Thesis to Book

Currently engaged in transforming my doctoral thesis into a book, I have now finished drafts of Chapters One and Two, which basically set the scene for the book's central argument by introducing Radical Orthodoxy (particularly James K.A. Smith's "postmodern catholicism"), deconstructive theology (especially Jack Caputo's "weak theology"), and the emerging church (as a milieu organised around several diversely understood discrusive and practical commitments).


There are, of course, several publications on the market aimed at helping academics at this stage in their career, including William Germano's From Dissertation to Book and Getting It Published; Eleanor Harman's The Thesis and The Book; and Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors, edited by Beth Luey. I haven't read any of them, but I have been tracking down advice for PhD students from publishers such as Ashgate (here) and researching formats for book proposals.

There are several questions that I'm asking myself at the moment, particularly:

• "is my thesis best suited to publication as a book, or as a journal article or series of journal articles?"

and,

• "to what audience would my book be addressed?"

"I Hate Your Church..." Published

My Expository Times article on the emerging church ("'I Hate Your Church; What I Want is My Kingdom': Emerging Spiritualities in the UK Emerging Church Milieu") is now available online. You can access the abstract for free here, but you'll have to subscribe to The Expository Times, purchase short-term access, or log-in using an Athens account or university homepage.

I'm not allowed to distribute the article either.


The article briefly assesses current ways of defining "the emerging church" and suggests the value of the notion of a "milieu." Borrowing from Gordon Lynch's work on progressive spirituality, the concept of a global "emerging church milieu" (with regional milieus within it, e.g. "US emerging church milieu" or "UK emerging church milieu" etc) allows the emerging church to be portrayed as a coherent religious phenomenon without ignoring local differences and divergences.


I then enumerate what I see as the six commitments of emerging church discourse. These are commitments to:

1. "glocal" contextualisation,
2. "ancient-future" traditions,
3. organisational experimentation,
4. exploring postmodern thought,
5. (re)thinking theology, and
6. socially, politically and environmentally just living.

Not having much space in which to present these commitments in this article, I go into much more detail in my doctoral thesis, but these commitments (which obviously overlap with other Christian and non-Christian milieus beyond the emerging church milieu) are variously understood and put into practice multifariously.


Then I identify two spiritualities which emerge from this milieu: Deep Church spirituality and A/Theistic spirituality. These two spiritualities were primarily presented as hermeneutics in my thesis, but they can also be thought of as spiritualities. In my postdoctoral research, I hope to explore them as social imaginaries. Again, I didn't have the room to go into much detail in this article, but I hope to publish a few academic journal articles and a monograph that will bring my library basement destined thesis to the masses!

My Expository Times article then concludes by reflecting upon the missional orientation of these two emerging church spiritualities. Following a question that John Hull asked of fresh expressions of church in Mission-Shaped Church and Mission-Shaped Questions, I wonder whether Deep Church and A/Theistic spiritualities are kingdom-shaped or church-shaped in their missiologies.

How to Eat Well in Church

As I begin to emerge from a just-passed-my-viva-(phew!) lull (I always tend to get a bit depressed after the excitement of finishing a piece of work, presenting a piece of work, or handing something in), I am doing my corrections (done!), writing my paper for the Edinburgh BSA SocRel conference on the Changing Face of Christianity (not done yet!), and submitting abstracts for a couple of conferences later in the year - 500 words for the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture's "Attending to the Other" (done!) and 200 words for the "Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue" symposium, held by the University of Glasgow's Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology and the Arts (not yet done!).

My submission for the Attending to the Other conference is called, "How to Eat Well in Church: Saying 'Yes' to the Other and Becoming Nothing in Derrida, Paul and Emerging Christian Discourse." Hopefully it'll get accepted by either the Continental Philosophy of Religion or the Theology panels, but I'm also keen to work this paper into a journal article so it won't be too bad if it doesn't get accepted. Here's the abstract:

‘Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination... before any identification’ (Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, 77).

‘Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you’ (St Paul, Romans 15:7).

‘...we can freely enter into a theatrical space in which we act as though there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female... Here we do not lay down our identity only to pick up our new identity in Christ. Rather it is in laying down all our identities that we directly identify with Christ’ (Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal, 178-179 and peterrollins.net/blog/?p=889)

‘If a community is too welcoming, it loses its identity; if it keeps its identity, it becomes unwelcoming’ (John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 113)

For Derrida, hospitality, friendship and love are responsibilities that are excessive to the complacent fulfilment of duty. While hospitality by rights and justice under the law protect the self-same, unconditional hospitality is to attend to (to pay attention to and to serve) alterity. Similarly, for (Badiou’s) Paul, the Christian community is to welcome the other, without quarrelling about or arguing over determinations of truth. Co-implicated in this is that, in order to welcome those with different truths, that which makes the host distinctive is to be sacrificed or performatively suspended, which is why there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female (Gal. 3:28). Paul’s injunction to hospitality is occasioned by questions regarding whether or not to eat meat and what Paul calls for is the creation of communities that attend not to the question of what to eat but to the question of how to eat, which is a ‘learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat’ (Derrida, “Eating Well,” 282). The event of Jesus’ excess in relation to all law is to be translated into hospitable ecclesial spaces that attempt to let the other be other, to privilege hospitality over the temptation to conversion or consensus, to refuse to subsume the other to the self-same, and to create a space that places unconditional welcome above conditions of entrance.

The “emerging church conversation” is one contemporary discourse about Christianity that is attempting to imagine and enact such spaces. This paper introduces the discursive motifs in which this Derridean-Pauline desire to attend to the other is expressed and through which it is being performed liturgically, particularly in the work of Peter Rollins and the Belfast-based ‘transformance art’ collective, ikon. I examine the ways in which alterity is welcomed, by which a place for the other is prepared, and through which Christian community negotiates unity and difference. I raise questions of openness and the possibility of radical sociality, of kenosis and the problems of self-identity, and of how deconstructive theologies (such as John D. Caputo’s weak theology) might be ecclesiologically, ethically and politically viable for concrete collectives.

If deconstructive theology interprets the church and the world, how might deconstructive religious collectives be changing them?

Cross and Khora

Jack Caputo gave me a heads up about an edited collection about his work, Cross and Khora: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo. It's out in January 2010, edited by Marko Zlomislic and Neal DeRoo (Neal edited a collection on phenomenology and eschatology, of which I've read a few chapters but haven't yet had time to fully review, as well as one on James K.A. Smith, which I looked at a bit here, here and here). I'm hoping Jack'll be able to get me a copy to review here and use in my thesis.

Here's a list of other books about Caputo's work:

• Roy Martinez, ed. 1997. The Very Idea of Radical Hermeneutics.
• James Olthuis, ed. 2002. Religion with/out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo.
• Mark Dooley, ed. 2003. A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus.
• Christopher Simpson. 2009. Religion, Metaphysics and the Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo.

