What’s love got to do with it?: On theology

“There is little at stake for you in this.” This is a complaint often spurted out with exasperation after a debate has reached its physical end point, when all parties involved are essentially exhausted, and directed towards those of us who do work in the liminal space of philosophy and theology (a kind of queer philosophical theology?). The force behind this accusation, always it seems with the presumed answer “nothing” as they often lump us all as some kind of Big Lebowski-esque nihilists, again relates to an old saw here: the questions of tradition, belief and authority. I may be wrong, but the complaint seems to me predicated on the notion that the study of theology only matters to those whose lives are caught up in the “Church”, that is in some form of the Christian tradition that looks to historical theology for its dogmatic basis (there will of course be different formulations here), the notions and concepts that will aid in spiritual and communal formation. Those who look to study theology and do not submit themselves to this authority, it seems to them, have little at stake in their study.

Further thoughts on separating theology and “belief”

What is the difference between philosophy and theology if it’s not the personal belief stance of the thinker in question? What makes the pursuit of something like theology distinctive compared to what one would normally call philosophy? I should say from the first that I think this has to be regarded as an open problem, because philosophy and theology are both critical and speculative discourses undertaken in dialogue with a historical tradition. Given such similarities, it is understandable that one would cast about for factors external to the discourse itself, such as the “personal belief” of the thinker. I think that such a difference is both nonsensical and boring, however, and I propose that a more reasonable and interesting difference must be found within theological discourse itself.

A Characteristic Theology: Book Announcement

Hey, I finally have something to hawk around here! The very kind folks at Wipf & Stock have taken on my lovable shaggy dog of a book, The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville: Aesthetics, Politics, Duplicity. Scratch it behind the ears and be patience with its flatulence, and it’ll love you forever. Many thanks to Charlie Collier & the entire team of editors up there in Eugene. Somehow they’re able to get a lot of work done amidst the microbreweries and marijuana smoke.

Also, because I for some reason failed to do so in the Acknowledgments: thanks, too, to Ben Myers, who was an unexpected advocate on my book’s behalf. Very much appreciated.

I am told it (as well as all the other sundry AUFS wares) will be available at the AAR meeting in San Francisco for a significant discount.

What is Creaturely Theology?

First, just a “thanks” to aufs for hosting the livestream of our divinanimality conference at Drew this past weekend. While the event is still fresh, I also thought I might pose a couple of questions that began to gestate over the course of this four day conference. My ears are selectively attentive. So whatever I report will (naturally) be told a bit slant. But, nonetheless, I’m interested in broad questions, about how religious studies and theology might infect/intersect with the ever-expanding storehouse of scholarship in animal studies.

Of course there were theological questions, calling attention to the sticky relations between creatures, creators, creations. But I think one of the most fruitful conversations—one that kept coming up over the course of the weekend—was the ontological distinction between the “animal” and the “creaturely.” While the conference intended to foreground the challenges that animals and divinities pose to humanist orthodoxies, many pointed to the “creaturely” as a plane of engagement that seems to do something different. I’ve actually given a lot of thought to this question (and have a forthcoming piece about it, in the volume resulting from the “Metaphysics & Things” conference at the Claremont Graduate University last December). But it was interesting to hear this conversation broadening. Kate Rigby suggested that the creaturely is a more “democratic” conceptual space—inclusive of both humans and animals, as well as plants, monsters. Perhaps even machines. This space isn’t unlike that given to “actors” in Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, Alfred North Whitehead’s “actual entities” or even OOO’s objects. But, of course, the creaturely has a theological genealogy. Which makes it easier to explore this concept in the field of religious ideas. In spite of the generic, egalitarian potential of the creaturely, however,

Weapons Grade Snark: Against Barth On Religions

I am frankly offended by this stunning display of bad faith, initiated by Barth’s tortured dialectic and Green’s defence of so transparent a piece of sophistry […] The parochialism and abject ignorance of the advocates of the Barthian position is not only embarrassing, it is offensive to the dignity of the spiritual and religious lives of literally billions of fellow human beings.

Ivan Strenski, “On “Religion” and Its Despisers,” in What is religion?: origins, definitions, and explanations, ed. Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 1998). responding to Green Garrett, “Challenging the Religious Studies Canon: Karl Barth’s Theology of Religion,” The Journal of Religion 75, no. 4 (1995).

Imagine writing a piece that was so offensive that it actually was offensive to billions of people.

On Belief and Teaching Theology

Tony Hunt has posted a review of Mark A. McIntosh’s recent Divine Teaching: An Introduction to Christian Theology that caught my attention. Even though they’re mostly on books I will probably never read, Tony does a nice job of reviewing them with teaching in mind. So what caught my attention about his review of McIntosh’s book was this line:

Can one understand theology and not be a believer?, he asks. His answer is, surprisingly, no, not really. One can come to acquire knowledge of a tradition and this can be taught, but McIntosh says to be truly taught by God, one’s own inner life must be made ready to receive this knowledge as a gift.”

The Monstrosity of Christ as the Moment “Religious Thought” Jumped the Shark

While the exchange between John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek in The Monstrosity of Christ has become one of the most widely discussed books in religious thought in the past decade or so, the real question remains: why does it matter? (Carl Raschke)

This comes via a strangely frustrating feature on the book in the most recent JCRT, and it struck me that, intentionally or not, in a single line Raschke manages to cast damning praise on both a single book and an entire profession.

