From Word To Word

It is the responsibility of power to love.

Power may choose only to love or to oppress; there are no other choices that power can make.

Choosing to love almost always involves choosing to set aside power in favour of weakness.

This is the nature of power that oppresses: it continually chooses to be powerful.

This is the nature of power that loves: it continually chooses to be weak.

I am a bit backlogged, I must confess.  I have finished reading several books over the past few months, and I would like to write about them, some of them more than once, but these are not the kinds of posts that I am able to write in a few minutes, and so I now have a small stack of books on my desk, all awaiting my attention.

At the top of the pile, a book that I finished more than two months ago now, is Richard Kearney’s The God Who May Be.  It was given to me by Dave Humphrey, either this past Christmas or for my last birthday, I cannot now remember which, and it was a welcome gift, because I had heard a little about Kearney and was wanting to read him for myself.

The book begins with an admirable clarity.  “God neither is nor is not but may be,” Kearney says.  “That is my thesis.”  He argues for this thesis by making what he calls an eschatological reading of several biblical texts, a reading that opposes the onto-theological tradition that understands God in terms of existence or esse, as the God who either is or is not, with a reading that proposes an understanding of God as possibility or posse, as the God who may be.  Kearney articulates the substance of this position more concisely than I ever could, so I will quote him several times, and at length.

“God will be God at the eschaton, ” he says.  “That is what is promised.  But precisely because this promise is just that, a promise, and not an already accomplished possession, there is a free space gaping at the very core of divinity: the space of the possible.  It is this divine gap which renders all things possible which would be otherwise impossible to us – including the kingdom of justice and love.  But because God is posse rather than esse, the promise remains powerless until and unless we respond to it.  Transfiguring the possible into the actual, and thereby enabling the coming kingdom to come into being, is not just something God does for us but also something we do for God.”  In other words, God will come to be, but is not yet.  In the present time, God remains what God may be, remains possibility, and the transformation of this possibility into actuality requires us to respond to what is possible in God.

This response to God’s possibility, in Kearney’s view, becomes our primary responsibility to God.  Our duty is to decide the possibility that is God, again and again, in order that God will be transformed from possibility to actuality.  As he says himself, “It is the divine perhaps, hovering over every just decision or action, that ensures that history is never over and our duty never done.  The posse keeps us on our toes and reminds us that there is nowhere to lay our heads for long.  God depends on us to be.  Without us, no Word can be made flesh.”  Kearney’s claim here is radical.  It makes humanity responsible for the being of God, for the incarnation of God.  It makes God dependent on the decisions of God’s own creations.  It makes the future fundamentally undetermined.  It makes the nature of the coming kingdom of God rely on the decisions made by frail people here and now.

This radical reunderstanding of God and of humanity’s responsibility to God, says Kearney, is the condition of a hope for the future.  “The posse keeps us open to hope,” he says, “even if it is a hope against hope, in other words, the hope that in spite of injustice and despair the posse may become more and more incarnate in esse, transmuting being as it does so into a new heaven and a new earth.”  The hope here is that the God who may be will more and more come actually to be, as we respond to the possibility that God opens in us.  The hope is always that the possibility of love and justice and grace will become ever more the actuality of love and justice and grace.

There is much that I appreciate about Kearney’s argument.  I agree that the God of existence, the God of onto-theology, does not satisfactorily account for the God that is portrayed by the Bible or required by theology or encountered by experience.  I am attracted to the idea that God is a God of possibility rather than existence, and I am attracted even more to the idea that this possibility places an unending responsibility on me to make God be in the world what God desires to be.  I am moved by the hope that is in this possibility.

I am not convinced, however, that Kearney’s idea of God as possibility actually escapes onto-theological existence.  I will not go into the details of my reservations because I am aware that this question is not one that everyone finds compelling, but my main argument would be that Kearney’s understanding of God as possibility that is ideally coming more and more to be, really only defers existence into the future, to the time when it will become actual.  Such possibility escapes existence, perhaps, but only for a time.  It is constantly slipping into existence, moment by moment, and so is already under the sign of existence.  Far from escaping onto-theology, it finds its culmination there, precisely as it moves from possibility into actuality, precisely as humanity makes actual the possible God.