Getting Out of Being a Young Theologian Today

I posted earlier about the call for papers for a conference in Ireland on "Being a Young Theologian in the World Today." I reflected there about my reasons for submitting an abstract that was basically about not wanting to be a young theologian in the world today. I was concerned that it wouldn't get accepted. Here's what I sent in:

On the Question of (Rightly?) Passing for A/Theologian

By nature, religious studies departments nurture young students of religion. These students might draw their markers of self-identity from any of the disciplines such departments incorporate. They might be(come) sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, textual scholars, scholars of culture, politics, sexuality, or gender. Perhaps, theologians. In my interdisciplinary doctoral studies, I felt at home in such a diverse academic environment, but I balked whenever my supervisor either described my work as theology or suggested that I might even "be" a theologian.

This paper stems from an interrogation of my own reactions to such designations, as well as undergraduate students' perceptions of the nature and role of theology in western society. While a contemporary context of de-traditionalisation and individualisation might seem at odds with the public religiosity of theologians, the societal trends of pluralisation and sacralisation suggest a simultaneous post-secularism that seemingly levels the playing field for religious confession within and beyond academia.

I introduce the work of (reluctant?) deconstructive theologian John D. Caputo as an appropriately nondogmatic and "weak," even hypothetical, yet robustly confessional theology, negotiating both historical association with the Christian tradition and messianic dissociation from it. In conversation with Caputo's "a/theological" project, I reflect upon Jacques Derrida's confession that he "rightly passes for" an atheist, in the face of his reluctance to say "I am" an atheist, and suggest the aptness of these sentiments for thinking about disciplinary affiliation today. In contemplating the question of rightly passing for an "a/theologian," I re-consider my relationship to both theology and religious studies.

Although my abstract got accepted, I am having to pull out of the conference because it costs too much to get there. "Budget" airlines (naming no names) have stuck so many extras on to a ticket from Birmingham to Dublin that I can't afford to go. I'm going to write the paper anyway, as it is basically a section of my methodology chapter reflecting on interdisciplinary. At least my partner Sim won't now be jealous that I'm going to Ireland without him!

[Update: October 21 2009 - Eoin O'Mahony, a PhD student, blogger, and researcher with the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference, has organised for my travel expenses to be funded, so I'm off to Ireland after all! This is really exciting... Sorry, Sim!]

Philosophy of Life Conference Round-Up

I got back last night from Liverpool Hope's "Towards a Philosophy of Life: Reflections on the Concept of Life in Continental Philosophy of Religion" conference, having had a thoroughly enjoyable (if not totally follow-able) weekend. My own learning style is not comfortable with listening to people read written papers. I'm much more at home with people presenting, rather than reading, work. But philosophers tend to go for the practice of writing a journal paper or book chapter or whatever, and then just reading it out - rather than thinking about their audience's learning styles and altering the piece in order to facilitate rather than alienate others! Only very few of the papers this weekend were easy to follow (even if you knew the material they were talking about) which was disappointing. But I have always felt that sociologists of religion are much better presenters, thereby actually helping their audience follow their argument. Didn't mean to start this post off with a bit of a moan, but philosophers' styles of presentation do tend to detract from the enjoyment of philosophy conferences.

I met a cool bunch of people, including Simon Scott (PhD student at Warwick), Shahida Bari (How To Live blog), Aaron Landau (University of Hong Kong), Todd Mei (University of Kent) and Chad Lackies (Concordia Seminary, here's his blog). It was particularly great to meet Colby Dickinson (KU Leuven) whose paper on Agamben, the messianic and canonicity was really stimulating because of a resonance with my own work. Canonicity, Colby writes, is "the 'desire' for the canonical over and beyond any canon," clearly mirroring the hope against hope for the messianic given voice in but not restricted to determinate concrete messianisms. My paper also charted this dual movement, but in relation to Jack Caputo's historical association with Christianity (I was looking particularly at creation and kingdom in order to refute Jamie Smith's characterization of Caputo's work as allergic to determinate particularities, more of which in a later post) and messianic disassociation. Colby made some intriguing connections with identity formation, and Jack, Colby and I had a useful discussion after his paper about how communities that adopt deconstructive theologies actually do (ir)religious community. It's what I'm hoping to work on next, getting together a proposal for a research fellowship after I've finished my thesis.

Anyway, Jack's paper on "Bodies Without Flesh: The Soft Gnosticism of Incarnational Theology" was very thought provoking, though I know there were a lot of people that were very disppointed that John Milbank only came for his own paper, rather than engaging with Caputo's criticisms of Radical Orthodoxy's incarnational theology. His excuse was that he had, apparently, been stuck on one of the amphibious vehicles (duck) that take you on tours round Liverpool and brokedown (lame). Well, Jack's paper draws from his work towards a sequel to The Weakness of God, currently entitled The Weakness of Flesh. He argued that incarnational theology's incarnation is not radical enough. It is a theology of in-carnation, rather than a theology of carnality. It places "the life of flesh within an economy of bodies without flesh." Like contemporary robotologists, incarnational theology attempts to transform bodies of flesh into bodies without flesh, in the process "betraying" flesh, harbouring a secret "horror of flesh." Instead, he asked, "What would a theology of carnality itself, before or without In-carnation, look like?" "Instead of a transaction between fleshly and fleshless being, I propose a more radical conception of incarnation as an event of flesh itself, of becoming-flesh," of taking, therefore, Christianity seriously, at its word, as the Word made flesh. Caputo is, as I intimated above, not removing himself from the Christian tradition but trying to make the tradition "make good" on its promises. Looking forward to The Weakness of Flesh already!

Being a Young Theologian Today

In November, St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, Ireland, are hosting a conference called "Interface: Being a Young Theologian in the World," from the 6 - 7th. Here's a bit of blurb: "The conference is aimed at young theologians and has two objectives - to explore the role of the young theologian and to explore the role of theology in contemporary society." That really is a bit of blurb. The only other information I can find about this conference is that abstracts (of no more than 25o words) are to be submitted to interfacemaynooth@gmail.com (along with applicant's educational status: Institution, course, year, etc.) by September 7th, and papers should be 20 minutes in length.

I'm thinking of submitting an abstract but, due to its subject matter, it may well not get accepted. It stems from my supervisors persistence that she thinks what I am doing is theology. Maybe it is. But I don't want it to be. And I don't want to be a theologian... Why is that? I thought I'd interrogate my thoughts about theology and being a theologian today a bit more and see where they got me. The reason that such a discussion may not get accepted is because its more about not wanting to be a young theologian in the world than being one! But maybe this perspective would be of use to others... Maybe not.

But how does one "be" a theologian? Am I one? Do I even know what I am, in order to say I am, or I am not, a theologian? There are clear parallels here with Jacques Derrida's thoughts on "being" an atheist. He tells us he "rightly passes" for one. But "is" he one? Does he know whether or not he is "one"? Is he "one" of anything? Are we not radically plural in our selves? Is there both atheist and theist (and more besides) within him? Is there both a theologian in me and another self, or even other selves, that are not, that do not want to be, and that hate the theologian in me? Maybe I "pass" for a theologian? But that is up to other people, not me!

