In the beginning God began creating not out of nothing but out of something, ordering the already present chaos, and sparking a process of creativity that continues to the present and into the future, a process in which all of creation is participating. God’s providence, far from being tainted with power and intervention is a statement about present reality, a statement that rings from the powerless cry of Jesus on the cross into the future against suffering, injustice and oppression.

In keeping with our quasi-panentheistic notion of God with a certain postmodern flavoring, it should come as no surprise that creation and providence will be treated and reified in stark contrast to more modern and traditional theologies.  To being with, we should note that any concept of God which makes its home outside of Western metaphysics, understanding God as that signification, that event which is wholly otherwise than being will surely be incompatible with the long-standing doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.  In this first place, one can argue, quite convincingly in fact, that the doctrine is itself unbiblical.  As John Caputo¹ and Catherine Keller² have observed Genesis does not state that God created the cosmos from nothing, it simply states that “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:1).³ To but it bluntly, ‘in the beginning’ “things had already begun,” in some sense, and God simply brought things to life, indeed “[brought] being to life.”⁴ According to this creation narrative, God’s action is more like ordering some already existing chaos than it is creating matter from nothing.  On this reading “creation is not a movement from non-being to being…but from being to beyond being”⁵ in which God, Elohim in the Hebrew text, far from an arrogant display of power and omnipotence simply brings order to that which was already there, bringing life to the being that is already present.  Odds are the Hebrew writers who penned this beautiful mythopoetic narrative had no problems with this messy, risky view of creation.  The problem, as Caputo points out, is when Greek metaphysics re-appropriated the story:

Metaphysical theology has turned this Hebrew narrative into the tale of a pure, simple, clean act of power carried out on high by a timeless and supersensible being, a very Hellenic story that also goes along with a top-down social structure of imperial power flowing down from on high.  There is order and majesty here no doubt, but the story is, upon closer reading, “must messier,” as Keller says, more complicated—not creatio ex nihilo but “creatio ex profundis,” not a single clean power acting ex nihilo, but a concert of forces, one active and formative and the other more open-ended, free-floating, fluid, and unformed.  A poetics of creation from primal, untamed, unwieldy, water elements, as wily as the wind and as slippery as water, elements that tend to resist fixed order.⁶

Fixed order is inherent in creatio ex nihilo.  Indeed, one of the main reasons the doctrine is necessary within a metaphysical theology is to differentiate between God qua substance and creation qua substance, to distinguish between Creator and creation.  But as we have already seen, God is not a substance among others or a kind among others — God is that which is beyond both substance and kind.⁷ This so-called divide between God and creation becomes much more porous in a panentheistic view wherein creation is not seen as that which is separate or apart from God but rather that which is in God.  Recognizing the limitations of anthropomorphic analogies (and all analogies really), we might say that the world is God’s body, that God is always already incarnate in the world.  This is not, to be sure, simple reductionistic pantheism, which mundanely holds the creation is God and God is creation.  Creation is more than the sum of its parts.  This more, this beyond is what we might call God; contra Aristotle, God is not the Unmoved Mover, but the most-moved mover, as everything is in God.  As Moltmann rightly notes, “everything that is, and lives, manifests the presence of [the] divine wellspring” as “everything exists, lives, and moves in others, in one another, with one another, for one another in the cosmic interrelations of the divine spirit.”⁸ As this quote suggests, another problem with creatio ex nihilo is its lack of a Trinitarian focus, relegating the act of creation to the first person of the Trinity as some sort of divine monarch, but through our postmodern panentheistic optic we can affirm, along with Catherine Keller, a much more dynamic process of creation that “breaks the Trinity out of its doctrinal self-enclosure in the metaphysics of substance.”⁹  Here the inherent interrelatedness of God Godself is inscribed into creation itself “signify[ing] not only the immanent Trinitarian relations, but also an economic interdependence of creator and creation, and as such the interrelation of all creatures.”¹⁰  Moreover, creation on this account is not so much an instantaneous act of power as in creatio ex nihilo, but an ongoing, ever-unfolding act of creativity guided by the Spirit and in which creation and creatures participate.  Such a view is not only compatible with modern physics and evolutionary biology but with scripture itself as some translations of Genesis 1:1 render the verb not in the past tense (created) but in a progressive manner (began creating/began to create) which suggests an ongoing and continuing act of creation which began sometime in the past, continues in the present and into the future.  Perhaps then a more faithful doctrine of creation might be creatio continua, which implies continued creative activity on the part of God the Triune God as well as creation itself into the future.

What, then, is to become of God’s alleged providence and sovereignty in our appropriation?  Having already dealt with the issue of God’s powerlessness as made incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ in an above section, let us rephrase the question:  how and in what way(s) does God act in the world?  Too often God’s sovereignty, and especially God’s providence, when cast in metaphysical terms and inscribed unto a Supreme, omnipotent, all-knowing, Mega-Being only really serve as a foil for Transcendental Meaning.  In other words, God is commonly said to be all powerful, guiding the course of events in history as some sort of quasi-interventionalist — a close cousin to deus ex machina, by the way, and not at all the God of kenotic pathos revealed in Jesus! — not because God actually is those things but because those attributes, when projected onto God qua Being provide persons with a sense of certainty about the order of the universe and the meaning of things, however small or mundane.  But as our discussion of above indicates, no such God exists.  That God, the God of modern onto-theology, the God who Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Feuerbach railed against is dead.  In the aftermath of that death we are left with the God of Jesus Christ, a God of the event and eschatological possibility that is present and suffering in and with all of creation as that which is otherwise than being.  This is exactly what Slavoj Žižek, in his Neo-Hegelian Lacanian register, refers to when he says that the “Big other,” the guarantor of Universal Meaning, does not exist.¹¹ There is no universal and totalizing Transcendental Signified¹² ensuring us that, in a horrible misuse of Romans 8:28, “it will all work out in the end” regardless of our actions, that God is in control whilst horrible evil and grotesque tragedies are being committed.  To be sure, this does not mean that meaning does not exist nor does it simply acquiesce to boring nihilism.  Caputo picks up where Žižek leaves off reiterating that,

