Richard Rorty on liberal theology

In an interview, Richard Rorty has offered a very memorable assessment of liberal theology:

“I’m delighted that liberal theologians do their best to do what Pio Nono said shouldn’t be done – try to accommodate Christianity to modern science, modern culture, and democratic society. If I were a fundamentalist Christian, I’d be appalled by the wishy-washiness of [the liberal] version of the Christian faith. But since I am a non-believer who is frightened of the barbarity of many fundamentalist Christians (e.g. their homophobia), I welcome theological liberalism. Maybe liberal theologians will eventually produce a version of Christianity so wishy-washy that nobody will be interested in being a Christian anymore. If so, something will have been lost, but probably more will have been gained.”

I can hardly imagine a more acute commentary on certain forms of contemporary Protestant theology. Is this not, in fact, the precise goal of many theologians (e.g. Cupitt, Spong) – “to produce a version of Christianity so wishy-washy that nobody will be interested in being a Christian anymore”?

Slavoj Žižek and the loss of faith

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the temptation to quote Žižek once more:

“[W]ho, in fact, are fundamentalists? To put it simply, a fundamentalist does not believe in something, but rather knows it directly. In other words, both liberal-sceptical cynicism and fundamentalism share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept these statements as such, while sceptics mock them. What is unthinkable for both is the ‘absurd’ act of a decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision that cannot be grounded in the chain of ‘reason’, in positive knowledge.”

—Slavoj Žižek, The Universal Exception, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (2nd ed.; London: Continuum, 2007), pp. 308-309.

Ten thoughts on the literal and the literary

by Kim Fabricius

1. The more literal, the less literary a person is likely to be – and vice versa. A survey of the reading habits of fundamentalists would be an interesting exercise. I suspect that they would score low on reading classical and Booker/Pulitzer prize fiction – and even lower on poetry. I wonder what they would make of William Empson’s seminal study Seven Types of Ambiguity. To plagiarise Paul, the literal crucifies, the literary resurrects: meaning walks through closed doors. “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (Emily Dickinson).

2. It is an interesting fact that fundamentalism is predominantly a Protestant phenomenon, a reductio ad absurdum of the Reformers’ emphasis on the literal meaning of scripture to the exclusion of the medieval “fourfold vision” (Blake). Is there a lurking fear here of a connection between polyvalence and polytheism? How ironic that, on the contrary, an insistence on a single, solid, certain meaning – i.e. semantic closure – is indicative of idolatry. The burning bush is the horticulture of divine deconstruction, and the golden calf is bull.

3. Another interesting fact: the rise of Protestant literalism went hand in hand with the desacralisation of nature, which – the good news – entailed the rise of the natural sciences, but which also – the bad news – issued in the evacuation of God from the material world, soon followed the absence of God from the world of culture. Modernist atheism itself is the spawn of biblical literalism. And when belief did a bunk, it was the priesthood of poets that helped keep the rumour of transcendence alive.

4. So another connection: the “disenchantment” of nature (Weber) and the impoverishment of the imagination. Chesterton observed a “combination between logical completeness and spiritual contraction.” And he said: “Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so makes it finite.” There is also the spiritual contraction, the failure of imagination, of legalism and moralism. Hence R. S. Thomas’ description of Welsh Nonconformity as “the adroit castrator of art.”

5. There has been much discussion at F&T about the nature of theology as a science. Of course – this is a Barthian blog! But Barth himself was a master of stirring rhetoric and stunning imagery. And, of course, there was his passion for Mozart, and his admiration for Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Melville’s Moby-Dick. Barth wasn’t so hot on the visual arts – a Protestant prejudice! – but the Church Dogmatics is a cathedral, stained glass windows and all. In short, if theology is a science, it is also an art.

6. Which should not be the least bit surprising. After all, God-talk is impossible without the deployment of analogy and metaphor, and the Bible is incomprehensible apart from a narrative hermeneutics. Is it not therefore a scandal that, until recent times, theology has been in thrall to an ontological and epistemological captivity – and inevitable that it would take a Catholic, Hans Urs von Balthasar, to write a theological aesthetics and dramatics? Is not faith itself an imaginative perception of reality?

7. Theological ethics – another test case. Fundamentalist ethics are rule-based, and the answers to moral problems are found, decontextualised, at the back of the (good) book. Jesus’ preferred method of ethical instruction, however, is the parable, “subversive speech” (William R. Herzog II). Indeed Richard B. Hays argues that a “symbolic world as context for moral discernment” is fundamental to the entire New Testament. “The kingdom of God is like this.” Enter the story, work it out – then act it out!