Maybe the problem I have with being a theologian has to do with the status, or nature, or interpretation of theology itself? Jack Caputo used to refuse the label of theology and of being a theologian, because (in his Derrideanicity) he equated it with "onto-theology" (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, pp.288-289), with a project that "takes God as an object of conceptual analysis - rather than the addressee of a prayer - and is awash in institutional power" (The Weakness of God, p.301, footnote 1). Now, however, Caputo equates such dreams of a "calm and objectifying" discipline with Religious Studies, whereas Theology is a "disturbing passiong for God" which he loves madly (The Weakness of God, p.301, footnote 2). So maybe I do want to be a theologian? Afterall, Jack Caputo is my kind of theologian.

But, then again, the kind of theologian that Jack Caputo is, is an a/theologian. His theology exists on the slash of undecidability between atheism and theism; his is a theology, for sure. It names God within a determinate tradition - Christianity. But it never forgets that names are subject to endless translatability and substitutability (differance, Derrida would say) such that his theology remembers that it can be determined otherwise. Caputo does not say that he has named God once and for all; damn those who disagree to hell. Instead, he recognizes that what goes under the name of God also goes under other names. So maybe I want to be a/Theologian? (I reflect further on the nature of theology itself in my thesis, particularly on theology as fiction; its also something I cover in my paper for the Towards a Philosophy of Life Conference, which I haven't finished yet!)

Maybe I assume theology lacks humility about itself, about its status as theology, and maybe my presumption of theology as dogmatic is what makes me nervous about it, and about being one. In the West's pluralistic context, is this not how theology is viewed in the world today? Is this not how young theologians are viewed in the world today? As having "the truth" all sown up; damn everyone else's truth?

I don't know. But I thought it would be interesting to interrogate this presumptions a bit further, and to try and get a paper on it accepted to a conference on being a young theologian today. I think I'll call it "On (Not) Wanting to be a/Theologian."

I thought about doing an informal survey of undergrads starting theology and religious studies courses next year, asking about their preconceptions about the disciplines, the boundaries between them, and how they are/how they think they are perceived by "the public." Some useful resources on these topics from the Higher Education Academy's Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies includes Angela Quartermaine's "Theology and/or Religious Studies? A Response from Graduate Students."

"Making Good" on a Paper Submission

So my abstract for the "Towards a Philosophy of Life" conference at Liverpool in June (conference details here, abstract here) was accepted. My paper will be entitled, "Making Good on the "Good" of Life: Emerging Logics and Poetics of the Kingdom," and is basically the last chapter of my thesis, "Poetics." This chapter demonstrates how the preceding findings regarding the notion of truth in the UK emerging church milieu informs the debate between Radical Orthodoxy (particularly James K.A. Smith's 'postmodern catholicism') and deconstructive theology (especially Jack Caputo's 'weak theology'). So I now have to fit writing this paper into my thesis writing schedule (see here). But it'll be worth it, as both Caputo and John Milbank will be presenting at the conference too, so it'll be a great room of people to present this stuff too. I'll also have a bit of time after the conference for any revisions from the paper to feed into the chapter itself.

Philosophy of Life Abstract

So I submitted my abstract for the Towards a Philosophy of Life conference today: "Making Good on the "Good" of Life: Emerging Logics and Poetics of the Kingdom." The gist of it is basically the argument of my last three chapters (having now rearranged the order of my chapters - "Justice," "Generosity" and "Weakness" - which I'll blog more about tomorrow). Hopefully it'll get accepted, but even if it doesn't the words will go straight into my thesis so no real harm done... but it would be great to present this stuff to Jack Caputo and John Milbank as it directly relates to the rebate between elements of their work (see particularly my posts on James K.A. Smith's Radically Orthodox 'Postmodern Catholicism' here, here, here and here). Here's the abstract then:

This paper begins by illustrating how the deconstructive theology of John D. Caputo is embodied in the life of the UK emerging church milieu. Caputo’s theological project, articulated more recently as a Weak Theology, proposes both an ‘historical association’ with the determinate religious traditions’ visions of and hopes for life, and a ‘messianic disassociation,’ in order to refuse such traditions’ exclusionary, violent and unjust closure towards the other. Using interview and ethnographic data, I suggest ways in which this difficult tension between particularity and alterity might be lived out. I show why Caputo’s notion of the kingdom of God as a repetition or recreation of God’s generative proclamation that life is “good” is helpful as participants seek to live their lives as a form of “making good” on this original “good.”

In the process of exploring his notions of creation and kingdom, I defend Caputo’s theology against recent criticism by James K.A. Smith. In contrasting his Radically Orthodox ‘Postmodern Catholicism’ with Caputo’s work, Smith distinguishes between his own logic of incarnation and Caputo’s logic of determination. According to Smith, the consequences of the Derridean/Caputian logic include the translation of Derrida’s impossible, undeconstructible, un-present-able justice into an indeterminate, not specifically Christian, kingdom that is similarly structurally always to-come. However, I believe this is to overlook Caputo’s differentiation between representational logics and transformational poetics. I use this distinction to argue that an interpretation of the kingdom of God as a concept that corresponds to a reality that will either arrive (Smith) or never arrive (Smith’s reading of Caputo) mischaracterizes it as representational rather than transformational. These divergent notions of the kingdom are also present within contemporary Christian belief and practice. This paper therefore further unpacks the differences between these two understandings of the kingdom, as I see them emerge both in the work of Smith and Caputo, and in the UK emerging church milieu.

Two Cheers for Postmodernism; Three for the Logic of Incarnation?

Jamie Smith's chapter, "The Logic of Incarnation: Towards a Catholic Postmodernism," in Neal DeRoo and Brian Lightbody's The Logic of Incarnation: James K.A. Smith's Critique of Postmodern Religion, begins with a clarification of the "post-" in "postmodern" and of a distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity (pp.3-4). The subtitle of the book is a little misleading as Jamie Smith has contributed lucid and entertaining expositions of philosophical postmodernism and postmodern Christianity to (evangelical) audiences who have often misunderstood and/or misrepresented both (see, for example, his chapters in Christianity and the Postmodern Turn and his monographs Jacques Derrida: Live Theory and Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault to Church). So to describe his work as a "critique of postmodern religion" is more than a little confusing, given his engagement with postmodern thought. However, Smith helpfully summarises his position in relation to philosophical postmodernism:

"Insofar as the church (and mutatis mutandis, Christian theology and philosophy) has bought into key assumptions of modernity; And insofar as these assumptions (for instance, regarding the nature of freedom, the model of the human person, the requirements for what counts as “rational” or “true,” or what can be admitted to the “public” sphere of political or academic discourse) represent a rejection of biblical wisdom and the Christian theological heritage; And insofar as postmodernism articulates a critique of just these assumptions; Then the postmodern critique of modernity is something to be affirmed by Christians, not because it is postmodern, but because the postmodern critique of modernity can be a wake-up call for Christians to see their complicity with modernity, the inconsistency of this with a more integral understanding of discipleship, and thus actually be an occasion to creatively retrieve ancient and pre-modern theological sources and liturgical practices with new eyes, as it were." (pp.4-5)

So with his position clarified in such a manner, Smith gives "two cheers" for postmodernism - but stops short of the full three. Three cheers for postmodernism, Smith claims, is to "enthusiastically and wholeheartedly embrace all that is 'postmodern,' without critique and without reservation" (p.6). Acknowledging that the metaphor will eventually break down, Smith suggests that Christian thinkers like Merold Westphal (Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought and Overcoming Onto-theology: Towards a Postmodern Christian Faith) might also give postmodernism two cheers (or maybe two and a half), but that Jack Caputo (start with On Religion and What Would Jesus Deconstruct?) and Pete Rollins (How [Not] To Speak of God and The Fidelity of Betrayal) give postmodernism three cheers, and do so, according to Smith, "without critique and without reservation" (p.6).

In contrast to Smith's reading of Caputo and Rollins, his own work "is meant to be a critical appropriation of postmodernism and deconstruction that walks a long way with Derrida, but parts ways at a critical juncture—not out of a timidity or an unwillingness to 'go all the way,' but because of a principled critique of what I think are problems internal to Derrida’s thought." (pp.6/7)

So, with Smith's position with regards to postmodern thought clarified for the reader, he moves on to detail the "logic of incarnation" which was first articulated in Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation and developed as an "incarnational ontology" in Introducing Radical Orthodoxy. I blogged briefly about Smith's logic of incarnation yesterday, here. He contrasts his "two cheers" logic of incarnation with the "three cheers" logic of determination that he sees in the work of Jacques Derrida and the deconstructive theology of Jack Caputo. Though he acknowledges that there might be other strains, here's how Smith characterises these two:

The logic of determination recognises particularity, uniqueness and difference as inescapably part of human finitude but deems this existence "regrettable, lamentable and problematic" and remains "haunted by the Enlightenment dream of universality and purity" (pp.8-9). As these dreams are understood to be constitutive of knowledge, knowledge is therefore impossible (p.9). Similarly, as particular entities, determinative religions are considered to be tribal and violent, unable to live up to the (undeconstructible) dream of pure religion (p.11; see Hent de Vries Religion and Violence). Visions of justice, for example, are determinate, and therefore exclusionary and violent, which enables Derrida to construct the notion of undeconstrucible, pure justice as necessarily always to-come. Smith views the result as "a political rhetoric with grand claims regarding justice but which is systematically unable to articulate concrete policies" (p.12). However, this logic of determination is assumed. As Smith suggests in The Fall of Interpretation, the particular and determinate is constructed as violent only on the assumption of finitude as "failure" (p.13).

Smith argues that the logic of incarnation can outnarrate that of determination. This logic does not lament particularity but rather, as a "more 'persistent' postmodernism," refuses to desire universality and purity as (modernist) requirements of knowledge (p.10). This, Smith writes, "makes it possible to conceive difference differently" (p.11). Rather than being violent, then, particularity and determination - "drawing boundaries, demarcating doctrine (as the 'grammar' of the community) and specifying it's confession" - are central to finite communities (p.18). Unlike the logic of determination's positioning of justice (or a kingdom of the kingdomless reading of the kingdom of God) beyond possibility, "the logic of incarnation, which flows from and re-affirms the goodness of creation, finds its completion in the doctrine of the resurrection and an eschatology of the new heavens and the new earth—which is not any kind of escape from finitude as if finite particularity were inherently evil; rather, it is the hope of well-ordered particularity." (18)

Smith frames these two logics as a debate between a the "religion without Religion" of Caputian Weak Theology (see Caputo's Weakness of God) and Smith's "reformed Radical Orthodoxy" (see Introducing Radical Orthodoxy) or what he is now articulating as a "Catholic postmodernism" (p.21). He argues that "religion without Religion" is not undecidable all the way down (i.e. "things have been decided with respect to the abyss" [p.24]), does not leave the question of revelation "open" enough (p.29), "makes religion a (still) largely private, individual affair" (p.32), and fails to affirm a catholic eschatology in which "a particular instantiation of the kingdom is coming and will arrive" (footnote 65, p.34).

I've skipped through Smith's critique of "religion without Religion" because there is a lot more work I want to do on his distinction between the logics of incarnation and determination. I think that the debate between Weak Theology and "catholic postmodernism" [surely it should be a lower-case "c"?] will be a very useful way to frame my thesis as I already have two theological strands which emerge from my data on the notion of truth: a modified Radical Orthodoxy (in conversation with Generous Orthodoxy) and Weak Theology. When I've done more work on this I'll let you know whether I have three cheers for Smith's logic of incarnation!

Day Conference on Belief

Next year the Religion Graduate Students Association of Columbia University, New York, will host a day conference entitled "Belief Matters: Reconceptualising Belief and Its Use." Here's the blurb and why I'm sorely tempted - even though its only a day!

"In recent decades, sociologically- and anthropologically-minded scholars of religion have attempted to shift scholarly attention away from belief and doctrine to rituals, practices, identities, and institutions. This turn away from belief-as-doctrine has helped scholars see religion as a dynamic phenomenon that exists beyond the confines of peoples' heads. At the same time, however, has this shift kept scholars from examining other ways in which belief and believing remain central to how people conceptualize what religion is and how it operates in the world? By re-examining what it means to "believe," this conference explores if and how belief matters.

"We invite paper submissions (400-500 words) related to any of the following themes:

"Belief vs. Practice
"Papers on this theme might sharpen the critique of belief-centered paradigms, or defend their importance. Are ritual and practice better ways of conceiving religion and identity? Should belief play a role in studies of religious practice? Papers might address the ambiguous (and sometimes seemingly inconsistent) relationship between belief and behavior.

"Belief in People and Places
"Papers on this theme might focus on the notion of believing in something--as opposed to believing that something is true. Objects of belief may include charismatic leaders, saints (hagiography), and sacred places (e.g., pilgrimage sites).

"Ways of Believing
"Papers on this theme might focus on cultural, historical, and sectarian differences or developments in what it means to believe. Papers may examine, for example, post-enlightenment developments in western notions of belief and believing, the role of law in structuring acceptable ways of believing and belonging, or issues relating to how groups and individuals conceive and present their "beliefs"--including varying uses of such terms as "spiritual" and "religious." Papers might address atheism, science, or nationalism as alternative modes ofbelief.