I would suggest that any God who is truly founded in possibility, any God who truly escapes onto-theological existence, is a God whose possibility never becomes actual, either because it remains always still to come, as in Jacques Derrida’s messianism without a messiah, or because it comes to being in such a way that being does not recognize it, as in Jean-Luc Marion’s saturated phenomenon.  As soon as the possibility of God become actual, either now or in the future, either in this time or in some time to come, it becomes subject to onto-theology, to presence, to being, and becomes fraught with all of the problems that this entails.  This means that Kearney is suggesting, not an alternative to existence at all, but merely a teleology that defers the existence of God to a future and coming time, even if this time is only the end of time.

The problem here is not God as possibility.  The problem is that this possibility is being understood as always anticipating an actuality which then becomes the limit and completion of God, becomes the end of God as possibility.  This is why it is necessary, I would suggest, to begin seeing the possibility at the heart of God as a possibility that never require an actuality, at least not in any of the ways that would be available to human understanding, because the purpose of this possibility is not to make itself be at all, but to make us be in its place.  It does not require being.  It requires us to be as its possibility would make us to be.  It is neither what is, nor what is not, nor what may be.  It is what brings us to be as we respond to its possibility.  The responsibility that the possibility of God lays on us is not to make God come to be, which will never be possible in any case, but to bring ourselves to be in the ways that we can only be as we respond to the possibility at the heart of God.

The opposition between predestination and freewill is a false one. It presumes that God is bound by the same relation to time that binds humanity.  Merely because the human intellect cannot conceive of how God could both have foreknowledge and permit freewill, it presumes that God cannot conceive of such a thing either, as if God was bound by the limits of human logic and understanding.  Any such God would not be a very poor God indeed.

The alternative is to acknowledge the possibility that, for God, foreknowledge and freewill are not exclusive of one another.  If the conjunction of these things is represented to us as a mystery, surely reducing this mystery to the limit of our human logic is a gross presumption, for it assumes that our human understanding, our human experience of being, marks the limit of God.  Any such assumption is the greatest heresy, perhaps the only heresy, even if it is also the heresy of every theology, even the one that I am writing now.

The Jewish scriptures tell of a stone that the Israelites erected in order to memorialize a place where God had helped them overcome their enemies.  They called the stone, Ebeneezer, which means, “Thus far God has helped us,”  and I am interested in how this kind of memorial might represent a proper theology’s attempt to articulate the moment of encounter with God.  Let me outline what this might mean.

My theology needs to be, not an idol, not an altar, but an ebeneezer.  It needs to be, not an attempt to show the face of God, not an attempt to provide an adequate sacrifice to God, but a necessarily inadequate gesture which says, like Samuel, “Thus far God has helped us,” or like Jacob, “Here I wrestled with God; here I was broken; here my name was changed.”   It is not an idol to which I might scarifice nor an altar on which such a sacrifice might be made, but a marker that recalls to me the reason for my sacrifice. It does not attempt to make God present, but recalls a moment when God was present, beyond all guarantee, and anticipates the moment when God will be present again, beyond all hope, according to a promise.

The gesture, the act that I perform for the other, is sacramental.  Though it is nothing in itself, neither is it purely formal, and when it is performed in the proper spirit, it becomes what it always purported to be, comes to bear what it always claimed to bear: a giving. This moment of becoming, of coming to bear, of giving, is not and cannot ever be seized or grasped, because it is inaugurated and accomplished only by a proper spirit. Neither can this moment be guaranteed, because the giver and the recipient of the gesture are incapable in themselves of producing or grasping the proper spirit through which it finds its accomplishment. Nevertheless, the sacramental nature of the gesture resides within any act as its potentiality, and this potential underwrites the very possibility, not of ethics as such, but of ethical response in the world.

