The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Theology: History and Justice

In his Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (George L. Mosse Series), Jan Assmann argues that justice is a “generator of history,” that is, it is the concept/action that makes history a field of interaction between God and man.  In the Bible, in contrast to Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religion, “History is seen as the manifestation of the will of God, of a god who reacts to the deeds of mankind by punishing, rewarding, guiding, and, eventually, redeeming.  History, or God’s interaction with humanity (or with his chosen people), is based upon justice.”  Thus justice is “a generator of history.”

That biblical perspective appears in some other ancient religions, but it also runs directly contrary to the impulses of many ancient religions, for which justice as order is precisely a stay against time and history.  It is the fixed frame within which time and history flow.

Theology: Limits of Apophaticism

Gregory Nazianzen (Oration 28,9) says that negative theology is only a starting point, beyond which one must go to state what God is: ”he who is eagerly pursuing the nature of the Self-existent will not stop at saying what He is not, but must go on beyond what He is not, and say what He is; inasmuch as it is easier to take in some single point than to go on disowning point after point in endless detail, in order, both by the elimination of negatives and the assertion of positives to arrive at a comprehension of this subject.”

He follows with an analogy: “a man who states what God is not without going on to say what He is, acts much in the same way as one would who when asked how many twice five make, should answer, not two, nor three, nor four, nor five, nor twenty, nor thirty, nor in short any number below ten, nor any multiple of ten’ but would not answer ten nor settle the mind of his questioner upon the firm ground of the answer. For it is much easier, and more concise to show what a thing is not from what it is, than to demonstrate what it is by stripping it of what it is not. And this surely is evident to every one.”

Theology: Thomists against Thomas

In his Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life (Great Theologians Series), Nicholas Healy challenges Jean-Pierre Torrell’s claim that the Summa provides the only possible organization for theology.  He challenges Torrell in the name of Thomas:

“On my view, the ST has a rather different intent.  Thomas’s Christology and doctrine of God are such that they rule out any perennial account of reality other than Scripture.  Thomas’s is an anti-systematic system, so to speak, in that its principles systematically undermine any system that does not push the reader back to Scripture and to the concreteness of a life dedicated to following Christ. . . . It is least of all concerned to construct a perennial metaphysics to counter all other worldviews.  Theology, as Thomas understands and practices it, attempts to clarify what has been revealed of divine wisdom through the incarnate Word and the operation of the Holy Spirit.  Theological inquiry’s main function is to serve the preaching of the Gospel.  And the preaching of the Gospel serves the Christian life, which is distinct from others ways of life, since it is an attempt to follow Jesus Christ obediently.”

To which I can only say: Amen.  Plus, a very Barthian Thomas, that.

Theology: Good and bad religion

Cavanaugh points out that until the middle of the 20th century, American law regarded religion as a social glue rather than a provocation to civil war.  The “social glue” view is of course widespread in sociology (from Durkheim) and anthropology.

So, why is Western religion considered divisive and disruptive, while non-Western primitive and tribal religion considered socially unitive?  My guess is that the issue is the form that religion takes.  Anthropologists tell us that traditional tribal relations are ritualistic and practice-oriented, not doctrinally oriented.  So, it’s not religion per se that tends toward violence, but dogmatic religion.

In short: The myth of religious violence seems to be rooted, like much of modern social theory, in in liberal protestantism.  Doctrine divides, ritual unites.

Theology: Things Unseen

In his stirring, challenging Good News About Injustice, Updated 10th Anniversary Edition: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World, Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission gives a fresh spin to living by faith instead of sight: “Christians . . . are meant to be particularly gifted in sustaining a commitment to what is true and important though unseen.  The very essence of faith, we are told, is ‘the conviction of things unseen’ . . . Therefore, we who are only rarely exposed first- or secondhand to the truth about those who suffering injustice in our world are taught in Scripture to ‘remember’ what we know, even after it leaves our sight or experience.”  He cites the exhortations in Hebrews 13:3, Galatians 2:10 and Colossians 4:18 to remember prisoners, and those who are suffering: “Precisely because it is not our first and natural inclination, we are called to a conscious effort of reserving a space in our thought life for those who suffer abuse and oppression in our world. . . . Surely it is God’s job to remember all the victims of injustice in our world, but might there not be one child, one prisoner, one widow, one refugee that I can remember?”

