For quite some time my approach to prayer was nothing more than a glorified exercise in narcissism laced with all the right buzzwords and religious jargon.  I treated God like some sort of cosmic gumball machine.  Through my prayers I inserted the proper coinage, twisted the handle, and hoped what came out of the tube was a flavor of gum I liked.  My prayers consisted of elaborate wish lists containing all sorts of petitions and requests.  To be sure, I would throw in something every once in while about starving kids in a third world country to feel less guilty and hopefully pad my persuasive capital with God — as if God were taking orders from me, or flipping some sort of epic prayer coin to decided whether or not my request should be granted.   God, for me, was a better version of a Genie in a Bottle: except there was no bottle because God was always there to listen (I always wondered how God could be there to listen to everyone, but I never let it bother me too much) and I had an unlimited number of “wishes.”  The only catch was I would never know if my wishes would actually be granted.  Some would, others wouldn’t.  Sometimes the minor ones were granted while other more important ones were not.  I just assumed God arbitrarily picked which ones to honor and which ones to table.  So it went.

I have long since rejected that very trivial theology of prayer, but as I reflect on its implications I realize how important our understanding of prayer actually is.  It seems to me that prayer is often sidelined as a second or even third tier “issue” subservient to more important and pressing theological questions like the nature of God or theodicy or soteriology and so on.  For example, if you go to a local book store book on prayer (the quality of such books notwithstanding) are almost always placed in the “Christian Inspiration” section rather than the “Theology” section.  However, if theology is primarily about developing a sound and coherent word (logos) about God (theos) — however limiting and finite it may be — what could be more important than prayer?  If I am feebly and delicately trying to develop ideas about God, about the divine, about that which is beyond me and that which consumes me — which is what I have devoted the remainder of my life to doing — what could be more weighty and significant than my ideas about addressing the divine, than my approach to communicating with God, than the way in which I, to borrow from Brother Lawrence, practice the presence of God?

This is what I am trying to get at: prayer says more about our theology and our ideas of God than we realize; indeed, I would go so far as to claim that how we view prayer in some sense determines what we believe about the nature of God and vice versa.  If God is a deus ex machina, a mechanistic deity, a Big Daddy in the Sky who pulls strings for good people and cuts strings for bad people, then we will pray in a certain way.  And, like my example above, how we pray will reveal an understood theology whether we overtly claim it or not.  If we really want to “do theology” well and uncover all those areas in which the residue of our tacit assumptions about God still remain, then we had better take prayer seriously.

What can we do, then, in developing a theology of prayer but return to St. Augustine’s age old question in book ten of the Confessions:  what do I love when I love my God?  Is that not the ultimate question of prayer?  Does that penetrating question not guide all our prayers and all our tears, all of our weak attempts to address that which calls us into being?  To paraphrase Jacques Derrida, what can we do but re-inscribe that question into our own context and our own language?

I must confess that I am not consistent in setting aside time for prayer or “quiet time” as they used to say at church camp.  Yet I wonder if in some sense doing so might minimalize the power and potency of prayer.  Here I want to be very clear:  I am not suggesting dropping such exercises altogether, of course there are important and edifying.  I’m just wondering out loud if hyper-emphasis on that alone misses the point of prayer.  What if instead of being relegated to the mundane as some sort of chore one must undertake in order to reach a certain quota prayer (and here I am relying on Brother Lawrence and others) demanded a radical restructuring of one’s life in response to the always ever-present Spirit of God in the world?  What if we lived life itself as an act of prayer rather than reduced prayer to mere daily exercise?  What if prayer is simply (and complexly) the ongoing outworking of our reply to Augustine’s question, which is always left open as a question?

It is in this vein that I read Oswald Chambers when he writes, “It is not so true that ‘prayer changes things’ as that prayer changes me and I change things.”  I do not pray to change God’s mind or to change reality, I pray because I myself am changed and transformed in the process.  And because I leave  Augustine’s question open as a question I am always answering (rather than a question to which I Answer) I stand with John Caputo, Derrida and the medieval mystics in saying that I do not know to whom I am praying, I do not know where my prayers and tears are directed.  Yet I am (at my best) transformed and empowered to restructure my life as an ongoing act of prayer in response to the question “what do I love when I love my God?”  Such a response is made palpable in my direct encounters with the other, encounters in which I am humbled to see myself as (an)other and encounters in which my normal, boring mode of being in the world is ruptured by divine grace, pushing me beyond a place of comfortability and into the realm of the im/possible where I see the other face-to-face.