"Conflict, Cosmopolitanism, and Social Reform
"Papers might address the rhetoric about belief and believing that governments and political and humanitarian groups use to justify or engender support for their policies or actions. How have groups in various cultural contexts situated their own beliefs or those of others in relation to "universal" human rights? How have social reformers in various historical contexts used language about beliefs in tactical ways?

"Counting Believers
"Papers on this theme might discuss questions about the role of belief in determining community membership--both from the perspective of practitioners and scholars. Papers might focus not just on modern communities (who, for example, count as "evangelical Christians"?) but also on communities from the distant past (who, for example, count as "early Christians"?).

"Belief and Science
"Scientific critiques of "religion" often frame their critiques in general terms but in fact focus their criticism on certain beliefs or modes of belief. How do alternate ways of thinking about belief unsettle conventional oppositions between religious belief and science?

"Belief and Ethics
"How does belief and believing inform decisions regarding right and wrong conduct in the world?"

Submission deadline: Monday, December 1st.

This conference has piqued my interest because recently I've been thinking about the aspects of my doctoral thesis which I would like to develop into my next research project. One of these possibilities is the way in which the nature of "belief" is shifting. Paul Heelas has been chatting to me recently about this, thinking about how belief in something inarticulated or inarticulatable is emerging - in contrast to determinable belief in some doctrine, person, place or thing. This dovetails quite interestingly with some of my research findings, partcularly how "belief" functions within communities which emphasise either "holding beliefs lightly" or "belief in the undecidability of belief." I'd like to do my next project on the ways in which the new nature of belief makes academic a/theology possible to practice "on the ground," and how this changes the ways in which ritual and particularly prayer are conceptualised and function. So this conference on belief might be a good starting point. Gonna REALLY be in trouble for money by April next year so we'll have to see!!!

Summer Hiatus Finally Over (Hopefully!)

Okay, so I've been a bit quiet over the past few months and I'm going to make up for that here. Since I last blogged about my thesis, I've been wrestling with transcribing (yes, I'm still transcribing!) after injuring my wrist (so, no, I haven't finished it yet!), finding and moving into a new house, buying kitchen appliances (Comet suck, but, when you complain, they give you stuff), and trying to get used to a new routine in a new place, whilst anxiously worrying about how my partner is getting on in his new job.

I've now transcribed 15 interviews (about 30 hours worth of data) with about 10 more interviews to go. Because I've been working from my fieldnotes about the content of the interviews, I've drawn up a very detailed thesis structure which I'm using to conduct thematic analysis of the transcripts, assigning participant quotations to their respective chapters. Of course, this is also further shaping my thesis structure as I do it.

Roughly, here are the main arguements of each chapter of the thesis, and some of the key words which I'm using to allocate interview data to particular chapters:

Chapter One argues for the concept of a "milieu" in approaching the emerging church and presents my understanding of the UK emerging church milieu.

Key words for (all) empirical data (not just interviews): alternative worship, "ancient-future," church, contextualization, culture, emergence, emergent, emerging church, experimentation, fresh expressions, "glocal," incarnation, leadership, mysticism, organization, post-evangelical, tradition.

Chapter Two presents the rationale for framing a study of the UK emerging church milieu and its spiritualities within an exploration of truth; namely, the criticisms of evangelical detractors, who wish to retain the "biblical" concept of truth as correspondence.

Key words: access, anti-intellectualism, correspondence, cultural postmodernity, emerging church critics, elitism, foundationalism, idolatry, intellectualism, modernity, "moral panic," nihilism, philosophical postmodernism, realism, relativism, representationalism, self-refutation.

Chapter Three provides the reader with an historical introduction to classical theories of truth, using a presentation of Nietzsche's critique of the will to truth and subsequent critiques of representationalism to introduce the ways in which participants understand the concept of truth.

Key words: Aquinas, Caputo, coherence, correspondence, Derrida, existentialism, event, Foucault, Heidegger, justification, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, metanoia, objectivity, personal, perspectivism, pragmatism, propositional, Radical Orthodoxy, realism, relativism, representationalism, subectivity, transcendence.

An Interlude: Mystics and Prophets explains that two sets or strands of philosophical implications can be drawn from the data about participants’ understandings of truth, and relates these two strands to the apophatic and prophetic strands which Jack Caputo identifies in the work of Jacques Derrida (and to Merold Westphal’s distinction between a hermeneutics of finitude and a hermeneutics of suspicion).

Chapters Four and Five highlight the epistemological and ontological implications of participants' understandings of truth, detailing the two strands which are in evidence.

Chapter Four agues that some participants are ontologically realist in relation to absolute truth, whilst acknowledging the epistemological limits that fallibility places on human knowledge of absolutes. These participants demonstrate a fear of what is constructed as postmodern relativism and postmodern nihilism, in their understanding of deconstruction as a necessary methodological phase through which they must go on their way to the reconstruction of Christianity.

Key words: absolutism, bivalence, certainty, deconstruction, doubt, faith, fallibility, finitude, foundationalism, humility, (in)accessibility, "moral panic," nihilism, relativism, subjectivity, universalism.

Chapter Five argues that, ontologically, other participants extend the themes of doubt and uncertainty to the reality of God's being and that, epistemologically, participants understand decosntruction to be inherent to language, as displayed throughout Christian history, and as a calling.

Key words: aporia, a/theism, auto-deconstruction, confession, deconstruction, doubt, event, faithful betrayal, metanoia, the other, ritual, slash, to-come, transformation, transformance art, uncertainty, undecidability, unravelling.

Chapters Six and Seven reflect on the theological implications of participants' understandings of truth.

Chapter Six assesses Jamie Smith’s suggestion that Radical Orthodoxy is an appropriate theological frame for the emerging church, arguing that, while RO connects with many of the theological implications of participants’ understandings of truth (especially within the first philosophical strand identified above), it needs to be revised in order to accord with these participants’ views on truth and religious pluralism.

Key words: aesthetics, arrogance, certainty, creativity, exclusivism, the "gathering center," Generous Orthodoxy, heresy, Hick, hierarchy, inclusivism, language, liturgy, meaning, narrative, "ontology of peace," "ontology of violence," "onto-theology," paganism, participation, pluralism, Radical Orthodoxy, sacramentality, "theo-ontology," transcendence, universalism.

Chapter Seven argues that the other strand within the data holds more affinity for Jack Caputo's weak theology, and that participants exhibit what I refer to as an “a/theistic orthodoxy,” which I show to be a practical expression of Caputo’s project.

Key words: activism, agnosticism, atheism, a/theism, deliteralization, language, the messianic, orthodoxy, postfoundationalism, pragmatic orthodoxy, theism, translatability, transformation, undecidability, undeconstructible, weak theology.

The second Interlude: Convergence argues that, while it is possible to discern differences between the philosophical and theological implications of participants’ understandings of truth, a convergence occurs in practice as participants unite in an emphasis on justice.

