Theology in Global Context: Essays in Honor of Robert Cummings Neville 9781474281201, 9781474293372, 9781474281218

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Part One: Religion in the Late Modern World
1 Neville's Systematic Theology of Symbolic Engagement
Engagement
Creation
God
The Religious Life
Conclusion
2 Robert Cummings Neville and Theology's Global Future
The Twenty-First Century Context of Christian Theology
Robert Cummings Neville's Global Theology
"The World is My Parish"
NOTES
3 Global Citizenship, Religion, and World Order
Emergent Global Citizenship
Global Citizenship in Neville's Theology
Global Citizenship, Religion and the Challenge for World Order
NOTES
4 Civilizing World Society: Order, Terror, Piety
Poetry and Competing World Orders
Impiety and the Ritualization of Terror
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
NOTES
5 Borderline Ethics and Intra-Community Violence and Murder among Young Afrikan American Males
Borderline Ethics
The Borderline Situation
Intra-Community Violence and Murder Among Young Afrikan American Males
A Borderline Ethics Response
NOTES
6 Axiology and Ecology: Neville's Contribution to an Ecological Ethic
NOTES
7 Jesus and Monotheism: Theological Transformations of Religious Philosophy
Knowing Neville
The Jesus of Faith and the Christ of History
Monotheistic Pluralism
Global Critical Monotheism
Theses toward Global Critical Monotheisms
NOTES
8 The Refiner's Fire: Some Reflections on Neville, Postmodernism, and the Trends in Discourses on Islam
NOTES
Part Two: Asian Religious Traditions and Theology
9 Neville Turns East
NOTES
10 Neville's Axiological Cosmology of Imaginative Synthesis: A Framework for Comparative Theology and Religion
NOTES
11 Pragmatism, Logical Vagueness, and the Art of Comparative Engagement
Acknowledgments
NOTES
12 Immortality
13 The Economy of Cosmic Power: A Vision for a Daoist Theology of Religion
NOTES
14 Mary, Mother of Mylapore: Symbolic Engagement as an Interreligious Transaction
NOTES
15 Toward a Christian Advaita: Sankara, Tillich, and Neville in Dialogue
I
II
III
NOTES
16 Nagarjuna and Creatio ex nihilo
Nagarjuna: Cosmology and/or Ontology?
Creatio ex nihilo: Cosmological and Ontological
Whose is the Middle Way?
NOTES
Part Three: The Future of Christian Theology
17 Godhead, God(s), Religions, and the Christian Religion
Godhead and God(s)
Religion(s)
The Future of the Christian Religion(s)
Excursus
NOTES
18 The Primordial, Godhead, and Apocalyptic Christianity
19 Graceful Reality: A Foundation for the Future of Philosophy and Theology
Grace in Neville's System
Symbolic versus Incarnational Engagement
A Theology of Grace: The Ground for the Future of Philosophy and Theology
NOTES
20 The Future of the Cross: Symbolic Engagement with the Atonement
I
II
III
NOTES
21 Infinity and Intersubjectivity
NOTES
22 A More Radical Pluralism
NOTES
23 Which Way toward a Theology of Religions: Pragmatist, Methodist, Ecumenist?
NOTES
24 Theology's Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy
I
II
III
NOTES
Part Four: Neville's Response
25 Thanks and Conversation: Responding to My Theological Colleagues
Symbolic Engagement
Creation
God
Religion
Ethics
Theology in a Global Public
NOTES
Robert Cummings Neville: Select List of Publications
Contributors
Name Index

Citation preview

Theology in Global Context

Religious Studies: Bloomsbury Academic Collections

This set contains six facsimiles from our imprints T&T Clark, The Athlone Press, Sheffield Academic Press and Continuum and focuses on comparing the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The volumes in this collection compare the different religions based on their prophets, their teachings and cultural influence, but also in how they face the challenge of an increasingly secular world. They are concerned with the similarities between the religions they discuss rather than their differences, hence supporting the view that religions should not be pitted against each other but instead be understood as faiths favouring understanding and togetherness. The collection is available both in e-book and print versions. Titles in Religious Studies are available in the following subsets: Religions of the World Comparative Religion Christianity and Society Religion, Sexuality and Gender Other titles available in Comparative Religion include: Calling Time: Religion and Change at the Turn of the Millennium edited by Martyn Percy Muhammad and Jesus: A Comparison of the Prophets and Their Teachings by William E. Phipps Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue edited by Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn The Privilege of Man: A Theme in Judaism, Islam and Christianity by Kenneth Cragg Turning Points in Religious Studies: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Parrinder edited by Ursula King

Theology in Global Context Essays in Honor of Robert Cummings Neville Edited by Amos Yong and Peter G. Heltzel

Religious Studies: Comparative Religion BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC COLLECTIONS