Theology: Grasping knowledge

In his book on Gregory of Nyssa (Presence and Thought: Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa (A Communio Book)), von Balthasar contrasts Nyssa’s epistemology with that of Zeno and the Stoics.  Zeno described a progression of thought under the image of the hand: an open hand is sensation, a half-closed hand is assent, and when the hand grips something tightly, it has comprehended.  In sum, “Intelligence is . . . above all a possession, and, for the Stoics, the degrees of thought are identical to the degrees of force and energy used in grasping the object.”

Gregory will have none of this.  The whole point of his treatise against Eumonius is to show that “our concepts are only remote analogies, approaches to the infinitely rich reality of God, symbolic signs, which point out a direction without ever reaching their object.”  For Gregory, knowledge of the creation is of the same sort.  We never conceptually possess the creation: “The ‘logos of creation,’ the essence of things, always escapes us.  God alone knows it.”  Human beings strive for mastery, but this striving must be given up to attain knowledge: “Human knowledge is therefore true only to the degree it renounces by a perpetual effort its own nature, which is to ‘seize’ its prey.”

Yet Gregory develops all this without a hint of skepticism: “The great, eloquent passages in which Gregory demonstrates to Eunomius that we do not know the smallest essence of any thing, of any element, not even the smallest little shoot of a plant, have no agnostic flavor to them.”  Rather, “they are atremble with the great mystery of the world and end in silent adoration . . . before the incomprehensible beauty of God.”  In place of the grasping epistemology of Zeno, Gregory offers an epistemology of wonder, a doxological epistemology, in which faith is “the only knowledge that conforms to our condition.”

Theology: End of Magisterial Reformation

Orthodox ethicist Vigen Guroian suggests that conservative Protestantism in the US has relied on American Christendom to buttress itself.  American Christendom was the body for bodiless evangelical churches.  Now that Christendom is gone, there’s little holding evangelicalism up.

Guroian’s observation suggests that we’re not simply talking about the end of an American experiment but the end of a form of Protestantism that goes back to Luther.  Put it like this: Can there be a magisterial Reformation without the magistrate?  Or, to get at the same reality from another direction: Is it any wonder that Protestants from various traditions now find the radical reformation so attractive?

Theology: Iconoclasts and Jews

An eighth-century iconodule tract claims that the iconoclasts have “perpetuated the work of the Jews,” and compared the iconoclasts to Jewish priests conspiring against Christ.  Like many other ironodule treatises, it accused the Jews of corrupting the minds of iconoclast emperors.

It would be interesting to explore to what degree the iconodule position was affected by anti-Jewish rhetoric and polemic.

Theology: Interpellating Iconoclasts

In the same 2003 article, Cameron comments on the iconodule use of heresiological methods in dealing with the iconoclasts after the Second Council of Nicea: ”the victorious iconophiles hada strong interest in endorsing their council as the seventh and culminating representative of a series already formally recognized. They wanted to have it all ways: thus Tarasius termed the iconoclasts ‘Jews and Saracens, Hellenes and Samaritans, Manichaeans and phantasiasts, equal to Theopaschites.’ Naming was all important, for it was far from clear that the iconoclasts were in fact heretics.”

Theology: Use of Argument

Austin Farrer commented, in an essay on CS Lewis’s apologetics: “though argument does not create conviction, the lack of it destroyed belief.  What seems to be proved may not be embraced; but what no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned.  Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.”