Chapter Eight argues that a Levinasian primacy of ethical action over settling theoretical differences is an appropriate framework in which to understand the political implications of the participants' notions of truth.

Key words: absolute future, activism, Augustine, call, Caputo, Derrida, ecumenism, ethics, event, facere veritatem, gift, hospitality, hyper-realism, justice, kingdom of God, law, Levinas, love, missio-Dei, orthopraxis, the other, per(ver)formative, politics, pragmatism, prayer, response, to-come, undeconstructible, Zizek.

The Conclusions re-cap my main findings, but also explore the importance of the context from which participants' understandings of truth arise (particularly post-conflict Belfast), and highlights two spiritualities which emerge from the emerging church milieu: Deep Church and A/theistic Spirituality.

So, any thoughts on the thesis structure as it is emerging? Admittedly, some of the key words and where I've chosen to place them within the overall strcuture only make sense to me, but hopefully the brief summary of each chapter's main arguments will give you at least an idea of where the data is taking me at the moment.

Panel Review UPDATE

So the panel review (middle of May) went okay. I had my supervisor (Dr. Deborah F. Sawyer - religion and gender, biblical studies and contemporary culture), Dr. Paul Fletcher (continental philosophy, modern theology, political theology) and Professor Chris Partridge (new religions, alternative spiritualities, occulture) - so a useful mixture of points of view.

I had hoped that it would be useful for my dilemma researching truth and representing research as truth. But it was unclear the extent to which the panel agreed that this is a question which will come up in my viva or is a problem of my own creation! We'll see. At least I can say that I have thought about the potential disjuncture between the theories of truth I am reflecting on and the theory of truth I am using in that very reflection!

I was grilled by Paul (rightly) about whether or not I am approaching the emerging church milieu and the work of Jack Caputo with the same level of critical judgment as I am approaching emerging church critics, critics of postmodernism, and some of the other theologies and philosophies I am using (Radical Orthodoxy, for example). I think a lot of my critical distance is going to come out as I start writing up (at which I am WAY behind schedule - not having completed transcribing yet!), framing the UK emerging church milieu within contemporary sociological theory and theorising a bit more on it as a social phenomenon.

And Chris asked to what extent I was taking ecclesiology into consideration in my discussion of emerging church epistemology, as there is a complex interrelationship between the two (which I agree). I'm not particularly interested in ecclesiology (sorry - leave that to the majority of the other postgraduates researching the emerging church) but where I do draw connections between ecclesiology and epistemology will be in the first chapter where I introduce the reader to the UK emerging church milieu.

A New Kind of Christian is a New Kind of Atheist: Truth and A/theistic Orthodoxy in the Emerging Church Milieu - part one

[update: this post has been edited, to remove too much detail about my paper - which threatened the paper's later publication in journal and/or monograph form. If you would like to read the paper, please email me at k.moody1@lancaster.ac.uk and I would be happy to send you a copy]

My paper at the "Postmodernism, Truth, and Religious Pluralism" conference went well.

I was nervous. I'd been imagining large the large auditoriums you see in films set on American university campuses, but the room wasn't too big and was all on one level - although I did have to stand up to deliver the paper, which I've never done before. I've also never really READ a paper. I usually do papers based on PowerPoint presentations and just talk. Then I sort of write the paper after I've presented it, so it was a bit odd for me to have to read something out. I hope my presentation skills were up to it! Early on, I decided to play the (always useful) postgraduate student card - conference delegates tend to be easier on us PGs. I decided to emphasise my cute Britishness too. It seemed to work.

First off, I introduced my project, exploring the UK emerging church milieu through the question of how truth is conceptualised. And explained the impetus of this focus in relation to critics' claims that the emerging church is departing from the biblical notion of truth as correspondence.

Then I read the paper. I posted my introduction in an early post, so here I'll just briefly make my main arguments and blog about the responses I got from other conference delegates:

Primarily, my paper argued that there is slippage in the work of Jack Caputo between the ways in which he conceptualises the notion of truth. However, I demonstrated that this slippage is a functional necessity of his weak theology. Although he slides away from a wholly performative notion of truth (as event, as confession, as weeping, as praying) towards truth justice - as a telos and as an adequatio (regardless of whether this telos can ever be known or whether it's equation to reality can ever come about) - this slide mirrors a key feature of Caputo's theology of the event: the slippery distinction between wholly other, undeconstructible messianic structures (truth as event and circumfession) and determinate messianisms (justice, hospitality, gift, forgiveness and the kingdom of the kingdomless).

Secondly, my paper situated this argument in the context of ethnographic data from the UK emerging church milieu, in which may participants are increasingly drawn to continental philosophy and deconstructive theology. I demonstrated that the understandings of truth discernable in Caputo's work can also be observed in the conversations I have had with a wide range of people within the emerging church milieu. In particular, I link the a/theism advocated by Caputo to an understanding of pragmatic orthodoxy which arises from within the UK emerging church milieu. This reformulation of orthodoxy moves away from right belief and towards believing in the right way, i.e. lovingly, and holding your beliefs lightly. I argue that what I call the "a/theistic orthodoxy" observable within the emerging church milieu is a practical expression of Caputo's project, particularly as it relates to the concept of truth. Hence my title: A New Kind of Christian is a New Kind of Atheist... i.e., an a/theist.

Off to Boston, baby, yeah!

I got confirmation yesterday that my paper, "A New Kind of Christian is a New Kind of Atheist: Truth and A/theistic Orthodoxy in the Emerging Church Milieu," got accepted for the Society of Continental Philosophy and Theology conference on Truth, Postmodernism and Religious Pluralism that I've been banging on about in other posts. Very exciting!

I'd booked all of my flights and hotels already because the theme of the conference is so similar to that of my thesis and it would have been a great opportunity to network - even if my paper hadn't been accepted. But it has, so now I need to go and read loads of stuff to prepare for the inevitable questions I'll get and to pray that the Arts and Humanities Research Council are nice enough to pay for my flights!

Here's my brief introduction to whet some appetites concerning "a/theistic orthodoxy":

Jacques Derrida writes that, ‘[w]e have to elaborate another truth of the true, another way of experiencing the truth.’ Jack Caputo’s translation of continental philosophy into a deconstructive theology, which he has recently articulated as a weak theology, begins this elaboration. However, his reworking of Augustine’s facere veritatem, doing or making the truth in one’s heart before witnesses, into making truth ‘come true’ lays him open to a charge of inconsistency in his deployment of the term “truth.” However, this paper argues that the slippage which occurs between Caputo’s conceptualisations of truth is a necessary feature of his theology of the event.

This paper is set in the context of ethnographic data from the UK Emerging Church Milieu, wherein participants are increasingly drawn to both continental philosophy and deconstructive theology. Their notions of truth exhibit the gamut of understandings discernable in Caputo’s work and elements within this milieu similarly seek to celebrate the slash of undecidability between theism and atheism. In conversation with Caputo, I argue for the linkage of this a/theism to an understanding of orthodoxy which arises from the UK Emerging Church Milieu. I argue, therefore, that an “a/theistic orthodoxy” is a practical expression of Caputo’s project of a weak theology as it relates to the concept of truth.

