Tag Archives: theology

Process Thought and Process Theology

by on February 6, 2012

This past week, I traveled to Ontario, CA for the Emergent Village Theological Conversation at Claremont. Over three days we heard from Monica A. Coleman, John Cobb and Philip Clayton as they talked about process, practice and a dash of metaphysics. I came into the conversation without any prior familiarity with process thought; blame Baylor and Princeton if you must, but perhaps it was mentioned and I didn’t notice.  Regardless, I came as one eager to learn and, from what I read before arriving, as one already in line with much of what they say.

On the plane ride home, I mentioned on Twitter that my conclusion for now is that I’m a process thinker but not a process theologian. Here’s what I mean. After the first day and a half of the conference, I was trying to sort out what it was that wasn’t sticking for me. If I agree with the content, for the most part, what seems out of place? I think it’s the fact that process began as a philosophy, not a theology. And you can tell the difference. That’s not meant to be a judgmental statement; it’s meant to be a clarifying one. Because a whole host of questions arise when I consider process theology. We seemed to bat around a number of them, with no real conclusion, such as Christology and eschatology. (Granted, it’s a lot to cover in a few hours.)  Mostly, my inner nerd theologian was dogged by questions about how they could prove this or that by the narrative of Scripture or the tradition of the Church or where and how, exactly, process flows out of the history of Christian thought. Honestly, I felt that much of what was spoken as process theology could not be discerned as much more than a hunch or a hope, or maybe both.

I found I could sidestep much of my dis-ease simply by classifying it a philosophy. Far less categories that need mental filing and a particular kind of treatment. Far more room for consideration and exploration. This may be simply because I was trained over a good set of years to think theologically in a certain kind of way. I’ll grant you that. But I know from talking with a number of other attendees that I wasn’t the only one who would find this distinction really helpful and also necessary.

I’ll have to do a lot more reading before I’m willing to classify myself as a process theologian. But I’m happy to say I’m inclined to process thought, and that it informs the way I hold and understand my theology.

On another note entirely, John Cobb is a dear, dear man. Eighty-six and sharp as a tack, he came into the sessions holding his wife’s hand and helping her into her chair. He talked without notes and could weave his answers and responses through seventeen other things before finally concluding with the question at hand. (If I could have one wish, it’s that his session on metaphysics would have lasted a few more hours.) He could not be more humble. Multiple times during the conversation he asked for help and feedback from others in the room…even though Cobb could obliterate all of us with his intellect. And even when he was discussing the possibility of human extinction and environmental armageddon, he never once raised his voice, or frowned, or lost his center. It’s perhaps the only reason why we could hear him talking so blatantly about it and not run trembling from the room. This is my favorite thing about the Theological Conversations. We are given the opportunity to be in the room not only with great thinkers, but with great human beings, from whose wisdom we can learn so much. Do you think we’ll be that centered and wise when we’re 86?!?! Here’s  hoping.

 

 

 

 

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Life in the Spirit

by on May 16, 2011

Happy Moltmann Monday!  This morning’s Moltmann quote comes from The Spirit of Life. In this section, he is attempting to provide a non-dualistic understanding of Paul’s discussion of the battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Life in the flesh is false life, life that has missed its way, life that cannot live and leads to death. Life in the Spirit is the very opposite. It is true life, life springing up from its divine source, life that leads to resurrection. This gives particular emphasis to the sphere of the flesh as the sphere of sinning, and the sphere too of death because of sin. It is not a question of an ontologically lower rung on the ladder of being, compared with the higher rung of soul or spirit. What is meant is sin and death as a field of force into which the whole person has entered, body and soul, together with (his) whole social world…Here ‘flesh’ is a total statement about human beings, and must not be restricted to their physical nature. The sin which misses the mark of life is not centered in sensuality, the drives, or so-called lower instincts. Its center is the whole person, and especially that person’s soul or heart, the center of (his) consciousness, or of his will if he is possessed by the death instinct…

When Paul sees ‘flesh,’ ‘sin’ and ‘death’ as supra-personal forces which enslave people, destroy their world, and make the whole creation beyond the world of human beings ‘groan,’ this is not a matter of unenlightened mythology. It is apocalyptic realism. The greater the hope, the more profound the exposure of misery.

