture uses concerns about social justice, ecology, and the like. This isn't to say that these things are bad, but if one says anything critical of some social justice-type action, one risks a sort of excommunication, especially in liberalish circles. Certain types of criticism aren't too risky, the most obvious being the co-option of these sort of concerns by capitalism. This is indeed the age of image marketing. People don't just want the cheapest jacket or the best coffee, but want to buy from a company that supports their values. Responsible investing and purchasing isn't necessarily a bad thing, but lets face it, these things also make great marketing ploys. Zizek mentions TOMS, who advertise "one for one," giving away one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair you purchase. My interest isn't so much in whether or not the company is exploiting people, and if so whether such exploitation is morally justifiable, but in the effect such advertising has on us and what parts of us it exploits. It is no longer enough to buy a pair of shoes, with whatever combination of quality and value you prefer, instead an increasing number of products are being invested with additional value. I find it difficult to speak of this issue, as I don't want to quickly resolve that this investment is bad, but I find the uncritical acceptance of this sort of infiltration of values into commerce troubling. If nothing else, why should I look down on my poor neighbor for needing to shop at Walmart?
The other things that bothers me about the discourse surrounding social justice issues is way deployment of social justice language tends to close arguments. Among liberalish circles, we can debate the theological merits of universal salvation, the importance of biblical literalism/criticism, and the place of mystical experiences in religious life, but debate surrounding social justice? How absurd! Again, I don't want to question that, for instance, care for the poor and widows was a huge part of Jesus' message, but social justice often becomes an easy out, a way for liberalish types to quickly find agreement without having to consider parts of Jesus' message that are less palatable to them. This partially springs from the firm conviction I hold that Jesus was about more than just social justice, and that we risk much when we separate his teaching, or his call to care for the poor, from the rest of his message. We certainly lose much of what Jesus was about if we reduce his mission to allowing access to heaven, but we equally reduce him if we make him only about giving our time and money to "good causes." I am concerned at the frenzy of activity I often see amongst the social justice go-getters. Again, I don't meant to say that social justice is unimportant, but I think it is a matter of order (and maybe, but not necessarily, priority); contemplation of God leads us to our neighbor, and care for our neighbor should lead us to contemplation of God. When we miss out on being still before God, I worry for our activists.
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