Theology without Walls: Toward a Hermeneutics without Boundaries?
Kurt Anders RichardsonJournal of Ecumenical Studies, Volume 51, Number 4, Fall 2016, pp. 506-516 (Article)
Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1353/ecu.2016.0046
Foradditionalinformationaboutthisarticle
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/648081
Theology has begun to work fruitfully under the cultural conditions of religious pluralization, detraditionalization, and individualization. Respect for conscience is original to the earliest notions of faith as such, and contemporary religious experience continues to develop itself according to this principle. The sense of faith as something that must be exercised with “authenticity” along with the progressive dissolution of precisely defined religious boundaries is producing a number of expressions of trans-religious theology. This essay explores some of the core features of this development.
In the most basic sense, theology intends to mediate knowledge of God. As it has developed over the last three centuries, it has become highly differentiated, expressive of critical and scientific reasoning, with psychological and sociological dimensions, embedded according to cultural or ethnographic coordinates, and all carried along by ecumenical, comparative, pluralistic, and even post-theistic currents. We live in a time that has been characterized by religious pluralization, detraditionalization, and individualization.1
1See Colby Dickinson, “Searching for a Self-Reflexive Theology: Ways Forward for Systematic Theology in Relation to (Non) Religious Thought in Contemporary Western Culture,” Irish Theological Quarterly 79 (November, 2014): 368; cf. idem, Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought, Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
journal of ecumenical studies vol. 51, no. 4 (fall 2016) © 2016
Far more than reconstructive, self-critical tools are required; the selfreflexive or, better, the self-mediating capacities of the person are also needed. There are trends of disaffiliation and nonparticipation alongside new forms for expression and patterns of behavior. Theology as taken here remains a discipline, not merely an aesthetic or imaginative activity, but not one that informs regulative institutions of the state. In fact, theology is most effective when it offers its reflections to readers without “authority,” when it appeals to the reader’s awareness of God and the degree of authoritative relation achieved in that awareness.
Theological self-reflection is rooted in the biographical and autobiographical narratives of the scriptures: Abraham, Rebecca, Joseph, Deborah, Ruth, David, Elijah, Mary, Jesus, Paul, John, etc. These texts can be read as exemplars of self-mediation in the face of the self-revealing God. Communities have developed with an uncanny diversity of voices, with persons arrestingly disclosing self-formation under the guidance of revealed wisdom and the exemplarity of prophet and apostle, with the likes of Anthony and supremely Augustine’s Confessions.
“Theology without walls” has a particular meaning that is both anthropological and political. The human being is volitional in one’s formation as a knowing and acting self, for oneself and for others. The constellation of the political, legal, institutional, economic, and global networks by which human beings communicate and exchange goods and services, defend themselves and one another, as well as observe all that is lawless and inchoate has opened up new possibilities. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, a significantly “long peace” has characterized the West and therefore the globe with respect to major worldwide conflicts. Combined with technological change, this situation is encouraging a vast transformation, involving a radical multiplicity of cultural exchanges, resulting in the deinstitutionalization of culture. Religion has been leading this trend for over four centuries, a trend toward the anthropologically and politically “open society.”2
Except when it is merely descriptive and historical, theology informs faith. In the context of radical freedom and indeterminacy, respect for conscience is the crucial value. In Rom.12:1–2, Paul talks about faith in knowing
2See the originally two-volume 1945 work: Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
and doing God’s will. The believer seeks the approval of God but is not bidden to do the will of God without approving it as well. This extraordinary reciprocity between God and the human finds expression early in the biographical narratives of scripture and, consequently, in the narrative theologiesofthelasttwocenturies,fromKierkegaardtoBonhoeffertoKing—and the exemplarity of King following that of Gandhi who first followed the modern nonviolent exemplarity of the Jesus narratives of the Gospels. Without this radical freedom to act, imitating radical divine freedom, the movements of love and justice as we have known them and hope for them would be unimaginable in the face of normative, regulative, and legalistic theologies of tradition and empire.