 

Here’s something Christians tend to ‘language’ incorrectly: when faced with a difficult choice, or the consequences of a bad decision or an unfortunate event, you tend to hear people separate out their own identity, like an attempt to throw on a sin hazmat suit. (It’s not me! It wasn’t my fault!) Or, people will say, in effect, that their bodies got the best of them, as if “they” are some separate entity fighting for the upper hand in their own bodies. Personally, I find all of this language unhelpful. I much prefer envisioning our actions as fields of force, moving either toward life or toward death. These are not totalizing declarations about your personhood; they just honestly describe the fact that when you do something, ALL of you does it. Your body didn’t somehow put a fast one over you, like it’s working for another team. The body is not a lower form, or even a separate form, of identity. Paul was not attempting to separate us into warring chambers of soul and body. Moltmann argues that Paul intended to describe the difference between two ways of life. It’s a far better use of energy to think about which way you’re following at any given moment, rather than deflecting all failures to some strange, dualistic notion of your rebellious flesh.

And, since I’ve had zombies on the brain, it can’t go unmentioned that the phrase “death instinct” certainly lends itself to imagine all the ways the zombie is a projection of our own self-destructive tendencies. Who doesn’t fear the human monster who wants only our own destruction? As I said at church, this, coupled with their existential emptiness of purpose, is the reason why it’s so appealing to grab a skillet and knock their heads off. It’s rejection of purposelessness and self-destruction writ large.  (Does that count as a “profound exposure of misery?!”)

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Spinoza, Deleuze and zombies

by on May 13, 2011

So Journey is doing a series on zombies, and I wanted to expand some ideas I mentioned on last Sunday’s first conversation. (If you’re completely baffled about why in the world we’re talking about zombies, read my post about it at Patheos.)

It’s quite surprising how many philosophical books, articles and papers have been written in relation to the zombie genre. I found this fantastic little quote from Zombies, Vampires and Philosophy most intriguing:

Whereas the vampire embodies a form of Nietzchean super-humanity, beyond good and evil, the zombie goes even further beyond…The zombie is sub-Nietzchean, sub-animal, really: as K. Silem Mohammad suggests it is a Spinozan force of decomposition, a completely non-moral and completely liberated interaction of matter with other matter.”

This made a whole host of things clear to me in one fell swoop.  First, about vampires:  In the vampire genre, you are almost always dealing with questions and issues of sex. (Does this now explain why vampires are so popular with teens?!) Whether certain sources deal with those issues with any sense of aplomb, I’ll leave to your own judgment and withhold my own. But vampires are enticing because they are superhuman. They are fast, and strong, and immortal, and extremely intelligent. I was having coffee with one of my favorite teenagers and he was telling me about his latest girl troubles. He said something like, “It was all going fine until she started comparing me to Edward Cullen. Then I thought, ‘I can’t take this kind of pressure!’ and I broke it off.”  Poor teen guys of today- they have to compete with Nietzchean superhumans.

Anyway, onto zombies.  In the zombie genre, you are almost always dealing with questions and issues of death. And inside death, of course, there are a host of other questions- identity, purpose, etc.- which is why there seem to be endless philosophical angles at which to approach it.

I was specifically struck by the phrase “a Spinozan force of decomposition.” The 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza has a theory called composition vs. decomposition in which he posits that when someone or something encounters another someone or something, there are two basic outcomes. Either they come together to form a more powerful whole (composition), or one of the elements dominates the interaction and decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. When seen in zombie theology terms, this makes absolute sense. (And it also, as an added bonus, gives you a great mental picture to understand Spinoza’s theory.)

Zombies are the purest possible example of Spinozan decomposition. You touch a zombie, you begin to erode. The resurrected Christ, on the other hand,  is the purest example of Spinozan composition. You encounter him, and you begin to live.

To put it even more plainly, despair is an act of decomposition, while hope is an act of composition (and recomposition, and recomposition).

When we set up the “spectrum” of humanity for the purposes of our conversation Sunday, we put zombie-hood at one end, “normal” humanity in the middle, and resurrected humanity at the other end. This is of course just to help us talk through the idea, but what I meant to communicate is that whatever zombies are, they are human minus. They are missing something- call it spirit, or soul, or life, or rational thinking. Whatever it is, they are disembodied bodies.  They are isolated matter. In the same way, the resurrected Christ is human plus. The stories of post-resurrection sightings tell us things like “He ate a piece of fish!” and “I touched his scars!” and “He just walked through the wall!” and “He just rose up into the air.” Whatever else these stories mean to tell us, they are trying to say that he is both as he was (physical, with a working stomach) and yet more than what he was (whatever it is you call that other crazy stuff).

To put this theologically, at Easter, what came together in the person of Jesus was a more powerful whole; not simply a human made alive again, but a human who became something entirely new: a resurrected human. Resurrection is the most robust composition possible, the most powerful whole. Easter is the event in which we witness the best and most extreme example of Spinozan composition: when the life of Christ came together with the force of death, what arose was not decomposition but resurrection, an entity that makes both death and life something more than it was previously.