8. Follow the trajectory to virtue ethics. The accent is on agency and action, dispositions and desire, time and telos. Rules are not excluded, but they function heuristically, as “perspicuous descriptive summaries of good judgments” (Martha Nussbaum), to inculcate habits appropriate to the development of Christ-like character. Moral theology works best when it tells the stories of the saints. Virtue ethics is narrative ethics, where the script is unfinished and improvisation is essential. The Christian life is jazz.

9. One of the great filmic send-ups of biblical literalism: the opening scene of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The camera pans to Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount, and then to a group at a distance where our Lord’s voice doesn’t quite carry. “Blessed are the cheese makers,” one character hears. “What’s so special about the cheese makers?” asks a woman. “Obviously it is not to be taken literally,” her husband replies; “it refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.”

10. Moral: a cultureless theology is an ecclesiastical disaster – and a “two culture” (C.P. Snow) theology is not much better. If we are ignorant of science we lapse into Idiocy 101-102: Creationism; or Imbecility 201-202: Intelligent Design. But if we are ignorant of literature, mere ignorance becomes downright dangerous – witness the nonsensical interpretations of biblical apocalypse by the religious right and its pernicious influence on American foreign policy in the Middle East. If pastors should be community theologians, community theologians should be writers-in-residence, exercising what Yoder called “word-care,” and teaching their folk how to read.

The collapse of theism

“The major churches in Europe, and partly in North America as well, are currently experiencing the collapse of classical bourgeois theism. More and more people are turning away from belief in a personal figure who exists over and above this world.... This collapse, which naturally gives rise to powerful countermovements—for example, fundamentalist ones—is hitting churches and cultures hard. Many institutions and many people are experiencing a crisis of landslide proportions.

“Laments over this development mostly overlook the fact that almost all significant theologies of the twentieth century have actually worked toward this collapse.... It was above all christological and trinitarian insights and questions that were determinative of the efforts to put an end to classical theism.”

—Michael Welker, Creation and Reality (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), p. 1.

Alvin Plantinga: what is a fundamentalist?

Cynthia posts a very funny quote from Alvin Plantinga on the meaning of the word “fundamentalist.” Plantinga provides a very helpful way of identifying people against whom we can use the label.

Are there "fundamentals" of faith?

Chris Tilling has a thoughtful post on the fundamentalist controversy of the early 1900s. The fundamentalists claimed that there were five “fundamentals” of Christian faith: the verbal inerrancy of Scripture; the divinity of Christ; the virgin birth; the substitutionary theory of atonement; and the bodily return of Christ. Needless to say, these polemical points can hardly qualify as the “fundamentals” of faith.

The most serious error of the early fundamentalists was that they tried to turn faith into a law, into a set of doctrines that must be believed—but faith is only ever a matter of freedom and permission, not of law or obligation. That's why I myself could never be comfortable using the term “fundamentals.”

So when Chris asks whether there are any true “fundamentals,” I would have to answer No. But perhaps instead of speaking of “fundamentals” (i.e. things that you have to believe in order to be a Christian), it would be better to speak of “identifying beliefs” of Christian faith (i.e. beliefs which are essential to the identification of faith as Christian faith). In this case, there’s no question of trying to impose certain beliefs on others or of turning certain doctrines into laws that must be obeyed, but only of describing those beliefs that distinctively mark out Christian communities and traditions from other communities and traditions.

So what are the “identifying beliefs” of Christian faith? It seems to me that there are two related ones: Christian faith is identified both by its christological character and by its trinitarian character. And at the core of both of these identifying characteristics is a single, central belief: a belief in the unity between Jesus Christ and God.

This, then, is what I would highlight as the central “identifying belief” of Christian faith: that in Jesus Christ we have to do with God himself. This belief itself can be (and has been) expressed with many different doctrinal formulations. And the formulations themselves are less important than the underlying intuition that our encounter with Jesus Christ is an encounter with the reality of God.

The Vatican on evolution and intelligent design

More details about the Vatican’s recent statement on faith and science can be found here, here and here. Cardinal Poupard defended evolutionary theory, and voiced “strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject [Darwin’s] theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally.”

In Rome, the statement was immediately understood as “a Vatican rejection of the fundamentalist American doctrine of intelligent design.”

The statement was made in the lead-up to the Vatican’s international conference this week on Infinity in Science, Philosophy and Theology.