The present approach is oriented by a perspective derived from Reformed epistemology, scriptural reasoning, catholic sensibility, and comparative theology. For, heightened by our current deinstitutionalized situation, a central place is taken by religious experience—the experience of faith disengaging more than ever from institutional forms and ritual structures in favor of authenticity—something approaching “first-order” experience of God. Reading and other communicative ways of acquiring meaning through symbols such as words and images are always second-order sources of knowledge by which faith is conducted or interpreted. The cultural conditions by which one is experiencing God are increasingly based less on social obligations and rewards for religious affiliation and more on the therapeutic and ultimate needs of the person. Current anthropological conditions, historical and political, that make for disaffiliation with religious institutions invite first-order, “authenticity”-oriented experience of God. This situation of disaffiliation is a hermeneutical condition for “theology without walls” or “trans-religious” theology. This is an observation about reading and other media by which human beings perceive or self-mediate the knowledge of God.
In traditional philosophy of religion, the so-called “argument of religious experience” has always been problematic because religious experience is neither universal nor uniform. It can hardly be accorded any other standing than an “option” of faith. In a hermeneutics without walls, selfmediation experienced as a choice presents itself within a secular environment (as in the French clergy-less laicisme) or, best of all, an open society determined by the nurturing condition of religious liberty rather than reli-
gious coercion or policing. Religious reasoning is required among the believers, who must become at least communicative but also reasonable, since their values affect their politics but thereby affect the nonreligious as well.
Concurrently, there is a growing sensitivity to anthropologicalethnographic trends, complex notions of the human “self” and “community.” Notions such as “exclusivism,” “inclusivism,” and “pluralism” are not deemed particularly helpful because they invariably universalize in terms of an overarching theory of “religion,” as in Hick or Tillich. By the same token, there are concerns that syncretism, even any religious or theological “borrowing,” is illegitimate—as if it is an invariable, given that particular religions view themselves as embodying ultimate truth. Societal pluralism is, of course, a product of democracy and religious liberty—or at least of religious toleration. The “at least” aspect is necessary because toleration generally reflects a majoritarian situation wherein minority religions are not persecuted or made illegal in any way. Indeed, most democratic situations contain this form of pluralism which allows for varying degrees of prejudice and microjudgments that cumulatively denigrate and perpetuate stratification, that is, privileged superiors and underprivileged inferiors. Indeed, this stratification would be one of the reasons for religious disaffiliation—that various religious communities and, indeed, religious rituals in larger diverse communities harbor deep discriminatory processes validated by the religions. Perhaps the greatest reason for the decline of religious authority and the increase in disaffiliation has been the obsolescence of religion as a necessary social and political reality. The meaning of religio as “binding,” that is, the source of communal and political bonding in obligatory relationships, is no longer regarded as necessarily tied to religious affiliations and the commitments taught and commanded by religious authorities within their communities. One of the great debates of two centuries of the Enlightenment had to do with whether or not religious profession was necessary for citizenship. The answer was in the negative, as reflected in the absence of religious tests for citizenship or governmental office in the American constitution. The disappearance of binding religious obligations within the political community is even more conspicuous in the disappearance of “religious crimes” defined by “laws of religion.” Already by the end of the nineteenth century it was becoming too difficult for civil courts to “defend” religious sensibilities within society through the enforcement of blasphemy laws. There were too
many Christian “sects” among Christian majorities and minorities. Various “blue laws,” which included prohibitions of doing business on religious holidays, had to be repealed. The public sense of religious obligation for attendance and service declined radically during the twentieth century also with the perception that highly destructive wars, even when secular in nature, were aided and abetted by religious institutions, including various anticommunist dictatorships—as if state authoritarianism were tolerable so long as it was Christian or quasi-religious.