 

*a brief note about the photograph above: it came from an Austin, TX news article about some pranksters who figured out how to hack into electronic road signs and change the messages. Since Austin/UT is where Zombieland’s Columbus hails, I think the prank is only fitting.

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The Resurrection of Nature

by on May 9, 2011

Happy Monday, all.  Today’s Moltmann minute comes from Sun of Righteousness, Arise! p.67:

The Catholic liturgy for Easter Eve enjoins the reading of the first creation narrative, Genesis 1. That is a wonderful sign:  the world begins with a ‘resurrection.’ It is called out of the darkness of chaos into the light of the living cosmos. Thus on the very first day of creation–in the midst of the old creation–the work of the new creation flashes up. In this way creation acquires an eschatological character from the beginning, for in this way it can be seen as a great ‘promise’ on God’s part. With this, its future in the kingdom of God is created. All created things are true promises of their completion. Creation out of chaos is like a resurrection, and the resurrection from the power of death is like a new creation. The God who makes the dead live is the same God who calls into existence the things that do not exist. The God who has raised Jesus from teh dead is the creator of the new being of everything created. Resurrection and creation belong together, for the raising of the dead and the annihilation of death are viewed–and rightly so–not only as surmounting the consequences of the Fall, but also as the comsummation of creation-in-the-beginning. In both resurrection and creation the negative is negated and the positive perfected.

 

I appreciate how Moltmann links creation to resurrection. We often hold them so far apart, and in so doing resurrection becomes something of a necessary house-cleaning to the fall of creation gone awry.  I hate to see resurrection limited to that, or relegated to mere clean-up. To see creation ex nihilo, out of nothingness, as God’s first act of resurrection, provides a much richer paradigm for understanding both events.  As Moltmann explains, joining them together in this way makes resurrection not just clean-up crew, but more importantly a fulfillment of a promise given in the very beginning, a fulfillment laying dormant in creation itself.  That promise is beautifully described by imagining the negative being negated and the positive perfected.  Isn’t that a fantastic line for understanding the coming future of God?  That Moltmann. Zingers under his sleeve at all times.

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Moltmann…Thursday.

by on May 5, 2011

Hi all- A few days late, here are some weekly thoughts from our German friend.  Today’s excerpt comes from Jesus Christ for Today’s World.

When we talk about Christ’s resurrection from the dead we are not talking about a fact. We are talking about a process. We are talking in one and the same breath about the foundation, the future, and the practical exercise of God’s liberation of men and women, and his redemption of the world. So what we can know historically about Christ’s resurrection must not be abstracted from the question of what we can hope from it, and what we have to do in its name.”

 

One of the (many) problems with modern theology is that it tends to get tied up in factual questions, spending all energy proving or disproving something while overlooking the reason why the event means something in the first place.  I have no problem discussing my view of the factual reality of the resurrection (it happened–really and truly) but I do think Moltmann puts us on the right path by talking not about fact but about process.  What God put into play that Easter morning was a story of redemption that went further than we had imagined before. It brings hope to the past, present and future of history.  As communities of faith gather around Eastertide stories of Jesus showing himself to the disciples, we can get off track and talk about what kind of body he had, or we can talk about what we can hope from the story of Christ’s resurrected body, and what we are now called to do in response.  Seems to me a much more interesting and productive question.

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Moltmann Monday returns!

by on April 25, 2011

Happy Easter, everyone!  Ah, how I missed my German friend!  And what better way to celebrate than to share some of his words on the resurrection from The Way of Jesus Christ:

 

Seeing history in the perspective of resurrection means participating through the Spirit in the process of resurrection.  Belief in resurrection is not summed up by assent to a dogma and the registering of an historical fact.  It means participating in the creative act of God.  A faith of this kind is the beginning of freedom.  If God reveals himself in the raising of the Christ crucified in helplessness, then God is not the quintessence of power, such as the Roman Caesars represented. Nor is he the quintessence of law, such as the Greek cosmos reflects. God is then the power that quickens into life, that makes the poor rich, that lifes up the humble and raises the dead. Faith in the resurrection is itself a living force which raises people up and frees them from the deadly illusions of power and possession, because their eyes are now turned towards the future of life.

 

I love Moltmann’s elegantly simple description of how the  resurrection speaks of  a very certain kind of power, one that in its very nature stands over and against other, lesser forms of power (might, law, possession, etc.).  I also am very fond of the definition of resurrection as a process, a creative act of God, a quickening into life.  I envision resurrection as a turning away from one direction of seeing life down a narrow and closed path and toward an entirely new and open direction where the future of life extends brightly ahead of you.  The process of resurrection is the act of looking up and out, ahead and beyond.  I think this is what Wendell Berry means when he urges us to practice resurrection.