Theology: Cantor and Theological Set Theory

Depoortere (Badiou and Theology (Philosophy and Theology)) provides a neat summary of Georg Cantor’s theological-mathematical treatment of infinity.  Cantor was led into these theological waters by the same paradoxical sets that Badiou uses to disprove the existence of God.  The difference between them is partly in their understanding of “consistent” and “inconsistent” multiplicities.  Depoortere explains that “For Cantor, an inconsistent multiplicity is a multiplicity for which it is the case that ‘the assumption that all of its elements ‘are together’ leads to a contradiction, so that it is impossible to conceive of the multiplicity as unity, as ‘one completed thing.’  These multiplicities are described by Cantor as ‘absolutely infinite,’ which entails that they can only exist potentially.  When, on the other hand, we have a consistent multiplicity, ‘the totality of the elements of that multiplicity can be thought of without a contradiction as ‘being together,’ so that they can be gathered together into ‘one thing.’” Only the latter count as “sets” because they have actual existence.

Badiou also uses the distinction of consistent and inconsistent, but he turns Cantor’s distinction upside down.  For Cantor, the conclusion that a multiple is inconsistent is “at the limit of his mathematical endeavours,” at the limit where “the count-as-one fails” and where one “bumps into the absolute.”  Badiou places the inconsistency first: “it is the nothing that precedes the count-as-one.”

All this left Cantor with two options:

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Theology: Badiou, Set Theory, and God

Frederiek Depoortere’s Badiou and Theology (Philosophy and Theology) is a challenging, fascinating introduction to Alain Badiou aimed (as the title and series subtly suggest) at theologians.  Badiou is best known to theologians as the atheist-Maoist-Marxist author of Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present), but Depoortere highlights instead the more central themes of Badiou’s philosophy.

What might those be?  Depoortere’s book answers in several ways.  Early on he summarizes a 1999 lecture of Badiou’s in which he reviews the sickness of contemporary philosophy, whether in its hermeneutic (Hedegger, Gadamer), its analytic (Wittgenstein and disciples), or its postmodern (you know who) guise.  Despite their differences, these three trends share two flaws: all assume the end of metaphysics, which means the end of truth, and all assume that language is “the crucial site of thought.”  Badiou finds both of these themes disastrous.  Philosophy is dead unless it can “establish itself beyond the multiplicity of language games” (Depoortere’s phrasing – this is the Kantian agenda, as described by Hamann) and unless philosophy can affirm Truth, it has no way to stand against “the monetary uniformity imposed on us by global capitalism.”

True philosophy adheres to a “fixed point within discourse, a point of interruption,” an event to which one remains absolutely loyal.  Hence Badiou’s interest in Paul, “a poet-thinker of the event.”  Badiou’s own Damascus Road is less transcendent: It’s May 1968.  A philosophy loyal to the event is characterized by revolt, logic, universality, and risk – all the features of genuine philosophy.  As Depoortere puts it, “Without ‘the discontent of thinking in confrontation with the world as it is’ (revolt) and ‘a belief in the power of argument and reason’ (logic), true philosophy is seen as not being possible.  True philosophy ‘addresses all human beings as thinking beings since it supposes that all humans think’ (universality’ and is, finally, always a decision which supports independent points of view’ (risks).”

That’s one way to put it.  Another way is in Badiou’s own words: “mathematics is ontology.”  This equation, Depoortere tells us, is “the basis of his entire philosophical system.”

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Theology: Religion and zoos

In one chapter of his delightful Life of Pi, Yann Martel gives a robust defense of zoos, and a funny critique of the notion that animals consider zoos to be prisons from which they long to escape.  From the first pages of the novel, Pi, the narrator, has connected zoology and religion (his double major at the University of Toronto), and he closes his defense of zoos by reverting to that theme:

“I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces.  Religion faces the same problem.  Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.”

Theology: Boundless liberty

Shakespeare’s Troilus stated the dilemma of desire with poetic concision: “The desire is boundless, but the act is a slave to limit.”  Human desire is indeed boundless, and that is so deeply embedded in human existence that it is hard to imagine human beings otherwise.  According to Troilus, this only means we are bound to be frustrated and dissatisfied.  Boundless desire has to settle for limit in act, and that means that our freedom is resolved into slavery.  The only real boundless is the inner boundlessness of aspiration, which can never be realized in action.

That is true unless boundless desire is directed, not only directed but bound, to some good that is boundlessly free.  In a Christian framework, having a heart fixed on God is not enslaving but liberating because the heart given to God participates in God’s own freedom.