A parallel dynamic is what has been called the “Protestantization” or “individualization”3 of religion, not only in the West but also on a global scale. The phenomenon goes back to the leading teachers of the Reformation, who, although agreeing with the Catholic and Orthodox about the vast majority of essential doctrines in Christianity, initiated reform based upon a concentration on salvation, its linkage with personal faith, and an emphasis on personal eschatology in the messages of the New Testament. The result was a sacramentalization of personal faith. At the heart of the sacrament of faith were clues from the scriptural sources for self-mediating forms of understanding and religious decision-making. These developments undergird theologies of religious liberty of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, down through the most refined theological expression in the document Dignitas humanae from the Second Vatican Council. Dignitas humanae, or the Declaration on Religious Liberty, outlines from a theological perspective—and this is what is so crucial—why religious liberty is anthropologically and therefore religiously and legally necessary. The democratization of the legal principle appearing in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), cuius regio, eius religio (“his region, his religion”—the prince’s faith determines his people’s faith), eventually resulted in the embodied and therefore legal self, the self-governing person, which corresponded to the sole locus of faith in human life: not in the community but exclusively within the soul of each member of the community—indeed, in each and every human being. Religious experience and decision-making became understood as inviolate movements of cognition and self-determination, ultimately to be embodied
3“Americans of very different faiths all tend to agree, then, that they find the sacred by choosing it, not heeding its demanding call” (Richard Madsen, “The Archipelago of Faith: Religious Individualism and Faith Community in America Today,” American Journal of Sociology 114 [March, 2009]: 1278).
in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Such freedom of selfdetermination is essential because one must be free to choose in order to become, and to be respected as, fully human. That freedom includes such choices as agnosticism or even atheism.
One of the ways that the sacrament of faith has had such profound effects is through the elevation of “authenticity”—which contains both selfassertion and demonstration or proof to the self. Authenticity is a demonstration of the Real to the individual. It becomes something of a truth-claim of encountering the Real by that individual to his or her world. This is evident in the statement on religious choice: “If an authentic religious commitment must be based on a free choice of the sacred and validated by a personal experience of God, then we would expect religious believers to practice their religion in a very active way—to ‘do God’ ” as one in-depth survey respondent expressed it.4 The result is a trend that transcends its particular religious origins: “Although, according to religious historians, this religious individualism has deep historical roots in American pietistic religious traditions . . . that are especially closely linked with modern evangelical Christianity, it has jumped beyond its theological origins and now underlies many substantively different religious beliefs, including non-Christian ones.”5 American religious individualism in the late twentieth century led to the predominance of what Robert Wuthnow “called a ‘spirituality of seeking’ rather than a ‘spirituality of dwelling.’ ”6 Even where traditional and orthodox community limits the disaffiliation for some, the bedrock of personal experience tends to be determinative for religious affiliation. Religion is no longer the only avenue to the acquisition of ancillary social benefits, “the side effects of religious affiliation—social respectability, business contacts, access to education or jobs, and so forth,”7 which are actually secular goods. The older purposes of affiliation emanating from the approach of “civil religion” simply are no longer relevant.
The self as locus of truth is not of necessity relativistic at all. At the beginning of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin famously expressed a quandary as to whether the proper beginning of theology is with
4Ibid., p. 1279; emphasis in original.
5Ibid., p. 1281.
6Ibid., p. 1282; referencing Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
7Ibid., p. 1298.