I do not know to whom I pray, yet I continue.  And in so doing I, a broken vessel, am made new again and again.  In this way I can turn Derrida’s oft quoted statement (”I quite rightly pass for an atheist”) in my own direction:  I quite rightly pass as one who prays.  I seek to structure my life as an act of prayer itself insofar as such an act is an act of transformative response to the rupture of the divine event, of continually answering the questions of what it is that I love when I love my God and to whom, if anyone, my prayers are directed.  These are open-ended questions, they are never nailed down and only loosely demarcated.  My prayers are, like Augustine’s, prayers of a restless heart, of an unhinged being who does not know who he is and yet still seeks to understand from whence he came.  My prayers are always already unfinished and any “Amen” that I utter is always already the beginning of my next prayer, my next attempt at answering or reformulating these questions.

Our prayers have no real discernible beginning or end, only movements or acts (as in a play) in between.  This is, I think, precisely why Martin Luther King, Jr. said that to be without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without drawing breath.  To be in prayer is to be in touch with the divine, something which never really ceases albeit something of which we may or may not be aware.  The more efficacious prayer is — and here I turn back to Brother Lawrence — that one which is aware of one’s being in touch with something beyond oneself, something which beckons a tangible, sustained response; the most efficacious prayer is that one which heeds the call for response and allows oneself to be changed, both through the prayer and through outworking of the response.  This is the sphere we should inhabit as those who seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God — a sphere of continual prayer, a posture of “praying without ceasing” as Paul wrote (I Thess. 5:17).  So let us pray and let us continue to pray as together we work toward more faithful participation in the divine life.

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I was reading over his coverage of Tuesday’s events was immediately struck by this line from the Pete Rollins session (I don’t know if he is paraphrasing or if it is a direct quote):

The question is not is Christianity true, but what does it mean when it claims to be true.

The traditional assumption, of course, is that Christianity claims to be true in the same way that biology might claim to be true (at least that is what seems to have been discussed at the conference).  This is part of my beef with calling theology a “science.” It reduces meaning to the realm of empiricism and rationalism.  Theology is reduced to a fleeting pursuit of objectivity, which often claims to posses The Univocal Understanding of how the world works.  But what if it’s not so much about the world itself and how it works but rather how one should be in the world and how the community should embody an alternative to the world’s dominant narrative (of violence, domination, etc)?

That’s one way of approaching it.  But of course it’s not the only one.

However we might choose to answer it, I think framing the question in this way gets us a little closer to where we need to be.

How might you answer that question?  What does Christianity, or any religion for that matter, mean when it claims to be true?

I find it very difficult to celebrate the founding of a nation that is now the world’s largest imperialist power and has all but abandoned the principles upon which it was founded.  To commemorate nationalism, consumerism, capitalism, sexism, racism, militarism, and exceptionalism all on the same day and have the audacity to call it patriotism is a little much for me.  Even the fact that we still declare ourselves “Independent” every year on this day reeks of a dangerous type of collective ignorance and amnesia that is all too common in the good ‘ole USA.  We are not independent.  We haven’t been for a long time.  We are very much dependent on the rest of the world — “they” are the lifeblood of our now failing economy.  And we’ve mortgaged their well-being, their ability to live “the American dream” — to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on their own terms — in order to secure our own position of privilege.

But of course we’re not spending gross amounts of money on fireworks and firing up the grills to celebrate our current situation.  No, the whole point is to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence and as Howard Zinn points out:

The Declaration of Independence is the fundamental document of democracy. It says governments are artificial creations, established by the people, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and charged by the people to ensure the equal right of all to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Furthermore, as the Declaration says, “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” It is the country that is primary–the people, the ideals of the sanctity of human life and the promotion of liberty.

If that is true I wonder if we really realize what we are celebrating. Why don’t we take this stuff seriously instead of allowing our minds to be colonized by the status quo?  Why do we assume that global capitalism is here to stay and reject any alternative wholesale?  Why do we assume that the way in which we organize ourselves is the best or even the most effective way to do so?  Why are we afraid to try something different, to open ourselves up to a Derridean “democracy to come?” Here I find it quite ironic that many white liberals who have been on the side of dissent in this fashion for the last 8 years or so are suddenly quiet now that a new regime is in place and a new face represents the empire.  I like Obama, to be sure, and I voted for him.  But I am kidding myself if I believe that there will be any real, deep change.  There will be changes, but they will be cosmetic and like any well-oiled machine it will be just enough to blow off the steam and excess heat that is needed for things to keep moving.  Any system needs a good vent;  I’m afraid that too often our dissent only serves that purpose, thereby fulfilling an important requirement in maintaining the status quo.  We shouldn’t settle for a change in cosmetics and verbiage, we should demand a radical rethinking of our conceptual framework.