A certain stillness, of the mind if not of the body, is inextricably related to a certain knowledge, to a faithful knowledge that neither seeks nor attains a guarantee.  “Be still,” reads the biblical injunction, “and know that I am God.”  This does not mean, “Be still in order to know that I am God.”  Neither does it mean, “Be still because you know that I am God.”  The two commands are not consecutive.  They are parallel.  They could be separated by a colon rather than a conjunction, reading,  “Be still: Know that I am God.”  They imply that there is a stillness that is equivalent, correspondent, correlate to knowing that God is God.  The two statements repeat, reiterate, reinforce each other.  I am still: I know that God is God.  I know that God is God: I am still.

My friend James Shelley has just recently posted on how community gardening has given him an appreciation of the role played by fertility dieties in agriculural societies.  Though anthropology is not exactly my area of expertise, and though I am wary of drawing conclusions from anthropological generalizations in any case, I think that there is something significant in the relation that he is recognizing between the physical labour of farming and spiritual practice of religion.  In fact, I am inclined to extend this relation to other aspects of the home as well, to cooking, to building, to eating, to storytelling, to sewing, to all the activities that should form a spiritual practise for us but often do not.  It seems to me that as we engage in these things more fully, as we participate in them more intimately, we begin to understand the spiritual significance that these things once had.

As James recognizes, it is only in our affluent society that we can afford to be separated from these things, by technology, by the labour of others, by space and by time, only in this kind of society that we can seriously believe that the activities of the home and garden are not in fact spiritual in nature.  It is only because of this affluence that we become subject to the illusion that these things are merely physical and mundane.

To use the language of classical mythology, there can be no dryads so long as trees are merely for shading our patio sets, no nyads so long as rivers are merely for feeding ducks.  There can be no Pomona when the garden is just one more way to impress the neighbours, no Lares or Penates when the house is just the place where I sleep between work and amusement.

The local gods and godesses only appear when we become concerned with them, when we begin to love the trees and the rivers, the garden and the home. When I grow the tree from seed or from cutting, when I nurse the tree from a sapling, when I eat of its fruit and sleep in its shade, when I watch it grow year by year, then I discover that a spirit inhabits the dance of its branches.  When I wade in the water of the river, when I clean garbage from it with my own hands, when I watch the tadpoles and the minnows increase as the water grows cleaner, then I discover that a god stirs its waters.  When I plant what feeds me, build what shelters me, cook what nourishes me, sew what clothes me, then, and perhaps only then, I discover the gods of home and garden, the little deities that make the work of the home and the garden into a spiritual practise.

I was a guest preacher at a friend’s church this Sunday, and this is always an ambivalent experience for me.  Those who have some history with me will know already that my relationship with the institutional Christian church is not exactly orthodox, and they will probably know also that I am particularly uncomfortable both with the function of the Pastor and, to a lesser degree, with the function of the sermon, as these things have come to be understood in most Protestant churches.

This begs the question, of course, and there are several of my friends who have not left it begging, why do I still preach when I am asked.  Dave Humphrey posed this question to me the last time we were together for coffee, and I must confess that I had no very good answer for him.  I had to admit the extreme unlikelihood that my preaching would have any substantial influence on the church culture to which I am so opposed, and also had to admit, to myself, after Dave had gone home, that my preaching was much more likely to actually reinforce this culture by using the kinds of traditional forms that it finds familiar and reassuring.

I realized yesterday, however, as I was actually preaching, that this whole line of reasoning is wrong in the extreme, because it assumes that I have to be concerned with discovering the correct form and time and place of my speaking, when any medium and any time and any place will always be the wrong medium and the wrong time and the wrong place.  It is not a question of finding how I might speak appropriately.  It is a matter of recognizing that whatever I speak, especially if it presumes to speak about God, will always be inappropriate, in every case, by definition.