the human being or with God. Karl Barth hesitated to begin with the Holy Spirit because of extreme caution over a kind of hubris seen after the Enlightenment, when revelation had so often been reduced to theologies of mere self-projection. Now there is a powerful stirring to begin with the Spirit, which requires something of the perspective reflected in the programmatic words of Jesus: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8)—a “dangerous” text for sure, one quoted often by heretics and therefore ignored or explicitly deemed not useful by religionists. Nevertheless, for Jesus, it is a fundamental self-description. And, for the purposes of this theological hermeneutic, it is more than being “without walls” where the wind should blow; it is without borders, national, cultural, and certainly institutional. In this postdenominational, post-colonial, globalizing age, it is about the common access to all texts and sources, allowing the Spirit to speak to us. For my part, as an evangelical theologian, I am interested in how the Spirit will use these words of Jesus, embodied in the Gospel of John, as it goes around the globe, as these and other words are picked up and read, just as Augustine’s own conversion was prompted by the mysterious song of the child that beckoned to him from the other side of the garden wall.8
The self as locus of truth does not mean the self as source of truth. We are learners, recipients, interpreters, those who apply, embody, and integrate the truth as we know it, and yet truth always remains strange (if manipulated, an untruth), a grace that is “new every morning”—not a possession but something that possesses us. Self-mediated truth is about the deep psychological and rational persuasion by which faith satisfies and impels action, an authenticity of personal being as the sole “religious test” remaining in the human community. This thought is expressed very poignantly in the final published dialogues with the great deconstructionist, Jacques Derrida, just prior to his death, reflections shaped by his “religious turn,” which included penetrating forays into the subjectivity of faith as exposited by Søren Kierkegaard. Every claim of the human being could and should be deconstructed (because of the politics of knowledge), except a testimony to grace. The experience of grace, Derrida observed, “in a way that is absolutely improbable, that is, exceeding any proof, in a unique experience, then decon-
8See Augustine, Confessions VIII.12.
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struction has no lever on this. And it should not have any lever.”9 Grace is immune to deconstruction because, as an authentic testimony of experience, it is utterly the possession of an individual, of no other, and therefore could not in principle be used for power over another lest it contradict the very grace laid claim to. Whether or not such testimony actually exists, it existed for Derrida, and it corresponds with a kind of anthropological condition, a category of authenticity in faith-as-sacrament that cannot be gainsaid. Such testimony is by its very nature out of reach of critical exposure.
Various strategies have been used to combat faith-as-sacrament in the selfmediation of salvific promise. “Privatization,” the assignment of faith to the inner, subjective domain, is one such strategy. It is evidenced in “secularization” as used in the French expression “laïcité.” But, the original sense of this term is that the common people are sufficient, person for person, to mediate the knowledge and benefits of God—or not—for themselves. It is anti-clerical and anti-institutional. In contrast to a religious state, it spells the dismantlement of that state and its religious laws: the elimination of the entire category of “religious crime” (of which most of the living have not even a vague memory). But, laïcité is nothing other than the condition of religious liberty. Prophetsandpriestsofsecularismareidentified,forexample,Jean-JacquesRousseau inparticular,forhisversionoftheAugustinian“confession”(somethingwhich is rooted in that so conspicuously autobiographical text of ancient Western Christianity) and his evasion of all “public” religious obligations.10
However, the proper understanding of the French term is “laity” and thus is not secular but independent of clergy and often anti-clerical—not far really from Francis’s warning that “clerisy” is the greatest danger to his Church. Nevertheless, the popes, fascinatingly, are often from the progressive side of the Roman Church. Since John XXIII, each has enunciated the Church’s agreement with and theistic defense of human rights. These are very important declarations because they show how the Church’s theological leadership understands the anthropology that its Christianity helped to create—contrary to so many traditionalists who claim to speak for the same
9John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart, and Yvonne Sherwood, “Epoché and Faith: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart, eds., Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p. 39.
10See Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Confessions, tr. Angela Scholar; ed., intro., and notes Patrick Coleman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
institution. The popes recognize the new sense of obligation to the person and the God of the person, whether they are secular, of another religion, of the “separated brethren” of the multitude of Protestant Evangelical branches, or are seekers or atheists.