Weaponized Apophaticism and the Question of Religion: Some Remarks on William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence

William T. Cavanaugh is well known in certain political theology (or “theopolitical” as some Christian theologians like to refer to it) circles because of his 1998 book Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ. The book is a very interesting study of the Catholic Church in Chile during Pinochet’s regime and details the theological background to the political relationship between Church and State. At times, though I’m willing to hedge here, it isn’t clear in the book if Cavanaugh doesn’t secretly think that the Eucharist is a more revolutionary act than, say, workers organizing to provide for themselves and resist Pinochet’s Chicago School led neoliberalism. It certainly has been used in that way by some of Cavanaugh’s enthusiastic readers and even, dare I say, mis-used in that way by members of the Radical Orthodoxy/Red Tory movement. His mix of Foucault and Roman Catholic radicalism does give the impression of a strange conservative anti-Statist and anti-Capitalist form of thinking. Still, I would feel uncomfortable simply regulating Cavanaugh to this pit of vipers since his own work is overwhelmingly negative in its approach (I’ll explain the meaning of this more below) and his own attempts at positive proscriptive political statements often are undertaken with great care and a deep grounding in a tradition of non-violence.  Weirdly, if I can indulge in a bit of biography before moving on to the more substantive comments, reading Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist was the reason I decided not to convert to Roman Catholicism when at the age of 19 I decided to leave the Church of the Nazarene. Simply stated the book broke any romantic illusions I had about the Roman Church. It seemed to me as compromised and fucked up as anything American Evangelicalism had going for it. Regardless of the beauty of its liturgy or the depth of its intellectual tradition, I just couldn’t imagine ever converting. Perhaps if I grew up in a Roman Catholic culture I’d engage with it in some sense (and in fact I do), but why would I ask permission to be a part of something that had a hierarchy I’d struggle against for the rest of my life? And, worse yet, refused to acknowledge its awful crimes towards, not just others, but its own adherents? Perhaps not the outcome hoped for by Cavanaugh…

The So-Called Dualism between Nature and Culture

I’ve expressed my disappointment with the majority of theological engagements with ecology and that disappointment has come up again as I’ve been preparing my lectures for Environmental Ethics and Religious Thought. It seems that a lot of theologians focus in on the “split between nature and culture” as the underlying idea driving the ecological crisis. It isn’t just the high-church orthodox ones either. Lynn White’s famous essay that locats the “psychic foundation” for the ecological crisis in the turn from paganism to monotheism is really about what more contemporary thinkers refer to as the split between nature and culture. For White sees in Christianity the enthroning of humanity over and above nature. You then have Northcott responding to this claim with the counter that it was “the wrong kind of Christianity” that created this split. So, rather than dealing head on with the charge (which could be spurious anyway), Northcott moves around it, all the while leaving the underlying thesis regarding nature and culture in place.

This so-called dualism really doesn’t bother me though. I don’t think that positing distinctions in reality lead to the ecological crisis. Nor do I think that a nature/culture split leads automatically to viewing the earth as just a collection of things to be used. I know you get this in Heidegger, the change from a river into the power that a river can provide, but that is part of the river. Even from a phenomenological perspective we don’t find any foundation for the rampant nostalgia present in the theologians’ insincere lamentations for a bygone era. I’m not the biggest fan of Latour’s work, but his theory of nature/culture hybrids does reveal something. Essentially, neither nature-as-that-which-is-but-is-not-human and culture-as-that-which-is-human-and-part-of-nature have priority. There is something univocal at work underlying nature and culture (with these definitions, since they are slippery terms). We can call that Nature’s character as One. But positing a dualism helps us to think the real immanence of Nature-as-One, for it is a formal and abstract separation, rather than a real one.

I think if theologians could get to grips with the truth of immanence they would be less terrified by death, by nature, by genes, and the like. It may help them get past their psychopathic ethics; the kind where you say things like “there is no death outside the church” or you’re living in fear that you don’t know what life is. For the truth of immanence is not naturalism, scientists don’t even believe in naturalism now days, but gnosis. Rather than thinking it is all occluded, all a paradoxical mystery supported by the hand of the Creator who humiliates his creatures, you just know.

The Girlfriend’s proof of the existence of God

One day, The Girlfriend mentioned to me an article she had read that claimed that couples are happier when they discuss serious issues. In that spirit, I asked her if she believed in God. Her response was that she thinks that nature tends to seek some form of equilibrium or the path of least resistence. With that in mind, the only way things could’ve gotten so screwed up is if some kind of outside agent interfered — therefore, God must exist.

I find this to be a remarkable contribution to the theodicy debate. As I explain it to my students, the problem of theodicy is to find some way of reconciling the following three statements:

1. God is good.
2. God is all-powerful.
3. Evil exists.

The orthodox tradition has tended to solve the problem by seriously qualifying point #3 through its theory of evil as privation, whereas major strains in 20th century theology have rejected or significantly questioned point #2. The Girlfriend’s innovative contribution is to reject the almost universally unquestioned point #1. In addition, it provides a major advance in the attempt to prove the existence of God, insofar as it turns the most powerful argument against God’s existence (the problem of evil) into the key argument for God’s existence.

In conclusion, I recommend that all theologians and philosophers date someone outside their field, and preferably outside of academia altogether.