The weak force of God is embodied in the broken body of the cross, which has thereby been broken loose from being and broken out on the open plane of the powerlessness of God.  The power of God is not pagan violence, brute power, or vulgar magic; it is the power of the powerlessness, the power of the call, the power of protest that rises up from innocent suffering and calls out against it, the power that says no to unjust suffering, and finally, the power to suffer-with (sym-pathos) innocent suffering, which is perhaps the central Christian symbol. […] God, the event harbored by the name of God, is present at the crucifixion, as the powerlessness of Jesus, in and as the protest against the injustice that rises up from the cross, in and as the words of forgiveness, not as deferred power that will be visited upon one’s enemies at a later time.  God is in attendance as the weak force of the call that cries out from Calvary and calls across the epochs, that cries out from every corpse created by every cruel and unjust power.¹³

More will be said about the ecclesiological implications of this in a later section.  For now it will suffice to say that the God of powerlessness, the God of the event who is revealed in the broken and tortured body of Jesus, far from precluding persons to solidarity as a Big other might, demands that the community called according to God’s name — that is, the community called ecclesia, the church — stand and indentify with the oppressed and the victims on the underside of worldly power.  Here meaning is created and assigned under the guidance and inspiration of the Spirit as the sacred text is performed in community.  Recalling Richard Kearney’s aforementioned neologism the God-Who-May-Be, God is palpably present when the community called church is realizing the eschatological possibility harbored by the name, rupturing predictable possibility and giving way to what Derrida calls the im/possible, which pushes mere possibility to its very limits and beyond.  God acts in the world when God’s people answer the call and respond to the event by following the way of the cross, standing alongside and identifying with the marginalized and powerless of the world.

God’s providence, then, is not to be equated with God’s controlling the future through brute power or intervention, as James Cone points out, “only oppressors can make such a claim.”¹⁴ Rather, providence is instead a tangible “statement about present reality—the reality of the liberation of the oppressed.”¹⁵ If the God revealed in Jesus is any indication, then the providence of God does not involve intervention or power at all, but rather the kenotic self-emptying of one for the sake of the other.  God in Jesus indentifies with all the victims, all the suffering, and all the oppressed as one of them.  God providential answer to the evils of the world, then, is the powerlessness of Jesus on the cross, unmasking the violence of the world, and protesting against all the atrocities of the ages.

1. Caputo, The Weakness of God, passim.
2. Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep:  A Theology of Becoming (New York, New York:  Routledge, 2003), passim.
3. All biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted.
4. Caputo, 58.
5. Ibid., 58-59.
6. Ibid., 59.
7. Kathryn Tanner, “God Beyond Kinds and Creation,” Essentials of Christian Theology, ed. William C. Placher (Louisville, Kentucky:  Westminster John Knox, 2003), 119ff.
8. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (Minneapolis, Minnesota:  Fortress Press, 1993), 9.
9. Keller, 232.
10. Ibid.
11. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf:  The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), passim and The Parallax View (Cambridge, Massachusetts:  MIT Press, 2006), passim.
12. Or as Morpheus put it in The Matrix (1999) to Neo: “Do not try to bend the spoon — that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon.”  Any attempt to appeal to or manipulate the Big other is impossible because the Big other does not exist.
13. Caputo, 43-44.
14. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (New York, New York:  Orbis Books, 1990), 80.
15. Ibid., 81.

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At one point I exchanged cards with a person sitting next to me — who may or may not have been under the influence — and his card, instead of reading what it was supposed to, said “I know you feel.”  I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but I have been reflecting on that difference between the two statements for several weeks now and I’ve come to the conclusion that that the latter, that is the one with the “typo,” is truer than than the former, the statement we inevitably default to when empathizing with those who are suffering or hurting.

In fact, the more I think about how radically different each of us is and how strikingly dissimilar our seemingly similar experiences are given the intricacies and peculiarities of our own subjectivity, the more I realize how arrogant and rash it would be to tell someone that I know how they feel.  Even if I have shared an experience that we might for the sake of convenience call “similar,” or even “the same,” I simply cannot understand nor comprehend how that experience may have altered or radically augmented the other’s narrative in ways strikingly different from my own.  My subjectivity and the other’s subjectivity are wholly other to one another.  Even our shared and similar experiences different; we experience the same experiences differently, so differently that I would say we are precluded from state that we know how the other feels.  Such would be to collapse the other into myself, relegating the other into the order of the same.  I think this is devoid of true empathy and compassion because it still places my experience and my subjectivity above that of the other.  I experience another as an object, not a subject.