Young girl looking out to sea

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What is the Church confessing?

by on February 21, 2011

This Monday morning’s Moltmann outtake comes from The Church in the Power of the Spirit, in the chapter of that same name:

It is necessary to reflect theologically on the mission of the community and every individual Christian, and on the congregation’s order and special ministry for before anyone actually speaks and acts in the church or in its name, the church has already spoken and acted through its very existence, its visible organization and its public functions. The form of its fellowship and public functions, and the shape of its order and its ministries, are not merely externals and inessentials; they are no less important than the word and the sacraments. The church’s institutions and its traditional congregational forms can become a stumbling block for many people, even if–and especially if–they do not thereby make the things of Christianity itself a stumbling block. People demand the ‘witness of existence’– and rightly so. Through its order, its ministries and its organizations the church either confesses or denies the thing that it has to represent. So it cannot leave its visible form to the power of the state or the requirements of its particular social order, if it wants to be recognizable as the church of Christ as as the people of the coming kingdom. It is of course true that every historical form the church takes also bears the stamp of its particular environment. But that is not a reason for accepting that stamp passively and for leaving it to external influences. As the church of Christ, the congregation with all its own powers has to realize the social, political and cultural potentialities of a particular period in a way that is in accordance with the cause it maintains; so that through its physical and public profile as well people will be confronted with the freedom of Christ and will be invited to the messianic kingdom.

- p.290

When as a seminary student I read the sentence I put in bold above, I felt bowled over by all its implications for the Church today.  I felt at the time, and I still do to a large degree, that the current forms and ministries of the Church more accurately confess particularly American markers- extreme individualism, a corporate definition of success, a monetized form of popularity, and a charity-cloaked form of selfishness.   I say this not to berate (or at least, not entirely) but to stand in front of the mirror that is the American church landscape and allow it to reflect honestly back.  Regardless of whether some of these assumptions or conclusions are false or oversimplifying, they have become part of our “image” and they are, therefore, our concern.  For our task, as Moltmann reminds us, is to reconcile all the potentialities of our particular period in a way that manages to live in accordance with the cause of the messianic kingdom.  If our image is reflecting otherwise, we have work to do.

As a pastor, that one sentence is enough to keep me up at night.  Through Journey’s structure and gatherings and events and small groups, we are either going to confess or deny the very thing we seek to represent.  And I’m certain there are plenty of places where we’re denying it, despite our deepest intentions to the contrary.  This is where our only recourse is to pray for boldness enough to face the mirror, to have a posture that allows you to acknowledge your own reflection, and to have the guts to change what needs changing.

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The individual is not a person

by on February 7, 2011

I realize I’m prone to these kinds of statements about Moltmann, but honestly, the paragraph below is absolutely mind blowingly fantastic. It’s so good, I’m not going to say any further commentary about the content itself, other than encourage you to read it, and think about the vast amount of application it has for our lives and the way we structure them if we want to live into the “social program of the Trinity.”  It is, to use a term I’ve coined for just such a moment, a Moltmann WWF Smackdown.  I have read thousands of pages of philosophy on human identity. None of them describe the problem with modern individualization and the true purpose of human identity and personhood as powerfully as Moltmann does here…in one short paragraph, no less.  Philosophers of the modern and postmodern age, consider yourselves smacked down.

For the last 200 years Western industrial society (and now modern society in general) has experienced one thrust towards individualization after another. The last of them bears the name ‘postmodern’. The opportunities for choice open to individualized men and women are enormously increased, and anyone who has the means can also take advantage of these opportunities. But this power is paralleled by the growing powerlessness of the individualized people, who can certainly look on at events and the world through the media, but can do nothing to change them. An individual is not a person, but–as the Latin word individuum says–something that in the final analysis is indivisible; it means the same as the Greek word ‘atom.’ As the end-product of divisions, the individual has no relationships, no attributes, no memories and no names. The individual is unutterable. A person, unlike an individual, is a human existence living in the resonant field of his social connections and his history. He has a name, with which he can identify himself. A person is a social being. The modern thrusts toward individualization in society promps the suspicion that a modern individual is the product of that age-old Roman principle of dominance: divide et impera- divide and rule. Individualized people can easily  be dominated by political and economic forces. There is only resistance for the purpose of protecting personal human dignity if people join together in communities and decide their lives socially for themselves.

These few pointers may suffice to show the public relevance of the trinitarian concept of God for the liberation of individualized men and women, and the relevance of the trinitarian experience of community for the development of a new sociality.

- Experiences in Theology, p.333

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