Of all people I think Christians should be on the cutting edge of this type of revolutionary imagination.  Jesus himself was executed by the state for preaching a message about an anarchic kingdom that existed under the nose of the status quo.  But still we continue to be co-opted by the forces of jingoistic nationalism.  So, though I disagree with him on some major points, I think Stanley Hauerwas is on to something when he brazenly claims:

I assume most of you are here because you think you are Christians, but it is not all clear to me that the Christianity that has made you Christians is Christianity. For example: How many of you worship in a church with an American flag? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt. How many of you worship in a church in which the fourth of July is celebrated? I am sorry to tell you that your salvation is in doubt.

The kingdom of God respects no nation knows no boundary.  This is why I think there is a truly subversive kernel to Christianity, a kernel that, if redeemed, can serve as a catalyst for revolution and evolution of thought.  But that cannot happen unless we shake free from all our various forms of dogmatism, be them religious, national or political.

And that’s why I find it increasingly difficult to celebrate holidays like the Fourth of July.  Not only because we have forgotten who we really are, but because the commemoration itself represents our penchant to complacently hide behind dogmatism writ large rather than allowing the creative imagination to conceptualize something beyond what we already know.

There is a war going on for your mind. If you are thinking, you are winning.

That is the nucleus of the post I wrote yesterday on prayer for Open Table Theology.  It should be published sometime later this month.

In the meantime, add the feed to your reader and join the in dialogical experiment!

The site of truth is not the way “things really are in themselves,” beyond their perspectival distortions, but the very gap, passage, that separates one perspective from another, the gap (in this case social antagonism) that makes the two perspectives radically incommensurable. The “Real as impossible” is the cause of the impossibility of ever attaining the “neutral” nonperspectival view of the object. There is a truth; everything is not relative—but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not the truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective. So when Nietzsche affirms that truth is a perspective, this assertion is to be read together with Lenin’s notion of the partisan/partial character of knowledge (the (in)famous partij’nost): in a class society, “true” objective knowledge is possible only from the “interested” revolutionary standpoint. This means neither an epistemologically “naive” reliance on the “objective knowledge” available when we get rid of our partial prejudices and preconceptions, and adopt a “neutral” view, nor the (complementary) relativist view that there is no ultimate truth, only multiple subjective perspectives. Both terms have to be fully asserted: there is, among the multitude of opinions, a true knowledge, and this knowledge is accessible only from an “interested” partial position.”

I gotta say, that makes a lot of sense to me.  Then we can only talk about better and worse “interested, partial positions” and never The Complete Position.

What would really interest me now is juxtaposing this with Caputo’s notion of truth as a happening or a event, a facere veritatem in his words.  Both positions seem to avoid the sinkholes of both objectivity and complete nihilistic relativism to a place beyond truth as disembodied proposition and toward truth as particular way of being in the world — a way of transformation.

Evernote is hands down my favorite Mac application.  It creates space for all the things I find worth keeping on the web (unless it’s a full page, I use Delicious for that) or noting.  It is my all-purpose capturing tool.  And it does what it does very well.

Now things just got better.

Following David Wierzbicki’s lead I’ve decided to share one of my Evernote notebooks.  This one is my primary repository for good quotes, short thoughts, and other nuggets that don’t really warrant a Delicious save but I’d still like to keep archived for reference. Up until now I’ve only used it intermittently, but I hope to put it too good use now that I’ll be sharing.

So if you have an Evernote account you can link my web clippings notebook to your account, or, if you don’t use Evernote (I don’t know why you wouldn’t!) you can grab the RSS feed.

Also, if you are sharing with Evernote, let me know and I’ll add you.

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There is a really interesting post over at the Church Postmodern Culture blog contesting Peter Rollins’s claim that Slavoj Žižek is a “dialectical materialist theologian.”  Geoffrey Holsclaw suggests that to call Žižek a theologian is to “misunderstand Žižek’s project” as an atheist (albeit a certain type of atheist which should be carefully distinguished from the new atheist fundamentalists a la “Ditchkins“) and to “seriously downgrade theology.”

Interesting. And strong.

Which raises the question: what does it take to be a theologian?  What are the qualifications, prerequisites, and prior philosophical convictions to which one must assent in order to claim the title theologian?

In the case of Žižek, I find it a bit odd to dismiss him as theologian purely on his being an atheist and possibly tainting theology.  First, such a stance supposes an unvarying notion of atheism.  Žižek is not your normal (modern) atheist and would undoubtedly detest the idea of being grouped together with the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in the same way that progressive Christians dislike being painted with the same brush as Christian fundamentalists.  So I think that charge lacks the proper nuance and care.  Furthermore, aren’t we all atheists of some sort?  Don’t we all reject certain gods?

Second, the accusation that naming Žižek as a theologian does the theological enterprise itself a disservice supposes a very rigid definition of theology and may give Žižek more credit than is due.  As far as I can tell, Žižek rejects any notion of transcendence, a tenet that Holsclaw believes to be central to the aim of theology.  He writes:

If theology is merely the sociology or anthropology of religion run through the Lacanian registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, then I might as well become a stock broker.  If theology is merely explication of the immanent infinitude of human subjectivity, the void of the cosmos, the height and depth of reality, then let’s own up to that (which I believe Žižek has).