The closest we can come, by contrast, to truly identifying with the other in our (un)shared experience is by declaring: I know you feel.  This seems superficially axiomatic but I think one would be hard pressed to find normal instances in which the deeply heterogeneous ways in which we experience trauma and suffering are actually validated rather than simply recognized and shoved aside.  Moreover, I find it very powerful that while I can identify with the other on a certain level through various shared experiences I can never know the full depth and breadth of her subjectivity, indeed that is precisely what it means to experience the other qua other.  I do know empathize with the other, despite our shared experience, because I know exactly how that experience relates to the other’s subjectivity or because I know “how” that experience makes the other feel.  Compassion and empathy couched in that way is, at its core, narcissistic.  I know the other feels (not how!) and I identify with the other despite the mystery that is her complete subjectivity and despite my desire to project myself onto the other. This is, I believe, what it means to “be with” those who are hurting and those who are suffering, not because we have actually been in their shoes — because we haven’t and to say we have would be damaging — but because we are woven together in the fabric of humanity and we encounter one another face to face despite the enigmas the separate us.  We stand together and hold together our shared experiences whilst realizing we understand those experiences and their effects quite differently, that is what it means to relate to one another and see one another and respect one another as other.

I don’t know how you feel but I do know that you feel despite what the world around you may say.

Contra traditional metaphysics and onto-theology, God, in our postmodern matrix, is not a Supreme, omnipotent Being or even Being itself; rather, the God revealed in the crucified body of Jesus Christ is a God otherwise than being, an event of eschatological possibility harbored by the name of theology which breathes life and dynamism to all things — God is dead, long live God.

In book ten of his Confessions Augustine asks, “What do I love when I love my God?”  a question he never fully answers for himself except to say that which we call God utterly transcends any categorization or conceptualization.  Negative and apophatic theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart are right to suggest that we cannot speak of what God is, only what God is not.  Indeed, to definitively claim what God is would be to create a conceptual idol. God is beyond naming and knowing, beyond nomination and that which cannot be captured or tamed within the confines of mere language.  But still we must speak.  We must develop some sort of logos concerning this enigma, yet this enigma lies beyond our logos. Therein lies the paradox, the tension.  God is that which is unknown, whose name cannot be uttered, but God is also that of which we are always speaking and thinking, thus “we must speak and yet we must maintain our silence”¹ in the excess of meaning and presence that is the un/known God.  We thus begin our venture into the doctrine of God with the humble admission that our language can only hope to point us toward the enigma to which we ascribe the name God but simply cannot do it justice.  Our theology of God will always be unfinished, incomplete, and provisional.  Those interested in nailing it all down will serve themselves well to not be theologians.  Theology is not an exacting enterprise nor is it interested in definitive explanations.  It is an ongoing, open-ended project that is more interested in approaching questions from a new vantage point and wrestling with the tension inherent in the questions than with providing easy answers.  Easy answers are hopelessly banal and trite, but the questions, the questions themselves are pregnant with meaning and possibility.  Thus theology approaches the question of God, the question of who or what God is, not in hopes of providing a clear-cut air tight answer, but, as Bertrand Russell says, “for the sake of the question itself.”²

Bracketing for a moment the ontological questions of to which we shall turn momentarily, let us first briefly comment upon Christianity’s unique, remarkable, and enigmatic concept of the Trinity, a notion that as profound ecclesiological implications.  Here the work of Jürgen Moltmann and Catherine LaCugna is particularly important.  Both emphasize the economic Trinity and hold that indeed the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa.  In other words, they ways in which the persons of the Godhead relates with one another — Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer³ — are inscribed to the very nature of God Godself.  Moltmann, for instance, in his The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, appropriates the Trinity in a manner that rejects what he calls “monarchical monotheism,” in which the second and third persons are subordinated to the third thereby constructing a hierarchical ordering.  Alongside Easter Orthodoxy and over against the subordinationism of the West, Moltmann and Lacugna emphasize the perichoresis and the mutual indwelling inherent in the Godhead in such a way that the identity of each person of is inextricably bound up and linked with the other, is indeed part of the other.  As such, the Trinity is a radically egalitarian community in which no one person dominates over another.  Further, for Moltmann, divine kenosis is not limited to the incarnation alone, rather it characterizes the relations inside the Trinity itself as each person empties itself into and for the sake of the other in loving communion.⁴ As such, this social notion of the Trinity establishes that “entering into divine life…is impossible unless we also enter into a life of love and communion with others.”⁵ Thus, the Trinity is not only a practical doctrine with radical consequences for Christian living it literally “revolutionizes how we think about God and about ourselves, and also how we think about the form of life, the politics, of God’s economy.”⁶ The practical significance of the Trinity for the community called church will be of the utmost importance in our discussion of ecclesiology and theological anthropology in later sections.