Theology: God of the Living

John Paul II again: “the resurrection of Christ is the final and fullest word of the self-revelation of the living God as ‘God not of the dead but of the living’ . . . . It is the final and fullest confirmation of the truth about God, who from the beginning has expressed himself through this revelation.”

Theology: Understanding

In his discussion of The Idiot, Rowan Williams makes this profound psychological and pastoral observation: “To see the truth in someone is not only to penetrate behind appearances to some hidden static reality.  It also has to be, if it is not to be destructive, a grasp of the processes and motors of concealment, a listening to the specific language of a person hiding himself.  It is perhaps the difference between ‘seeing through’ someone and understanding him.”

Theology: Defending subjectivity

Given that so much evangelical energy is spend defending “objectivity” and “objective truth” against postmodern subjectivism, it’s striking to turn to John Paul II and find him placing the emphasis on precisely the opposite side of things.  For John Paul, the great need of the church in the modern world is not to defend the objectivity of truth, but to defend the freedom, personality, subjectivity, and intentionality of human action.  Sexuality, specifically, cannot be reduced to “drives” and animal instincts; it is an embodied expression of self-gift, a form of knowing, a inter-personal event of reciprocal self-gift intended as such by a man and a woman, human persons.

No doubt, John Paul’s sense of the challenges of modernity has something to do with his setting within Catholicism, where “juridicism” and institutionalism are the distortions to be combated.  Still, evangelicals might be challenged by the late Pope’s writings to wonder if our emphasis on “objectivity” is playing into the hands of (especially scientific) modernity.

Theology: Sociology

A summary of some arguments from Part II of Milbank’s book.It is important to Milbank’s approach that he does not treat sociology as a “discipline” but as a worldview, philosophical standpoint, or theological perspective. He calls it a theology and a church in disguise, offering an account of history that is irreconcilable with Christianity’s.  He makes two subordinate points.

First, Milbank wants to show that theology entered into the construction of sociology, and he spends a good bit of one chapter reviewing several 19th-century Catholic social theorists and showing the continuity between their metaphysical assumptions that those of Durkheim and Comte.  Again, the point is that theology has helped to construct a secular sphere, and he locates a heresy regarding the role of secondary causes in the doctrine of providence.

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Theology: Once There Was No Secular

What follows is a summary of the first part of Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Political Profiles).

Once, Milbank begins, there was no secular.

And the appearance of the secular is not merely a matter of removing something superfluous, as sociology generally tells it in its theories of “desacralization,” the image of the stripping of a sacred covering so that some realm of pure humanity and nature is brought into the open.  That portrayal assumes that there is such a thing as a pure humanity, which is always there under the surface of the sacred and of religion, which has nothing to do with the sacred, and it assumes that humanism is the natural destiny of history, the inevitable telos toward which all human societies  move.  Both of these assumptions must be contested.

This is an important theme throughout Milbank’s book: there is no “natural” human ordering of life.

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Theology: Eckhart, pantheist?

No, says Milbank.  But then he often sounds pantheistic, to his contemporaries as well as to us.  How does Milbank defend him?  Here’s what I think I’ve figured out:

1) God is transcendent, and this means (in Milbank’s Cusan theology) that He transcends oppositions; there is a “coincidence of opposites” in God.

2) Specifically, it means He transcends the opposition of difference/identity.  If God were simply different from creatures, He would be another being on the same plane as other beings.  To put it in quasi-Hegelian terms, if He were simply bounded by other beings, He would not be infinite but finite.  So, we cannot simply say that God distinguishable from other creatures without taking away from His transcendence.

3) On the other hand, He is not simply “indistinct” or “identical” either.  That would also rob Him of transcendence.  As I understand Milbank’s deliberately paradoxical formulation, He is distinguishable precisely by being indistinguishable, different precisely in the fact that we cannot simply differentiate Him from creation.  We can’t draw a line, point to one side and say, “here is God,” then point to the other side and say, “and here is not-God.”  We can do that with finite, immanent creatures; not with the infinite transcendent God.

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