I'll post about "a/theistic orthodoxy" again in the run up to the conference, and address (as I do in the paper) the apparent contradiction in linking these two concepts: a/theism and orthodoxy.

Truth in Weak Theology - part five - adequatio, circumfession, facere veritatem

My presentation of Jack Caputo’s Weak Theology (in parts one [Names and Events], two [Aporia], three [kingdom without kingdom] and four [A/theism]) sets the scene for a discussion of truth in The Weakness of God, where three notions can be identified and linked to differing levels of his work. I treat these concepts of truth, not in the order in which they arise in this book, but in an order which reflects Caputo’s hyper-realist, messianic prayer for the to-come.

In his reduction/magnification of names to events, Caputo emphasises the conditioned nature of language and in so doing exposes that there are contingent reasons why certain names are chosen over others (288), and that no name can function universally for humanity (289). Caputo rejects, therefore, the first concept of truth as correlation. For him, ‘a truth that is not a matter of establishing an adequatio’ (286). Without denying the reality of the world – ‘The “world” is what really exists, whereas the kingdom calls for something else’ (37) – the truth of God is not found in theological realism nor theological anti-realism, which both demand a correspondence theory of truth wherein language corresponds to reality (whether reality is real or an illusion). Rather, the truth of the name of God is found in a hyper-realism, of which is cannot be said that it “is,” but that it is “to-come,” thereby disallowing a theory of truth which demands an adequatio between language and what “is.” The truth of the name of God is not (yet) ‘in being, in re’ (16).

The truth of God is found, therefore, ‘not in a proposition but in a confession’ (286). It is a matter of prayer, not epistemology (6). In this second understanding of truth, which can be referred to as a circumfession, Caputo uses phrases such as ‘a hard truth’ (6), ‘honestly facing the truth’ (6), ‘the cold truth’ (20), ‘if the truth be told’ (288), ‘in all truthfulness’ (287), and ‘to be honest to God’ (287). Here truth has the flavour of honesty – hard and humbling, it is the event of a confession, a cut, a wound, a confession that makes us weep and bleed. It involves the recognition of our condition vis-à-vis language, and therefore truth involves the rejection of truth as an adequatio. Instead, ‘Truth means truthfully to confess the poverty of our philosophy, the weakness of our theology, and the humility of our condition’ (286). Truth is a confession, which itself is a concession (293), an admittance of our situation – rather than truth being something that is sought after it is something which cannot be escaped (284).

‘To confess the truth means to own up to our own limits, to face the music about what we know and do not know… the truth demands an honest concession that we cannot contain the event harbored by the name of God’ (287).

This concept of truth as the event of ‘endless confession and circumfession and confusion’ (115) moves us away from truth as an adequatio on the plane of being, name, and realism/anti-realism, towards truth as ‘a deed, something to do, to translate into the flesh of existence’ (16). Here Caputo repeatedly employs the Augustinian understanding of “making” or “doing the truth,” facere veritatem, so that ‘a “truth claim” is less an exact claim we make than a exacting claim that is made upon us’ to make truth true (286), to actualise the promise, the call, the hyper-real.

Truth ‘wants to become true, to make itself true, to make itself come true, to be transformed into truth, so that its truth is a species of truth facere veritatem’ (118). The truth is less about descriptive content than about a promise calling to be fulfilled, so that the truth of the name of God is the truth of the event, ‘facere veritatem, doing and making truth happen’ (268).

In this sense, truth as facere veritatem is a hyper-truth beyond the truth of correspondence, a not-yet-true truth, a truth of future-correspondence-peut-être, of correspondence-à-venir, hyper-correspondence.

When Caputo talks about justice preceding truth (253), he refers to a translation of the name of God into an event and the event into a deed, which is a ‘translation into [the] justice which precedes truth [as correspondence with reality], or a translation into truth in the Augustinian sense of facere veritatem’ (272). This is suggestive of two of the concepts of truth which I have observed in Caputo’s work: truth as correspondence now, which in terms of theological truth is rejected as undecidable, and truth as facere veritatem, correspondence-to-come. As Caputo himself writes,

‘The truth of the event releases us from the order of names and transports us to another level, where truth does not mean learning a name but making truth come true, making it happen, facere veritatem, letting the event happen, sans voir, sans savoir, sans avoir, praying and weeping before an unknown god.

Lord, when did we see you hungry and give you to eat?

Is that you, Lord?

The truth of the event is not a name but a deed’ (299)

The first notion of truth identified, and rejected, in Caputo’s work is truth as a full and adequate correspondence between language and reality. Truth is not about correlation, because this theory of truth operates on the plane of being, of names and of the right names, the right correlations. Instead, truth is about the honest but hard recognition of our limitations on the plane of being. This existential truth is the second notion identifiable within The Weakness of God, on the plane of being, but facing the hard truth of our inadequacy. The third notion, facere veritatem, is the prayers and tears for truth to be made true, for the messianic to-come to be made a kingdom without kingdom, here and now, where ‘the truth of the event is not a name but a deed’ (299).

These second two movements which Caputo makes with regards to truth, after a rejection of the first position, mirrors the movements he makes within an experience of the impossible:

‘Having, or rather venturing, an experience [of the impossible] involves a double operation: first we understand full well that it is impossible to go, that we are blocked from moving ahead, that we cannot take another step, that we have reached the limit: then we go. We venture out and take the risk, perilous as it may be. First, immobilization, then movement. The movement is mobilized by the immobilization… The immobilization belongs to the more cognitive domain: we know that this can’t be done; we have been instructed by the understanding about the limits of what is possible. But then we go. Thus the movement is carried out by a shift to the sphere of praxis and the pragmatic order… to a certain non-cognitive leap which overcomes the hesitations of the understanding that is what Augustine calls doing the truth, facere veritatem’ (Caputo 2003:126)

So in relation to truth, Caputo makes two interrelated moves. First, we know we cannot know truth, cannot name it, contain it in language, cannot stop the endless translation and deferral. Then, we go – we act, we pray, we weep for the truth to become true; we translate the event’s truth – not it’s semantic content but what it promises (6) – into a deed; we respond to the call to being to go beyond itself, to be otherwise.

Truth in Weak Theology - part four - A/theism

Fourth installment about Jack Caputo's The Weakness of God, following on from parts one (Names and Events), two (Aporia), and three (kingdom without kingdom).

The undecidability of ontology forces translation not from realism to anti-realism, for aporia prevents final, transcendent answers, but from event to deed, from experience of the impossible, a promise to come, to the act of hospitality, actualising the promise (284). And this under not only the name of God and theism, but of atheism, ‘for Derrida could say whatever he has to say without the benefit of this name [God]’ (93).