Turning now to the aforementioned ontological questions, perhaps one of the greatest missteps of historical Christianity is its appropriation of Greek metaphysics (or, depending on how one views the matter, its bequeathing of Scripture to Greek metaphysics).  For by doing so the God of the Scriptures, especially of the Hebrew Scriptures, was replaced by a stoic, uninvolved deity and the God of pathos replaced with deus ex machina who controls the universe from afar and is wholly uninterested in the plights of human beings.  Christian appropriations of Aristotelian thought assigned attributes to God such as omniscience, omnipotence, and impassibility, attributes alien to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.  Since then, Christian theology has been preoccupied with a singular question, a question any theology which is beholden to these attributes must answer — that of theodicy.  However, since at least the time of Søren Kierkegaard — who John Caputo interestingly calls a “prime progenitor”⁷ of postmodernism — and Friedrich Nietzsche a line of thought which came to fruition, more or less, in the work of Martin Heidegger,⁸ has provided the grounding necessary in order to speak of God after the end of traditional metaphysics and the demise of various onto-theologies.  Nietzsche was correct to proclaim that “God is dead,” insofar as God had come to be indentified with a metaphysics of presence in which God is conceived as the supreme Being above all other beings, indeed a Being that suspiciously looks a lot like human projection (Feuerbach) or the subconscious superego (Freud).  What postmodern thought offers, then, at its best, is not slippery relativism (which we dealt with above) but a way to think of God in the wake of the death of the death of God, a way to theologize after the death of God.⁹  Such will be our aim in this section:  to utilize postmodern thought in such a way that theologizing becomes possible again.

From the outset, we must be clear that any such theology will necessarily involve a wholesale rejection of the traditional metaphysical attributes of God, namely impassibility, omnipotence, and omniscience.  For as Moltmann points out apropos to Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover,” a God who is impassible and “incapable of suffering…would also be incapable of love”¹⁰ insofar as love involves loving others and not merely oneself alone, not to mention a God that is wholly incompatible with the revelation in Jesus Christ.  Many modern theologies seem determined to hold on to omnipotence for whatever reason, but despite the endless qualifications and bracketing of questions such as “why?” theodicy still rears its ugly head and any attempt to “explain” evil while retaining God’s so-called omnipotence within an onto-theological framework necessarily implicates God causally by virtue of that framework’s metaphysics.  As many theologians have noted, Auschwitz “spelled the end of theodicy.”¹¹ The problem, however, is that theology has not caught up.  The same holds true for omniscience and in this regard process theologians have done a remarkable job of rethinking God as that which does not know the future, indeed as that which is creating the future alongside humanity as a “becoming” rather than a static being.  The problem with process thought, however, is that does not go far enough. It still conceives of God theistically within a traditional, metaphysical framework.  What might God look like beyond that framework?

With our postmodern, post-foundationalist optic we find ourselves returning to Augustine’s question:  what is it that I love when I love my God?  Is God the best name we have for love, or is love that best name we have for God?  What is love anyway?  What can we do, then, but stand alongside the later Jacques Derrida and “make [Augustine’s] question [our] own?”¹²  It would seem, then, that reconceptualizing God outside the confines of a traditional metaphysics and onto-theology might involve treating Augustine’s question qua question, indeed as an open question and a query to which all theology must answer whilst admitting it can only develop answers and never an Answer.  The death of the modern God spells the end for any theology to capitalize its name.  In this respect, the work of postmodern philosopher/theologians John Caputo and Richard Kearney is especially helpful.  For Caputo, God is not a Being among others, or Being-Itself, or even the ground of Being as Paul Tillich might think.  Rather, God is beyond being or otherwise than being as Emmanuel Levinas likes to put it.¹³  Indeed, the very word “God” is a deconstructible name which harbors an impossible and undeconstrucible event.  As Caputo writes, “the name of God occurs, not on the plane of being, but of the event; it is the name of a signification or an interpretation, not a substance.”¹⁴  God is therefore beyond being and that “weak force,” another of Caputo’s expressions, that gives being its life, creativity, and dynamism.  Similar to the panentheistic God, in this framework everything is in God and pregnant with God’s possibility.¹⁵ Likewise, Richard Kearney speaks not of a God who is or is not but of a God-Who-May-Be¹⁶ in the tangible realization of eschatological possibility. Here God’s very existence is contingent upon our participation in the event and our willingness to allow Augustine’s question to remain an open question and one that we must continually pose and translate as we resist the temptation to relegate questions of God to traditional metaphysics.  The question then is not so much whether God exists, as onto-theology loves to continually ask, but whether the church is participating in God by allowing the event to lay claim to them. Here the meaning of the name of God “never comes down to a decision made in the order of being or knowledge, to deciding whether or not God exists; its meaning is shifted out of the circle of knowing and non-knowing, concealment and non-concealment, being and non-being,”¹⁷ to the realm of the hyper-real beyond that which is real or unreal.    It is in this way that we can begin to see what Derrida and Caputo mean when they speak of a “religion without religion,”¹⁸ or the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer of a “religionless Christianity.”¹⁹ Indeed, it is in this vein — contra metaphysics and onto-theology — that we might read Bonhoeffer when he writes,

[W]e cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have live in the world etsi deus non daretur (“as if God did not exist”). And this is just what we do recognize — before God!  God himself compels us to recognize it.  So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God.  God would have us know that we must live as men who manage out lives without him.  The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34).  The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.  Before God and with God we live without God.  God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, which he is with us and helps us.²⁰

After the death of God we still speak of God, not as an omnipotent, omniscience supreme Being above all else, but a crucified God revealed in the broken and tortured body of Christ, a God whose power is realized in his powerlessness.  This God is otherwise than being, a God beyond being, and a God of the event whose name is beyond all names, who is with all and in all; this is the God who may be, who comes to be as the church participates in the liberation of the oppressed and the realization of justice and peace in the world.

1. Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), 30.
2. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Radford, Virginia:  Wilder Publications, 2008) 101.  Russell was not, to be sure, speaking of the doctrine of God or even of theology but of the aim of philosophy.  Theology and philosophy have always had an odd relationship.  Here, though, it is not incorrect to equate their aims.
3. The use of personal and gendered language in relation to the Trinity is an important one and should not be overlooked.  For now, however, it will suffice to referred to them as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.
4. Cf. Moltmann, 118-19.
5. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us:  The Trinity and Christian Life (New York, New York:  Harper-Collins, 1993), 382.
6. Ibid., 383.
7. John D. Caputo, On Religion (New York, New York:  Routledge, 2001), 51.
8. Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (Chicago Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2003).  See also his Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (New York, New York:  State University of New York Press, 1996), passim.
9. This phrase is borrowed from a recent book by John Caputo and Gianni Vattimo entitled After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
10. Moltmann, 23.  See also his The Crucified God (Minneapolis, Minnesota:  Fortress Press, 1993), passim.
11. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 181.  Here Caputo is referencing Moltmann (without citation).  Interestingly, Moltmann holds onto omnipotence himself and is thus still enmeshed within this framework we are presently deconstructing.
12. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., Augustine and Postmodernism:  Confessions and Circumfession, (Bloomington Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2001), 3. The very fact that Derrida, who in the same work suggest that he “quite rightly passes for an atheist,” has the grounding to pose such a question suggest that we are already operating on a different plane outside of metaphysics and beyond onto-theology.  Indeed, the sheer fact that Derrida say he passes as an atheist rather than saying he is an atheist tell us that we are dealing with something beyond belief in one being among others.
13. Emmanuel Levinas, “Essence and Disinterestedness,” Emmanuel Levinas:  Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 1996), 109-27.
14. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 181.
15. As Meister Eckhart once stated, “We are all mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.”
16. Cf. Richard Kearney, “The God Who May Be,” Questioning God,  John D. Caputo et al. eds., (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2001), 153-86 and Kearney, The God Who May Be:  A Hermeneutics of Religion, (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2001), passim.
17. Caputo, Augustine and Postmodernism, 98.
18. Cf. John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:  Religion Without Religion (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 1997).
19. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged edition, ed. Eberhard Bethge, (New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 278-282.  Admittedly, Bonhoeffer would likely never take his neologism as far as postmodern can and will.  Thus, I am not interested in Bonhoeffer’s holistic theology per se, but rather the possibilities of his “religionless Christianity,” within the context of his letter(s), for postmodern theology.
20. Ibid., 360.

Of course, historically there is no doubt that Christianity unfortunately deserves to be placed alongside some of the more violent and totalizing metanarratives of modernity.  That is true.  I won’t dispute it.  However, I want to speak, more or less, normatively.

If we are to reify the Christian narrative after modernity, so to speak, how do we classify its narrative?

My conviction is that we have to be honest about the universal claims the Christian story makes on humanity and the course history, but unlike the metanarratives of modernity I think we also have to make room for respectful disbelief.  So the story is, I think, universal but not totalizing, invitational but not impositional.

That being said, I’m not sure I am happy or comfortable with calling the Christian story either a metanarrative or a micronarrative  It is universal but not domineering, it is contextual but not simply ad hoc.  I think it is a different story altogether and I find myself groping for another category.  I know, categories are limiting and so on, but I think it is important to have some sort of reference point, however limiting or provisional.

What do you think? Meta, mirco, or something else?

The locus of Christian authority and the centerpiece of revelation lies in the God who was revealed in the  incarnation of Jesus Christ — Scripture bears witness to this reality; as such the bible is the primary source of revelation and it becomes the contextual word of God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as it is responsibly interpreted and faithfully performed in the community called church.

God is the locus of Christian theological authority, more specifically, the God that was revealed in the historical incarnation of Jesus Christ. But what is the nature of that authority? Often in public theologizing appeals to religious authority are made in order to validate and legitimize specific truth claims to simply settle the issue in hand. In that sense, such authorities are more authoritarian than they are authoritative. This is problematic because theology, as a finite discipline, “is always potentially vulnerable”¹ and therefore can make no completely absolute or objective claims. Authority in the strict sense must therefore be abandoned lest theology be relegated to the sphere of modern, post-Enlightenment science, a move that has become all too popular since Descartes and Kant. Furthermore, since religious and theological authorities always require responsible interpretation, the order and placement of authority in the line of normative argumentation must be reversed so that it is not at the end of theologizing as a validator of certain claims, but rather at the beginning as the starting point from which all theologizing emerges.²

What then, are the sources of theological authority? Scripture is without a doubt the prime source of authority and the primary source of God’s special revelation insofar as it points to the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is not, however, the only source nor does it exist in a vacuum; like any other text, it requires responsible interpretation. In our time the claim that “Scripture interprets Scripture” without any subjective mediation is wholly untenable and makes for a wholly irresponsible hermeneutic. Here the so-called “Wesleyan quadrilateral” is helpful. If Scripture is the primary source of theological authority and the locus of Christian revelation then tradition, reason, and experience — helpful sources of authority and revelation in their own right — constitute a sort of hermeneutical triad by which Scripture is responsibly interpreted in various contexts and performed, that is made incarnate, by various communities.