Why should these things be off the table?  I for one would like to keep the channels of conversation open here rather than demanding that all theologizing acceptance some idea of transcendence.    Here is a question:  does a theologian need to choose between the two, between transcendence and immanence?  Is one acceptable and the other out of bounds?  Does one need to accept a certain definition of God and ultimate reality before being allowed a place at the table that is theology?

Setting Žižek aside, I’d like to go back to that original question.  What does it take to be a theologian? Who qualifies?  At the superficial level, I’m tempted to say that everyone is a theologian whether he or she realizes it or not.  Our mode of being in the world will always already be emblematic of our belief(s) about God and ultimate reality whether we overtly confess that belief or not.   But I understand the need to zero in on something more precise.  I just wonder if placing superfluous limitations on what it means to be a theologian is more of a reflection on our own notions about God, religion, and divinity than the larger enterprise itself.  I become deeply suspicious once we start taking things off the table for questioning.

I’m interesting in your thoughts on this.  How would you define a theologian?  What does it take to be one?

Here’s an interesting quote from the Žižekian perspective from Kester Brewin:

The radical kernel that is left at this death, which Zizek sees as the death of God – Father and Son, is the ‘Holy Ghost community.’ Our separation from God, our abandonment by God – in Job and in Christ’s death – means that we end up actually in the same place as God in Christ: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And, according to Zizek, those who are thus true Christians are those who have embraced this abandonment by God and gathered as the church, the ‘Holy Ghost community’ to live out the radical implications of that death… it is this human community that is the resurrection of God.

I haven’t been able to listen to much of the audio yet, but Kester’s take on it really makes me want to listen…and then jump into the book.

It’s not that I reject systematic theology wholesale.  I understand that at its best it is very important for a robust understanding of the Christian tradition and I utilize it myself and often rely on key systematic figures in my own thought.  But still, there’s something about it that doesn’t quite set right with me.

My main objection is that systematic theology is largely a modern enterprise, meaning a couple of things.  First, it is beholden to a rational,  and sometimes positivist, worldview which tends to treat the divine as some sort of scientific object to observed and dissected from a distance rather than a reality to be participated in.  Hence the expression that theology is the “queen of the sciences.”  To suggest that theology is a science at all, let alone the superior one, is already to posit a certain type of form and method that is always chasing objectivity.  Naturally, the need to delineate and taxonomize things into neat little air tight systems comes next.  So theology is fractured into all sorts of sub-genres and compartmentalized into different categories and groupings.  Again, I don’t want to categorically reject the categories.  They aren’t inherently bad.  At their best they help to point us in the right direction, but I think they more often than not tend to serve as conceptual idols, as do our systems.

And I guess that’s my biggest beef.  That systematic theology, as good and as helpful as it may be, is prone to creating conceptual idols and constructing impenetrable systems that resist any contribution from someone not perceived to be an “expert” by an esoteric — and often parochial — community.  And if we agree that all theology is political then I think we will most definitely find that systematic theology is often used to reinforce the status quo at the center rather than identifying with those on the margins; and as Leonard Sweet has said, “a move to the center is a move away from Jesus.”  So at its worst systematic theology serves as a handmaiden to the political status quo.  In that respect I think Walter Brueggmann was really on to something when he wrote that “empires prefer systematic theologians” in the first edition of his The Prophetic Imagination (interestingly, that line was removed in the second edition; I’m in the process of trying to figure out why).  Augustine’s early development of just war theory in the fourth century as the church was beginning to gain rapport with the Roman Empire would be a prime example.

Again, I don’t say any of this to negate the worth and usefulness of systematic theology.  I affirm that.  But I’m still suspicious.  Suspicious that when we create systems and taxonomies we tend to hold them much too tightly as if they themselves are without error.  But all our models are fallible.  Period.  The temptation is to construct an appealing system and then cram God into it.  I think it should be the other way around.  What I see God doing in Jesus is rupturing every human system and every finite construction with an un-tamable type of dynamism and vitality.  Those systems are, I think, only useful insofar as they point us toward the divine, but too often we mistake the systems themselves for the divine.  When it’s all said and done we have to be able to say along with Thomas Aquinas (who was the first systematic theologian and wrote perhaps the most epic systematic theology ever) that our systems, constructions, and taxonomies are “all straw” in comparison to the great mystery and paradox that is this ultimate reality in which we all share.

So I wonder, if systematic theology in its current state is in fact hopelessly beholden to a modern worldview as I suspect it is, what might a postmodern systematic theology look like?  Or is that even possible?  What think you?