The uncontainability of the event and the endless translatability of the name means that ‘[a]n event cuts across the distinctions among the various confessions, and even across the distinction between the confessional faiths and secular unbelief, in order to touch upon a more elemental, if ambiguous, quality of our lives, however this quality is given words or formulated, with or without what is conventionally called religion or theology’ (4).

‘To act in the name of God is to act in response to the event contained in the name of God, under whatever name the event addresses us, whether or not it is to the name of God itself that one responds’ (266), so that Derrida can both ‘rightly pass for an atheist’ (cited 25) and be theological, which means ‘to make the mind’s ascent to God, which means toward whatever event is astir in the name of God’ (6).

For Caputo, ‘the line dividing the kingdom and the world is not the line dividing theist and atheist; it is a matter of the event, not of nomination and denomination’ (268). It is the me voici, the “here I am,” that concerns Caputo, whether or not that is followed by au nom de Dieu or tout court – sans Dieu; the translation of the event, not semantically into theism or atheism, but pragmatically. So, ‘by the mad para-logic of the impossible, rightly passing for an atheist is no obstacle’ (266).

There is a resultant undecidability between theism and atheism, and each contains an element of their opposite, an a/theism where the contingency of the names constitutes their openness to the event. Under whatever name, in response to the event, there is the structure of the ‘messianic’ - prayers and tears for the to-come - without the ‘messianism’ of a particular Messiah. Under whatever name, in response to the event, there is the structure of a ‘religion without religion.’

Tomorrow, the final installment of Truth in Weak Theology - part five - adequatio, circumfession, facere veritatem - which (finally) addresses Caputo's notion(s) of truth in TWOG.

Truth in Weak Theology - part three - kingdom without kingdom

Third in a series about Jack Caputo's The Weakness of God, following on from Truth in Weak Theology - part one - Names and Events, and Truth in Weak Theology - part two - Aporia, today I'm posting about the pragmatic, rather than semanitc, translation of events; the kingdom (without kingdom) of God; and hyper-realism.

kingdom without kingdom

Conceiving the name of God as a weak force of a call holds implications for phenomenological scriptural hermeneutics, wherein ‘these texts are solicitations that call for a response, appeals coming from I know not where about a way to be, a style of existence, about a poetic possibility that we are invited to transform into existential actuality’ (117).

Scripture is not treated as representational of reality, but as ‘hermeneutically explicative or phenomenologically disclosive or revelatory about a mode of being in the world’ (188). There is thus a movement from text to call to response and actualizing activity. For Caputo, ‘[r]eligious discourses are not “verified” like propositions, by finding a fact of the matter out there with which the proposition makes a snug fit, but rather the event they harbor is “testified” to in experience, by being borne out or confirmed in our lives’ (118).

While names are endlessly translatable semantically, the event calls to be translated pragmatically. This translation is ‘radical, beyond any semantic transfer, beyond any aligning of meanings in different semantic fields, beyond being and knowledge, because it is a translation into witnessing, into action. The name of God must be translated into an event, and the event must be translated into a deed’ (272). Semantics should not block pragmatics, which is why Caputo is concerned to ‘save the name of God, not absolutize’ or literalize or ontologize it (40).

He reflects upon continental philosophy’s fondness for the French word ‘adieu,’ holding for Levinas the sense of being turned to God: ‘The à in à-Dieu represents a turn toward God, not a turn taken by the conscious freedom of an auto-turning autonomous self, but a being-already-turned to God, long before the conscious self steps in and takes on turn or another’ (264). Long before one turns to God though intentional actions and aspirations for God, ‘before I even know this name,’ one is ‘always already turned by God to God: à Dieu’ (264).

The name of God, which contains an uncontainable unconditional event, names a transformation (whatever name we give it) which turns the self to the other, because the name of God is an undeconstructible event of justice, forgiveness, hospitality, and love. This is where, Caputo argues, Levinas and Derrida converge:

‘Starting out from the opposite shores of theism and atheism, they join rails in the middle. Even as for Levinas, religion, me voice, au nom de Dieu [here I am, in the name of God], translates into ethics, me voici, tout court [here I am, just that], so for Derrida, for whom deconstruction is justice, messianic peace, and hospitality, deconstruction undergoes a parallel translation into an ethic-politics and therefore into the name of God, into a working equivalence with speaking in the name of God. Me voici, au nom de Dieu, and me voici, tout court – these translate into the same thing, into hospitality, which is not their “common meaning” but the event they share in common, whether or not one rightly passing for an atheist.’ (274)

The experience of the impossible, the event, which is ethics for Levinas and deconstruction for Derrida, turns from semantics to pragmatics, from names to events and our response to the event. ‘What matters with the event,’ Caputo writes, ‘is to take a step’ (298).

To recap, ‘It is not what we call God that is at issue, but what God calls. Then again, it is not what God calls that is at issue, but the response’ (97). For Caputo, the response, the action or deed, constitutes what he calls a ‘sacred anarchism’ (14), visible in the poetics of the kingdom of God. The kingdom which unfolds when the event harboured in God’s name rules (with sovereignty but without force, or, rather, with the sovereignty of a weak force, a call, a word, a sigh) is a ‘kingdom without kingdom,’ an anarchic kingdom, an (Alice in) Wonderland of a kingdom, which is a ‘holy disarray’ (14), a ‘kingdom of the kingdom-less’ (26). This anarchism, like deconstruction, is undertaken ‘in the name of something’ (140), in the name(s) which we ascribe to the event, the call, the ‘infinite task of making good on Elohim’s “good”’ (128) with acts of love, justice, gift, forgiveness and hospitality, if there are such things (s’il y en a).

This ‘making good’ is vital for one of the senses in which Caputo understands truth, which will be examined in a later post, but it also pertains to his understanding of ‘hyper-realism.’ Events, which are ‘not what is present but what is coming’ (6), avoid the realist/anti-realist debates which concern the level of being, the level of names (102).

‘I do not take the name of God to pick out an entity, as in realism, or an illusion, as in anti-realism, but an event, an advent, a future and a promise, a call and a claim, a hope and an aspiration, which is why I speak of a hyper-realism, which hopes in a being beyond or below being with a desire beyond desire and a hope against hope’ (124).

Reducing or magnifying the name of God to the level of events is to neither confirm nor contradict theological realism or theological anti-realism, but is to affirm a different reality altogether, the reality to come, the to-come (l’à-venir), whatever name it be given now or in the unforeseeable future. Hyper-reality is a reality promised beyond what is presently taken to be real’ (11). Hyper-realism ‘reaches beyond the real to the not-yet-real’ (11-12), so that it is a realism of the called-for to-come.

The translatability of names (mentioned in part one), the context of undecidability (part two), and the importance of pragmatics over semantics (here in part three) lead on to the discussion of a/theism, which I will post about in tomorrow's installment: Truth in Weak Theology - part four - A/theism.