Is Badiou Behind the Wu Tang Clan?

Is The RZA’s mathematical concept of truth the imported from Badiou? “The Truth shall set you free from all things.” (Props to Rodrigo Morales for the heads up)

Essential Texts for Systematic Theology

[updated]

In a panel discussion on the differences in method between historical and systematic theology last week at my school (Marquette University), a certain respected and well-known historical theologian claimed the following to be the essential texts to learn, without which one limits the quality of their constructive theology:

1. Third Meditation in Descartes’s Meditations (“Concerning God, That He Exists”)
2. Kant (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone).
3. Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion).
4. Ernst Troeltsch (text still unspecified).
5. Heidegger’s lecture on Heraclitus (where he speaks of ontotheology) and Being and Time.

This appears to me an unpredictably odd set of suggestions coming from a Roman Catholic historical theologian (and an avowed Augustinian), especially since it mostly consists in philosophy. I can understand this as a list of what to read in order to be able to understand modern theology, but the professor said explicitly that this is for “doing modern systematic theology.”

What alternate lists can we come up with? I suppose nothing lays your cards down like answering a question like this, so if anyone prefers rather to answer the question of essential texts for understanding, rather than doing, systematic theology, it is understandable. I will have to take some time to consider what I would list as the top five thinkers/texts for doing systematic theology (my list will probably come in the form of a comment).

Why I have so much confidence in historical scholarship

As one who wants to produce honest scholarly work, not bending ancient (or modern) writings to fit my agenda, I try to make use of the best available historical scholarship. But quotations such as the following make me wonder if appealing to such scholarship does much:

The whole of the apostle’s theology has now to be subpoenaed in order to reach the correct translation of a single word and, conversely, the correct translation of this one word determines, as I see it, the whole of the apostle’s theology. 

The above lines from Ernst Käsemann, speaking of the interpretation of St. Paul, point out the uncertainty of whether the phrase “righteousness of God” should be translated as an objective genitive, or a subjective one. Luckily he gives me even more hope elsewhere:

What has been said indicates that today Pauline interpretation is just as controversial as, for example, the problem of the historical Jesus or Lucan and Johannine theology. This means that at present the interpretation of the whole New Testament has become a highly uncertain matter, although the same historical-critical method is used everywhere…

The only question, then, is which (subjective) school of (objective) historical scholarship shall I listen to?

Call for a moratorium

I’m getting really tired of people concluding, based on what they take to be overly vehement reactions to their blog posts or other writings, that they “must’ve hit a nerve.” The assumption here is that the person is just putting forth some ideas and a disproportionately negative reaction can only be explained by recourse to psychological factors (such as intellectual insecurity that leads to over-defensiveness when one’s precious worldview is questioned). The myriad other factors that could’ve produced the negative reaction — perhaps blog post in question is simply wrong, or presents a stupid idea as though it’s a radical breakthrough, or puts forth a tired cliche as though it’s brand new, etc., etc. — are never given serious consideration. Overall, then, this classic all-purpose response is an especially smug and obnoxious way of begging the question.

Hot trends in theological sex

Just so everyone knows, it’s now cool to claim that sex is a matter of complete indifference. Regular readers of theology blogs will not be surprised to learn that this newfound conviction stems from a quotation from everyone’s favorite pontiff, Rowan Williams.

The conclusion that doesn’t seem to be drawn in these discussions is that if sex doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. I’d be very surprised if the payoff of this stance was that we should take a laissez-faire stance toward homosexuality, gay marriage, or even promiscuity more generally, even though that seems to be the most logical conclusion. Instead, I assume that in the last analysis, the way we show how ho-hum we are about sex is to go along with traditional morality — that’s how to be really radical, in the strict Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtlian sense of the term.

A rhetoric lesson

A lot of people seem to misunderstand the idea of an ad hominem attack. Instead of sticking to its traditional and well-known meaning, they prefer to use it as a kind of intensifier, meaning, “a counterargument that is too sharply worded or uses sarcasm.”