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2004 by T & T Clark This edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2016 © Bloomsbury Academic 2016 Amos Yong and Peter G. Heltzel have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of material reproduced in this volume. If any copyright holder has not been properly acknowledged, please contact the publisher who will be happy to rectify the omission in future editions. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8120-1 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8121-8 Set: 978-1-4742-9214-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Series: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, ISSN 2051-0012

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Theology in Global Context

Theology in Global Context Essays in Honor of Robert Cummings Neville Amos Yong 8c Peter G. Heltzel Editors

T 8 . T CLARK INTERIM ATI ON AL

A Continuum \

N E W

Y O R K

imprint

•

L O N D O N

Copyright © 2004 by T & T Clark All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, T & T Clark International. T & T Clark International, Madison Square Park, 15 East 26th Street, New York, NY 10010 T & T Clark International, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SEI 7NX T & T Clark International is a Continuum imprint. Cover design: Laurie Westhafer Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theology in global context: essays in honor of Robert C. Neville / edited by Peter Heltzel and Amos Yong. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-567-02690-6 (hardcover) 1. Theology. 2. Neville, Robert C. I. Neville, Robert C. II. Heltzel, Peter. III. Yong, Amos. BR50.T42875 2004 230-dc22 2004006908 Printed in the United States of America 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Preface Amos Yong of Peter G. Heltzel

ix

Part One: Religion in the Late Modern World 1

Neville's Systematic Theology of Symbolic Engagement Wesley J. Wildman

2

Robert Cummings Neville and Theology's Global Future Amos Yong àf Peter G. Heltzel

29

3

Global Citizenship, Religion, and World Order Rodney L. Petersen

43

4

Civilizing World Society: Order, Terror, Piety Andrew Irvine

59

5

Borderline Ethics and Intra-Community Violence and Murder among Young Afrikan American Males Rufus Burrow, Jr.

75

Axiology and Ecology: Neville's Contribution to an Ecological Ethic RolfBouma

95

6

7

8

Jesus and Monotheism: Theological Transformations of Religious Philosophy Kurt Anders Richardson The Refiner's Fire: Some Reflections on Neville, Postmodernism, and the Trends in Discourses on Islam Syed Nomanul Haq

3

107

123

Part Two: Asian Religious Traditions and Theology 9

Neville Turns East John H Berthrong

10

Neville's Axiological Cosmology of Imaginative Synthesis: A Framework for Comparative Theology and Religion Steve Odin

151

Pragmatism, Logical Vagueness, and the Art of Comparative Engagement Warren G. Frisino,

161

11

137

12

Immortality Livia Kohn

13

The Economy of Cosmic Power: A Vision for a Daoist Theology of Religion James Miller

189

Mary, Mother of Mylapore: Symbolic Engagement as an Interreligious Transaction Francis X. Clooney, SJ.

201

Toward a Christian Advaita: Sankara, Tillich, and Neville in Dialogue John J. Thatamanil

213

14

15

16

Nagarjuna and Creatio ex nihilo Harold H Oliver

175

229

Part Three: The Future of Christian Theology 17

Godhead, God(s), Religions, and the Christian Religion Ray L. Hart

243

18

The Primordial, Godhead, and Apocalyptic Christianity Thomas J. J. Altizer

265

19

Graceful Reality: A Foundation for the Future of Philosophy and Theology Jennifer Hockenbery

277

VII

20

The Future of the Cross: Symbolic Engagement with the Atonement S. Mark Heim

289

21

Infinity and Intersubjectivity Joseph A. Bracken, SJ.

303

22

A More Radical Pluralism JohnB. Cobb, Jr.

315

23

Which Way toward a Theology of Religions: Pragmatist, Methodist, Ecumenist? Gabriel Fackre

327

Theology's Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy James H. Cone

339

24

Part Four: Neville's Response 25

Thanks and Conversation: Responding to My Theological Colleagues Robert Cummings Neville

357

Robert Cummings Neville: Select List of Publications

387

Contributors

401

Name Index

405

Preface

The essays of this volume in honor of Robert Cummings Neville, in the year of his sixty-fifth birthday, examine different aspects of theology's global context. Early in his teaching career, Neville realized that the philosophical framework of the West alone was inadequate for a truly global theology. As Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University School of Theology, Neville has sought to write theology creatively and responsibly within our global context. This broader milieu has led Neville to rethink Christian theology in dialogue with a truly global, interdisciplinary, and interreligious public. The result has been a steady stream of scholarship from a variety of genres of philosophical and theological writing. In this volume, friends, colleagues, and former students of Professor Neville address the topic of theology's global context, critically reflecting on issues raised by Neville's scholarship from the different perspectives of their own work. Attending in some cases to Neville's own writings and in others to broader theological issues, each chapter illuminates an important dimension of theology's global context. By participating in the kind of dialogical theology embodied in Neville's oeuvre, the editors and contributors present this volume in honor of Robert Cummings Neville with fond affection and deep gratitude. Books are communal enterprises, and this one is no different. The editors thank each of the essayists for his or her timely - meant in more ways than one - contributions. We are especially grateful to Wesley Wildman and John Berthrong for the guidance they provided to us as we planned the volume. Ray Hart supported this project as interim dean of the Boston University School of Theology with a substantive grant. Bethel College (St. Paul, Minnesota) supported our work in various ways. Henry Carrigan at T & T Clark recognized