Through responsible, communal interpretation, Scripture becomes the Word of God and is thus authoritative for Christian thought and practice. As Karl Barth writes, “The Bible is God’s Word to the extent that God causes it to be His [sic] Word, to the extent that He [sic] speaks through it.”³  Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit the text becomes the word of God as it is read, interpreted, and performed by the church. This does not mean, however, that the text (each passage, chapter, or verse) as a single, fixed, objective, and determined meaning for all places and in all times. Such an illusion is unsustainable for at least three main reasons.⁴  First, as finite persons each of us is socially, historically, and culturally situated in a such a way that is hardly impartial, disinterested, or purely objective. Each person, whether they are completely conscious of it or not possesses what Heidegger calls a “hermeneutic pre-understanding,” which is inextricably woven into the fabric of that person’s subjectivity and serves as a sort of “implicit fore-structure [guiding] all interpretation in advance, upon which all interpretation draws, [and] by which every inquiry which is anything more than an ‘unphenomenological construction’ is nourished.”⁵   Even if there is such a thing as “objectivity” no human being would be able interpret it purely and without bias or prejudice. In other words, we are human, all too human. A white, American male from the rural south will read the bible very differently than a woman in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is whether Christians are making room in their theology for the bible to become the word of God for both persons, perhaps with different meanings, purposes, and ramifications.

Second, such illusions of objectivity inevitably lead to violence and domination. Too often the Western interpretation of Scripture has hid “behind an unchallenged belief that it is the Word of God”⁶  which has justified and legitimized not only the subjugation and oppression of the other but of the other’s interpretation of the text as well. When viewed from the perspective of those on the underside of history and the underbelly of power the history of Christianity is quite a sobering story. However, if Christians can begin to admit and own their own hermeneutical presuppositions and come to terms with the fact that the meaning of texts, especially biblical texts, look very different depending upon context, then perhaps Scripture will cease to be a foil for cultural imperialism and instead a tool for liberation. As Kwok Pui-Lan writes, “biblical truth cannot be pre-packaged…it must be found in the actual interaction between text and context in the concrete historical situation.”⁷

Finally, the myth of objectivity supposes that both text and author⁸ are static, fixed and motionless. Here the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (as well as Paul Ricoeur) is particularly helpful. If Scripture is indeed a living text as many Christians claim, its meaning cannot be static nor can it be limited to the mind of the author alone. As Gadamer writes, “the hermeneutical reduction to the author’s meaning is just as inappropriate as the reduction of historical events to the intentions of their protagonists.”⁹ Interpreters in the church seeking to embody and apply the text in their lives will always be confronted with the “world in front of the text,”¹⁰ a world which simply isn’t the same as the world of the text nor the world of the author. Yet the text is ours as it was the author’s and past interpreters:

Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text belongs to the whole tradition whose content interests the age and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of the text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history.¹¹

There is thus an irreducible plurality of potential meaning and polyvalency residing in any text and Scripture is no exception — this is the work of the Spirit. It is the job of the Christian, indeed the job of the church to be, under the inspiration and guidance of the Spirit, about the business of wrestling with the tensions of these various worlds by responsibly interpreting and performing the texts of Scripture always with the life, death, and resurrection of Christ in mind. Through this process the text is “assigned meaning by the community while at the same time overflowing into the community, often displacing and dislocating prior meaning.”¹²  Such is the work and dynamism of the Spirit.

Now, the obvious and most common objection to such a position is that it lends itself to nihilistic “anything goes” type relativism. Such is not the case¹³ and more often than not it seems that such caricatures serve the purpose not of substantive and meaningful engagement with the reality of plurality, but of shallow rhetorical dismissal and a refusal to come to terms with the end of the illusion of objectivity. Acceptance of the inherent plurality of meaning and polyvalence in the text does not, on the contrary, mean “anything goes.” One is not given the freedom to do what one wills with the text, indeed such an act would be to do violence to the text itself (and likely to others as well). Here it is important to underscore the importance of responsible communal interpretation of the text. One of the greatest strengths and most crippling weaknesses of the Protestant Reformation is that individuals were afforded the right and ability to read the Scriptures in isolation. Since then, too many faith communities have failed to responsibility live with the tension of individual interpretation, on the one hand, and communal interpretation on the other. Maintaining a proper balance will go a long way toward defending this so-called relativism. It is also important to note that there are bad, indeed, wrong, interpretations and manipulations of the text. Admitting the end of objectivity should not be equated with the end of interpretative judgment making. While there are numerous valid and meaningful interpretations of a given text, not every reading is valid. Recall Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit illustration.¹⁴  Depending upon one’s perspective or hermeneutical pre-understanding one may see either a duck or rabbit; indeed, it is possible that one might see both. Neither answer is more right than the other; both simply are. However, one would be wrong to say the illustration is a depiction of an elephant or a giraffe. When speaking of biblical texts the same principal applies though it is not as clear as a simple drawing. Indeed, there are likely more than two interpretations of a single text and discerning which interpretations are destructive is much more nuanced. Some who prefer objectivity will still eschew such an approach because it does not posit a simple, cut and dry methodology. For those who have long been silence by the “authority of objectivity” will find this affirmation of the plurality of meaning very liberative, and indeed salvific.