It is not my responsibility to speak rightly.  It is not my responsibility to accomplish anything through what I speak.  It is only my responsibility to make my speech open to what God might do through it.  If there is a God, something I believe but that I refuse to insist upon by any knowledge or by any guarantee, then it will always be up to this God to do what is necessary through me, whether I am speaking from a pulpit or from anywhere else.

The invitation to preach, therefore, at least to me, is an invitation to make myself available to what God might do through me.  It is an opportunity to see what might be accomplished, even if I do not actually see that anything has been accomplished.  It is an opening where I can do the best with what I have and offer this without expectation, just because it has been asked of me, and where I can do nothing else but hope that God will fulfil what God wills to fulfil.

This does not mean that everyone must preach, of course, or even that everyone who is asked must preach.  It means only that I must preach, beacuse I am asked to do so, not by any church, but by an obligation to something that I do not hope to understand but nevertheless hope to believe.

A friend of mine, Ben Platz, emailed me a selection from Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed theologian.  He asked if I would perhaps share my thoughts on Barth’s argument, and I said that I would, though I fairly warned him that I would probably do so through this medium.  So, since I will be making reference to the selection that Ben has sent to me, I will begin by quoting it at some length:

“There is no a priori human knowledge of God; there is no absolute theology. There is only, there can be only, a relative theology: relative to God’s revelation. God precedes and man follows. This act of following, this service, these are human thinking concerning the knowledge of God. Consequently in theology it will positively be necessary to refuse to accept any philosophical theory as a norm of theology. There is only one norm and it is: God who speaks! Not that we should not philosophize at all. We may—a little. There is choice irony on God’s part which tells us: Since you have philosophy in you, well, then, have it and do your best with it. On the condition, however, that when you have to make a decision between your philosophy and some requirement of the faith, you always make sure that the subject precedes and human thought follows. On the condition that your philosophy does not keep you from ‘following’.”

Now, my experience with Barth is not extensive.  I have read only Dogmatics in Outline,  which is a series of lectures on the Apostle’s Creed that Barth delivered at the University of Basel in 1946, and I only came to read that much in order to give myself some further context after reading Graham Ward’s Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology.  It is entirely possible, therefore, that I may misrepresent Barth in some serious ways, so I will say now that the following remarks should not be taken as applying to Barth’s work generally, but only to the isolated section I have just quoted.

With that proviso, I agree with Barth in his insistence that any theology can be a theology, not of God as such, but only of God as revealed.  Theology never says anything about God.  It can only hope to say something about how humanity experiences the revelation of God, a revelation that it can never instigate, regulate, or even comprehend.

I agree also with Barth’s conclusion that the impossibility of an absolute theology means that theology can never find its norm in philosophy, though I would perhaps go even further here, arguing for the complete unrecognizability of theology and philosophy one to the other.  I would suggest that any truly theological thought, any theological thought that avoids the temptation to proceed absolutely, is a thought that will not even be recognizable to philosophy, and that, in the same way, any philosophical thought will not be recognizable to theology.  Any theology that employs the logic and the procedures of philosophy, any theology that remains recognizable to philosophy, is not a theology at all, however useful it may be.  It is only a mode of philosophy.

This means that almost everything that has traditionally been considered to be theology, including what I am writing here, including what I quoted from Barth, is in fact merely philosophy, something that has fallen, and must always fall, by necessity, into an absolutism.  There is no formal theology that can escape this.  Every attempt to write, to speak, to show a theology of the experienced revelation of God can only appear as an absolute theology, no matter how deeply it strives to deconstruct this absolutism.  The only theology that escapes this necessity, perhaps, if only for a moment, is the almost inarticulate cry, the uncontrollable response to God’s revelation that comes forth as a gasp of pain or pleasure, as a single word of exclamation, as an ecstatic affirmation, as a groan that words cannot express, as a gift that is treasured up and pondered in the heart.