We must make a fundamental distinction between historical consciousness and historical imagination and the social imaginary. Alert to universalisms and cosmopolitanisms that impose hierarchies of religions/cultural systems upon the world of others, our theological learning and discourse stems from a social imaginary that is global and radically diverse. This diversity can no longer be defined by neat categories of “religions” and “cultures” in which peoples and persons dwell or make their spiritual abode. Instead, there are many resources or “sources of the self”11 (to borrow from Charles Taylor) that are available to awaken and inform human capacities for participation in a world of scarce resources, problem-solving, and the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Although there is a universality of global justice in the U.N. and international relations, these are boundary conditions seeking to protect individuals in the pursuit of selfhood before God. What then is the “self” we are looking at here? Whether notions of holiness or of ethical being, it is striking how the varying traditions of the world have well-developed concepts of the particularity of the self.12 The issue however is not so much how ancient sources inform us powerfully about the self but, rather, how contemporary persons use the narratives of scriptural and theological biography and autobiography to self-mediate mercy, grace, and other aspects of humanness by which the self can come into its own, enlarge perspective, express generosity toward the other, and perhaps realize hope and even salvation. The massive phenomenon of disaffiliation from religious institutions, particularly traditional authorities, has caused many of religious conviction to acknowledge the so-called “growth of spirituality,” not merely in “the West” but also in many non-Western societies. In the United States, the sta-
11See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
12See Gavin D. Flood, “Self and Text: Towards a Comparative Theology of the Self,” Cross Currents 56 (Summer, 2006): 198–215.
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tistic for nonaffiliation is striking, but the continuing religious identity— “church refugees”—is the perhaps unexpected factor.13 Theology without walls—that takes seriously the spiritual quest for salvation through revelation, through the reading of scriptures and the selection of what might be called the “best promise”—is one possible avenue for this fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”).
Above all, I would characterize the movement descriptively according to features attributable to a kind of hyper-differentiation of self. This does not mean that human individuals develop multiple personality disorder but that, in large parts of the world, improved health and economic well-being provide the conditions for self-expression, and the result is greater uniqueness and value accorded to each individual. In a tribalized world, the individual is valued in terms of communal interest. As individuals flourish within community, their uniqueness leads to a richness of community. “Individualism,” though often reviled by those arguing for well-being of the community of human beings, can also advance individual rights and freedoms available for flourishing. When we think pluralistically, we do not think pluralistically enough. Hyper-differentiation is a product of hyperindividuation, and there is no end in sight.
A number of provisional theses emerge for the ongoing work of theology without walls:
1. Human thinking and acting conscientiously radically change when all religious laws matched with civil penalties are removed from daily life.
2. There is wide disaffiliation with religion and the displacement of religion by faith and self-mediating forms.
3. The populations of self-mediating individuals are already immense
4. Whether outside or inside religious institutions, the human being has become an agent of spirituality/religiousness as self-care.
5. The multidimensional implications of self-care in terms of transcendence, rupture, and interiorization of truth all stand for self-mediation in religious practice.
13See Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope, Church Refugees: Sociologists Reveal Why People Are Done with Church but Not Their Faith (Loveland, CO: Group Publishing, 2015).
6. Scriptures become the common property of humanity. Their worldwide publication brings common access to them. What the Qur’an anticipates in terms of “competing in righteousness” and Pannenberg in terms of rivalry of religions goes beyond borders in the hyper-differentiated world.
7. Scriptures become the portable, “authoritative,” tradition- and timetranscending sources of religious self-care.
8. These changes do not necessarily augur the disappearance of religion. “Religiousness” and “religions” persist. There is a nondeclining core of ritual, myth, instruction, and authority and of rearrangements in institutional relationships to support them.
9. With respect to global Christianity, a reforming, post-religious Jesusfollowing recognizes that all the religions and ideologies are undergoing the kind of personalization and self-mediating demands that have become a global anthropological reality.
10. Christians must learn from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who recognized the end of heresy, and from Hans-Martin Barth, who endorsed a “confessionless” Lutheranism in Germany, and celebrate a Christian faith that is no longer obligated to provide legally binding definitions of one against the many or on behalf of the many.
11. If the historic institutions are going to be of service to the human being, they will have to provide pedagogies of spiritual self-care that allow for employment of many religious sources in the search for healing, meaning, and self-transcendence (salvation).
12. For theologizing, these changes mean that, since scriptures and other source texts of religion are the common property of humanity, it is possible to learn to read them all for inquiry and edification. The substance of theology without walls will be a combination of confessional, interreligious, and contemporary engagements with the reality of God in the world, exploring and explicating promise and fulfillment, wherever these may be found.