Perhaps then, in light of this shift away from objectivity and fixed meaning, a more dialogical hermeneutical model¹⁵ is the best approach toward Scripture. That is, a model in which the church is always in prayerful conversation with itself (in the past and the present) and with the other over what interpretation is the most responsible for its current context, its current historical situation. As Jürgen Moltmann writes, “humanly speaking, truth is to be found in unhindered dialogue […] for it is only in free dialogue that truth can be accepted for the only right and proper reason — namely, that is illuminates and convinces as truth.”¹⁶ This transformational conversation, which in the process of interpretative discernment is always guided by Jesus’ axiomatic love for God and neighbor, would not only involve room for the Spirit, but a special place for those voices that have long been marginalized and silenced in the process of interpretation. Indeed, it is by allowing space for those voices that we allow the Spirit to breath new life into the text for such dialogue is not “a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”¹⁷

1. Robert C. Neville, A Theology Primer (New York, New York:  State University of New York Press, 1991), 13.
2. Ibid.
3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, edited and translated by Thomas Forsyth Torrance and Geoffrey W. Bromiley (New York, New York:  T&T Clark, 2004).
4. There are many more reasons which draw upon the insight of 20^th century continental thought, but this is not the place to explore them in depth.
5. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God:  A Theology of the Event (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 2006), 113.
6. Kwok Pui Lan, Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (New York, New York: Orbis Books, 1995), 12.
7. Ibid., 11.
8. If there even is an author.  See Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York, New York:  New Press, 2003), 377-91.
9. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2^nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York, New York:  Continuum Books, 2004), 366
10. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences:  Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. John B. Thompson (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), passim.
11. Gadamer, 296. Emphasis mine.
12. Bryan P. Stone, Evangelism After Christendom:  The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Brazos Press, 2007), 172.
13. Rigorous defense of this position has been undertaken elsewhere and lies outside our immediate purposes.  See, for example, Merold Westphal, Whose Community?  Which Interpretation?:  Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church (Grand Rapids, Michigan:  Baker Academic, 2009) and John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics:  Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, Indiana:  Indiana University Press, 1988).
14. This illustration which Wittgenstein borrowed from Jastrow is originally found in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 193-94.  It is also discussed in Westphal, 24-26.
15. Cf. Pui-Lan, 33-43.
16. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God:  The Doctrine of God (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1993), xiii.
17. Gadamer, 371. Emphasis mine.

If I had to pick one point where Jürgen Moltmann has made the most significant impact on my own theology it would be his social doctrine of the Trinity.¹  In fact, it wasn’t until I read The Trinity and the Kingdom of God that I was actually excited about being Trinitarian!  Moltmann is not interested in the old heresies and old debates surrounding substance, or essence, or autonomous personhood.  Instead he is interested debunking monarchical monotheism, which inscribes domination and hierarchy into the very nature of God (not to mention humanity!) where God the Father — and here nobody would have a problem with the masculine, phallocentric language — sits at the top of the order, below him sits the Son, and last (and more often than not least!) sits the Spirit — because by this logic it only makes sense that the more feminine of the persons be at the bottom of the hierarchy!  Moltmann claims that all Trinitarian formulations at least since Augustine and surely since the insertion of the filioque into the Nicene Creed by the West are captive to this type of monarchical monotheism.

Obviously this creates all sorts of problems, especially if you believe that the human order should, more or less, mirror the divine order.  Then you have domination and subjugation writ large.  Enter Moltmann who, as we can already see, is more interested in the social and political implications — in other words, what all this means for the Imago dei — of the Trinity than modalism, Arianism, or any other ancient -ism that really has no bearing on contemporary theology.

Over against the hierarchical models, Moltmann imagines² a more egalitarian approach (I don’t know that he uses that word himself and I don’t know if he would take issue with it; I certainly don’t) which emphasizes the “community of God” that is comprised of the three persons and the perichoresis, the mutual indwelling, that binds them together as one.  For Moltmann, kenosis is not limited to the second person and the incarnation alone, indeed it is such kenotic love that holds the Trinity together, each person giving and emptying itself for the sake of the other.  In this relationship the identity of each person is inextricably linked to each of the other persons and through that bond each person sees the other as part of the Other and in the process sees itself as (an)other.³

In Moltmann’s larger theology this has deep political and social implications.  If the divine hierarchy is deconstructed then the human hierarchy must be too, and a radically new community — an order steeped with kenotic love and perichoretic unity that jettisons any form of domination — replaces it.  To be created in the image of God is to be a relational being, a mirror image of members of the the divine community.

You probably already see where this is going.  My question is what might happen if we not only took Moltmann’s social doctrine of the Trinity seriously but let it infiltrate our eccelsiology as well. What would happen if our ecclesial structures and our relationships with one another in the community we call the church were guided not by hierarchy and power but self-emptying, kenotic love and perchoretic egalitarianism?  What if we reversed the polarities of the order of power in the church and not only upheld our responsibility to the other but saw ourselves as (an)other too and deeply dependent upon the embodied connection between our subjectivity and the other’s subjectivity?  Is that not what Moltmann was getting at in his book title — “The Trinity and the Kingdom” — where the church doesn’t mirror the power structures and regimes of domination that rule this world but the very community of God in which persons are persons only in self-emptying relationship with other persons?  Is it just me or is it hard, if not impossible, to do that when the church is beholden to uneven power dynamics?