Not only would I push Barth further in this regard, but I would seriously destabilize his notion of revelation.  As I have argued before, I do not think that the revelation of God is recognizable as such in human terms.  Instead, I would say that any recognition of this revelation is itself a gift that is merely received, a gift that can never be guaranteed for what it is, a gift that can never be articulated without doing a violence to what was given.  For me, therefore, the tension is not between philosophy and the clear requirements of a faith that has been revealed, but between all of the theologies that never rise above philosophies and the gift, tentative, unsecured, that comes from elsewhere and reveals something in me.  It is not between philosophy and theology, but between all the supposed theologies and the gift that can be the only theology precisely because it lies beyond any theology.

As I said, I may be misrepresenting Barth’s larger philosophy here, and what I remember of Ward’s book on Barth and Derrida gives me some grounds for believing that this is the case, but I will leave Ben to supply any necessary corrections.

All of us are subject to our capitalisms and our democracies, our legalities and our governmentalities, our educations and our medications, our communications and our entertainments, our scientisms and our technocracies, our humanisms and our humanitarianisms, but we do not all endure this subjection in the same way.  Those who are even able to recognize it variously endorse, exploit, resist, or capitulate, but none of these responses are acceptable.  They only reinforce our subjection in any case.  The only acceptable response, though it is always tenuous and unguaranteed, is otherly concern.

To be otherwise concerned in this sense is to refuse to be primarily concerned with the structures of subjection themselves, neither in resistance nor in acquiescence, but to show oneself to be concerned precisely with those things that the structures of subjection do not recognize.  This act of concern may sometimes appear to be oppositional and sometimes to be affirmative, but it is never primarily either of these things.  It is an act whose appearance in relation to the structures of subjection is only ever a provisional appearance, an appearance that is only the remainder of its true concern, which is with something other and something otherwise.

This is not to say that the act of otherly concern does not recognize the structures of subjection.  It does certainly see these things, and its response is always a response to them.  It sees them, and it gives them their due.  It renders to them what was theirs already.  It does so, however, as if it is concerned, not with them, but only with something beyond them, only with something that they can not recognize, something that might be called justice or ethics or hospitality.

Otherly concern, therefore, is never provisional, but it always appears this way.  It is neither strategic nor tactical, though it may appear as either or both.  It may vote, for example, or it may refrain from voting, but in neither case will it put faith in this activity.  Its faith will always be in something other, something to which this activity can only hope to gesture.  It will never have faith in the conditional choice of a political system or a party or a candidate, but only in the unconditional something other that these things fail always to recognize.

This otherly concern is, therefore, the only acceptable response to the things that subject us, because it responds, not in ways that the structures of our subjection might recuperate, but in ways that continually call to what is essentially beyond recuperation.  This kind of response opens itself to the possibility of responding to the uniqueness of its subjection, to the unsubstitutability of this subjection, but in such a way that it cannot be reduced to the response that it makes to these things.

All this comes at the cost, however, of being beyond any guarantee.  There will never be any guarantee of the other with which I am concerned, or of the concern that I have with the other, or of the activity that comes from my concern.  Indeed, unless the other itself intervenes, it is always guaranteed that my concern and my activity will be faulty and insufficient.  More practically, it will always remain possible, even likely, that the structures of my subjection will not recognize the otherly concern that I am showing. Though my concern will be elsewhere, I will always remain physically imperilled by the things to which I am subject.

The hope that otherly concern offers, then, is only the most tenuous hope.  It is the hope that my concern for the other will somehow be justified by the other itself, though this possibility remains radically unguaranteed.  It is the hope that, as I am concerned with the other that is justice and ethics and hospitality and love, this other will in fact come, quite apart from anything that my concern might deserve, but merely because it condescends to come.  It is a hope that is barely a hope. It is hope that finds its place only among faith and love.  It is a hope that, in my mouth, says only and continually, “Even so, Lord Jesus, come.”