Surely these people have a right to complain about such counterarguments if they so desire. I don’t have a lot of patience for such complaints, but again, I have the right to express my impatience if I so desire. Free speech abounds, the glory of America! The problem, however, is that using an established term for this complaint renders that established term less useful for pointing toward its original meaning — that is, claiming that one’s opponent’s argument is incorrect due to flaws in his character. Obviously when the same term can cover the following two statements, there is a problem:

• “Your argument is, in my view, completely nonsensical and now I’m going to sarcastically draw reductio-ad-absurdam-style consequences from it.”
• “Why should anyone listen to you, since you’re just carrying water for the racists and homophobes of the world?”

Under the classical definition, only the latter is an ad hominem attack. The former is perhaps rude, perhaps annoying, perhaps immature, perhaps uncalled-for — but not an ad hominem attack. It works at the level of the argument, albeit not with the level of deep and abiding respect that the opponent would desire. The only tenuous claim to a personal attack is that by so attacking the argument, the attacker is also attacking the arguer as the kind of person who makes bad arguments — but is making bad arguments really a character flaw? Is it not rather a deficit in a certain skill, remediable only through practice in, precisely, argument? And is the attacker not presenting the arguer with an opportunity to further hone that very skill?

Here the attentive reader can probably already detect the irony that is at work: by falsely identifying a dismissive or less-than-fully-respectful response as an ad hominem attack, the accuser is in fact the one making an ad hominem attack, attacking the accused as the kind of person who makes spurious attacks, as a bad faith debater who is therefore unworthy of a hearing.

For purposes of clarity, I propose this maneuver be dubbed the meta-ad-hominem.

A quick response to Milbank’s essay in The Monstrosity of Christ

Um… do you realize that it’s not actually misty every day?

Christ and Culture: A Cautionary Example

I’m worried about our colleague Ben Myers, as his latest post strikes me as frankly insane — but maybe the problem is on my end, because the emerging consensus is that it’s great and helpful.

Greek reading text

Assuming sky’s the limit as far as availability, what should I use for a Greek reading text? My Greek is still in the early stages of its development, but at this point I have a year to work on whatever it is, which is effectively an eternity for these purposes.

Something patristic has more direct relevance, but something classical could be more interesting and better for developing my “chops.” After all, slogging my way through Augustine’s Confessions (who’s not properly classical Latin, but close) made later medieval texts seem like a breeze.

I’m currently doing Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechism, more or less by default since I have the text on-hand for my dissertation, but I’m getting bored with it because I know it too well — but I don’t know it well enough to use it as a “confidence building” text.

By way of explanation: in my years of trying to acquire reading knowledge, I’ve found it’s good to have two tracks. On the one hand, you have a challenging text that you work through little by little, as a kind of trial by fire of applying the grammar, building vocab, etc. On the other hand, you have an easy text that you can read with some confidence in order to convince yourself that you can properly read (and not just decode) the language.

I haven’t done this with every language I’ve worked on, but it seems like a “best practice” type of thing. With German I combined the two methods into one text — once I had developed a certain degree of confidence already, I took Benjamin’s “Theses,” going through them once in “decoding” mode and then rereading them immediately while the vocab was fresh in my mind. The Bible seems like the obvious choice for the confidence-building text, since I notice when reading a foreign-language text that biblical quotations always seem transparent to me, even when I’m not consciously familiar with the passage. (This would especially be the case for Greek, since I would get the additional benefit of reading the New Testament in the original.)

But back to the matter at hand: what reading text should I use? Brad has suggested Aristophanes, Herodotus, and Thucydides, all of which seem like great options to me.

Final Foucault Summary

Andy has posted the final Foucault summary. This batch of summaries is a real service to people unable to read French or too lazy to spend some time with this latest as it really does appear to prefigure a lot of work Agamben has done.