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1. His argument in The Crucified God apropos to God’s suffering is a very close second, but I’m not sure Moltmann goes far enough.  The suffering, abandoned God in Christ on the Cross would be much more salient and radical if Moltmann let go of omnipotence, but he wants to hold on to it.  I think we have to let go of that idea.  Not to mention the residual theodicy issues that are still very much at work under the surface.  I may take this up later at some point.
2. This is really is nothing new.  Eastern Orthodoxy has always held this view and it dates back to at least the Cappadocian Fathers.  I think it is fair to say, though, that Moltmann certainly popularized it, especially in the Western tradition, and extrapolated its political and social effects a bit further.
3. Ok, Moltmann doesn’t exactly use this sort of postmodern accent, but I can’t help it.  I hear when I read him — especially on the Trinity.

I think the best way for me to reflect on the Moltmann Conversation will be in a series of posts on a few key thoughts that were brought up over the course of the conference and have stuck with me.  Before going I figured I would just post my notes but I can’t do that because, well, I don’t really have any “normal” notes.  I wasn’t really able to take notes like I normally do because the conference was, more or less, a sound byte conference, which would be interesting to talk about in itself.  Free wifi was provided so just about everyone was either tweeting or liveblogging.  A screen was up behind the stage displaying some of the #moltmann tweets.  Then there wast the twub.  So the whole time I was trying to listen to the questions, listen to Moltmann’s answers (many of which were gems and very tweet-able), watch the Twub, watch the screen and tweet.  So in a sense my tweets ended up being my notes.  Weird, I know.  But that’s how it worked out.

During the first session Moltmann spoke to his own life experience (something he develops on a large scale in his autobiography, a book you should really read if you get a chance) and I was immediately struck by the notion of theology as biography.  His personal experiences as a POW and instances of deep tragedy and suffering led him to questions similar to those of Christ on cross:  where is God in the face of death and suffering?  In many ways, these experiences send Moltmann on theological trajectories that determine the bulk of his life’s work.  A Theology of Hope and The Crucified God are two of the most prominent examples.  The former views the whole of theology from an eschatological perpsective in which the church looks with hope to the future while standing firmly in the confidence of the resurrection and eagerly anticipating the incoming of God’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth; the latter is, of course, the other side of this hope: the cross of Christ through which God enters into the suffering of the world and identifies with the victim not as the stoic deity of Greek philosophy who is disaffected by the cries of the oppressed, but the God of the Hebrew scriptures, the God of pathos who is capable of deep suffering and likewise capable of deep love.  It is in this way that Moltmann re-frames the theodicy question, not as something to be answered — because as he stated at the conference “no answer will satisfy us” — but something to be wrestled with; indeed as something to be wrestled with together with God.¹

The theological particulars of each of these are interesting in their own right, but for me, after hearing Moltmann tell his story, the fact that both emerged from his personal experiences and his desire to develop a theology “after Auschwitz” cannot be overstated.  His is a perfect example of theology as biography and biography as the working out of theology.  Of course this happens both individually and collectively.  In that vein I appreciated Tripp Fuller (who I was finally able to meet in person!) raising the question in the panel of how 9/11 has effected the biography of younger (and even older) Americans in the same way WWII did for Moltmann’s.  At this point I think it may be too early to tell exactly how theology in the 21st century will take shape in the aftermath of that event.  But I think Moltmann provides us with a good model. I think we will be and are presently asking some of the same questions he did in response to suffering and tragedy.  And I think the way in which he poses those questions and attempts to re-frame them may be helpful too.

But the larger point for me is still theology as biography and biography as the incarnational outworking of theology.  And the more I think about the more I realize that is always our “background music” whether we realize it or not.  Perhaps our becoming conscious of it will make us better theologians.

1. Here I will resist the temptation to put Moltmann in conversation with John Caputo’s “weak God.”

When I got home all I got was the white screen of death.  No pages.  No posts.  No Wordpress dashboard.  Nothing.  So I did what I usually do.  I started stripping things away.  Themes, plugins, etc.  That didn’t work either.  I did some Googling around.  Some people had the same problem and were able to fix it pretty easily by tweaking some memory limits.  That didn’t work.  I tweeted about it and go some good suggestions (thanks Gideon) and some not so good.  None of them really worked.

I wiped Wordpress off my server I don’t know how many times and uploaded fresh installs.  Nothing.  I started to panic.  And for most of the night (and some of this morning) I thought I might lose all my posts and comments.

It turns out my sql database was somehow corrupted.  So corrupted that I couldn’t use my main backup and had to export and import reach table manually.  I’m still not done.  A lot of meta-data still needs to be dealt with and I know that some links are dead.

But the good news is I didn’t lose anything.  If you stopped by here yesterday and got nothing but a white screen I apologize.  Hopefully over the next few days I can get thinks back up to normal.

So much for starting off the week with a Moltmann post.  Those will come soon.  I promise.

I doubt that I will liveblog much, unless I change my mind.  Tweeting should be much easier and I’d rather contribute to the larger conversation that will be going on the Twub, rather than make up my own.  That being said, if you follow me on Facebook it will be easier to keep up with everything if you follow me on Twitter.  I’m not going to feed all my tweets into Facebook because I don’t want to spam a bunch of people.  I’ll double up on some things but not all.  If you follow me on Twitter and aren’t interested in any of this, well, I apologize.

To make things super easy, I’ve embedded the Twub below so you can keep up with everything that is going on from here if you like.

Hopefully sometime over the weekend, or maybe early one next week, I’ll post my final thoughts on the whole experience.