In lieu of anything substantive, let me draw your attention to something stupid. The Navy is going to spend $600,000 to alter the shape of a 40-year-old building that happens to resemble a swastika if you look at it from space. Do you realize how many meals, clean wells, doses of AIDS medication, or years of graduate school tuition could be paid for with the money that they are going to spend adding walkways or something to this building so that visitors from other worlds won’t mistakenly think that California is part of Nazi Germany? And I would like to point out that the symbol this building resembles was ripped off by the Nazis, and has a long history in both western and Indian religions in which it has nothing to do with the @#$%ing Nazis. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that it come back into fashion, though I would take issue with anyone altering a pre-1930’s work of art because it happens to contain one. Or if some idiot decided the government needed to spend over half a million dollars so that four L-shaped barracks don’t look like it from &%$#ing space. Of course, with however many billions of dollars have been wasted on the war, I suppose that a pointless $600,000 building project is just a drop in the bucket. Okay, end of rant. I’m going to German now. Auf Wiedersehen.
Archive for September, 2007
Something Stupid
September 26, 2007Spong
September 6, 2007I’ve been suffering from a sort of (non-clinical) ADD for the past two weeks. I’ve started about five books and haven’t been able to get into any of them. I often have this problem after finishing a novel I really liked. I can’t decide what I’m in the mood for. Anyway, when I can’t decide what to read, I can rarely decide what to blog about. I’m working on the process thing, but if I found it damnably difficult to articulate it without being overly technical back when I was pushing it, think how hard it is to write a sufficiently compelling articulation of what I don’t believe anymore that still gives the reader some idea of why one might believe it (and this in a blog entry of reasonable length)! Anyway, it’s coming.
In the meantime, since we’re on the topic of being charitable to one’s theological opponents (and since I want to kill about a half hour before lunch), let’s talk about Spong. He’s taking a well-deserved theological beating over on Faith and Theology, but Ben Myers has posted an interview with him which I recommend. Reading it, I can’t help but like the guy. I think he’s doing a great deal of good in addition to a great deal of harm. I think he understands (much better than most of his detractors) a sort of basic religiosity that at least most contemporary middle-class Americans can identify with that doesn’t usually find expression in the languages or liturgies of any particular religious tradition. Moreover, he recognizes this as a good thing, and realizes that if Christianity seeks to supplant this rather than tap into it, we cannot hope to speak effectively to contemporary people. And he’s been a real champion of gay rights in the church, for which I am grateful.
That said (and I think this is basically Myers’ criticism of him), tapping into this religious impulse of one target population does not mean that the only viable Christianity in these times is simply the religious impulses of people on the street dressed up in vaguely Christian apparel. Spong presents himself as middle option between atheism and apathy about religion on the one hand and fundamentalism and other oppressive orthodoxies (in the pejorative sense of the term) on the other. In fact, he is not avoiding extremes, but rather the rich breadth of the Christian tradition, both ancient and modern. His basic assumption seems to be that a fundamental change occurred in the Enlightenment that completely invalidated all previous Christian expression. From the interview:
Since that time there has been another revolution that changed the whole way that we see the world, and Christianity has got to redefine itself in terms of this new world. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo destroyed the dwelling place of God above the sky, and in effect the theistic definition of God with it. After the destruction of this God, we’ve got to find a new way of talking about God beyond theism. The only alternative to theism that our world seems to know is atheism. We’ve got to find a way of getting beyond that opposition. We’ve got to find a new way of talking about God.
I certainly appreciate the effort to overturn a false dichotomy (as I said, I can’t help liking this guy), but though he presents a third option, he has basically bought into the underlying assumptions of that dichotomy wholesale. Instead of saying that since neither theism (as understood by the Enlightenment) nor atheism are compelling we need something completely new, he might have examined the history of Christian theology more closely to see if there is an implicit or even explicit understanding of God that is not killed by Newton. Besides, Newton’s old news, and though I’ve not made much of a study of it, relativity and quantum mechanics are supposed to have complicated this matter greatly. The world is perhaps not as rigid as once thought. Spong really makes himself an easy target here.
I had meant to devote a paragraph or two to Spong’s Christology, but this has gone on long enough, and it’s now time for lunch. Besides, casual Spong-bashing should never go on for more than a paragraph, otherwise one starts to sound like an asshole (assuming one doesn’t already).
Process Theology: Introduction to a Series
September 5, 2007A Little Intellectual Autobiography
Process theology for me is kind of like Enya. I’m sort of embarrassed that I ever listened to her (had a girlfriend in college who liked her), but if you check my iTunes library, you’ll discover that I’ve listened to her more recently than I care to admit (note to self: find a way to reset play counts). Okay, so perhaps I’m not so embarrassed about process. Like the new age music with which I have most unfairly associated it, it was something I got into my sophomore year of college (almost the same time, actually). I was contemplating the evils of the world one afternoon in September of 2001 (when everyone was contemplating the evils of the world), when it occurred to me that the whole theodicy problem would be pretty much solved if God’s knowledge and power were limited. I remember praying as I walked somewhat aimlessly about the campus asking God how this could be, when I suddenly thought of 2 Corinthians 12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” The words that stuck out were “made perfect.” I happened to be in front of the library, so I went in and found the verse in a Greek New Testament. Teleitai (circumflex accent on the penult. Third person singular present passive indicative of teleo [epsilon contract verb], for those of you struggling through Greek intensives). I remember two things about this verb. It means “to complete or accomplish,” making the English translation of “to perfect” etymologically appropriate at least. It struck me that if God’s power (and thus God) was being completed or perfected, then it cannot be complete yet. It also struck me that as the subject of a passive verb, God is being acted upon.
I then walked over to the office of my favorite professor ever and told her that I thought I might have just become a process theologian, and she enthusiastically recommended books to me. I had some reservations about it even then. I found it very unfortunate that I couldn’t really explain it to people without going into the metaphysics of it (otherwise people either don’t have any idea what you’re saying or don’t see why it’s important). I wonder if the old Alexandrian Platonists or the Aristotelian scholastics felt similar frustrations. I also wondered whether the very real insights of process might be perfectly compatible with a more nuanced version of traditional theism than most process theologians seemed to be dealing with. And as I sort of rediscovered my interest in the Incarnation and the Trinity in divinity school, I didn’t think that the process metaphysic was able to accommodate them (though I have great respect for John Cobb for taking the challenge seriously).
However, I still think that God put that verse in my head as I happen to be walking by the library. I find myself very attracted to a number of features of Whitehead’s thought (much more to Whitehead than to any process theologian, actually), and it annoys me to no end when people dismiss it without taking stock of what it has to offer. So you, dear reader, should you continue to visit my blog, will get to read about what I find attractive about process thought, what I find inadequate about it, and how I struggle to appropriate its insights in a more traditional theological framework (I might even say what I mean by that). The first post in this series, an explanation of the basics of process theology, should be up in the next couple of days. After that it will get harder, so the posts will probably be farther apart. But persevere with me! And I’ll still blog about other things in the meantime (maybe).