X

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

the need for this volume when proposed to him, and saw it through to publication. Special thanks are due to Shelli Poe for proofreading the penultimate draft of the manuscript and especially to Matthew Malette for all his hard work put into preparing the manuscript for final publication. Amos Yong and Peter G. Heltzel

PART ONE

Religion in the Late Modern World

1

Neville's Systematic Theology of Symbolic Engagement

WesleyJ. Wildman

Neville's systematic theology of symbolic engagement is a powerful religious answer to globalism and cultural pluralism, including the spiritual alienation, social fragmentation, and transformation of religious institutions that globalism and pluralism induce. This essay explains why this is so through a survey of Neville's theology. Along the way I also raise two questions in various forms. One concerns the metaphysical foundations of this system of thought, asking whether Neville sufficiently acknowledges the arbitrary - which is also to say, artistic - dimensions of his particular approach. The other concerns the social feasibility of Neville's theological vision - in essence, it is a question about who can in fact experience this unusual theological vision as spiritually powerful. For more than a decade I have been privileged to have Bob Neville as a frequent conversation partner on every topic under the sun. I will draw freely from my impressions of those conversations in what follows, partly because the informal context of conversation generates interesting perspectives on Neville's thought, and also because I doubt that I can maintain a clear line between what he has published and what I believe he thinks. Put differently, these conversations have thoroughly colored everything I read of Neville's corpus. Most elements of the "system" seem connected to me even

4

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

when the basis for this connection is not immediately evident in a given passage from a Neville book. I take it that part of the point of having a close colleague write an essay like this is precisely to take advantage of this entanglement of text and conversational context, so I proceed without apologies, though not without warnings. Anyone presenting the system of Neville's thought is faced with the same problem that Neville faces when writing a book. How can one portray the system in such a way that all of its many organically related parts can be seen together (the meaning of theoria)} This problem is not unique to Neville's thought, obviously, but it is no easier to address because of that. Presenting a complex system, for author or interpreter, is like hedge sculpture: you only have sticks to work with and the result will never be perfect but the results are best when the large branches head in the right directions. With that in mind, and remembering that the focus here is merely on Neville's theology of symbolic engagement rather than the entire system, I proceed by expounding several concepts basic to his theology. Even these basic concepts take their meanings from the wider system, however, so the exposition will have to range widely across his thought.

Engagement Of the many resonant concepts in Neville's systematic view of the world, engagement is the most used and the least analyzed. Being often used and relatively unanalyzed are the marks of an axiomatic concept for a theory. An axiomatic concept helps to define other important concepts but derives its sense implicitly from an entire conceptual environment in which it is used in a host of ways. In philosophy and theology, an axiomatic concept also shimmers with overlaid meanings, evoking entire traditions of debate against and within which the new usage achieves stability and conceptual reach. In the case of engagement, which might also be called participation, the resonances are Platonic, invoking the history of western philosophy from Plato's own writings through the neo-Platonic philosophers of the early middle ages down to the epochal late-medieval collapse of Platonic instincts in the rise of the kinds of nominalism and individualism that utterly obscure the formerly comfortable idea of engagement. For Platonists, everything draws its value, its meaning, its power of being from engagement with something beyond itself, ultimately

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

5

the Good. Philosophers passionately debate how literally to take Plato's world of the forms, of which everything actual is supposed to be an instance, a valuable particular made valuable through having form and made particular through having a context and relationships with other particulars - in Neville's terms, having both essential and conditional features. Neville's stand on these issues of interpretation follows Robert Brumbaugh's view of Plato that engagement is always finally with the Good, not with any world of preliminary semi-particular forms. My own view is that Plato sometimes veers toward a more mythological world of forms because he has no truly satisfying alternative solution to the problem, but that he has the courage to acknowledge the incoherence of that wing of his thought. The dialogue, Parmenides, in which the great philosopher Parmenides courteously challenges Socrates' belief in an independently existing world of forms, illustrates all of these phases of Plato's thought. Neville believes that these segments of Plato's dialogues are deliberately concocted teaching devices, and that Plato himself was never unclear in his own mind about there being no ontologically independent world of forms, intermediate between our world of particulars and the Good. Neville's reading of Plato entails that forms only have dependent reality in and through being present in, and only ever in, particulars. This paints Plato closer than one might expect to the medieval thinker Duns Scotus, who was the philosopher-theologian that Neville studied most extensively for his doctoral dissertation at Yale University. It also underlines how crucial the category of engagement or participation is in Neville's system. In short, without engagement, there is no value. Because Neville's way of articulating the value of particulars depends on the coherence of the concept of engagement, it is fair to ask how he gives life to this axiomatic concept. The semiotic theory of Charles Saunders Peirce has been important to Neville at this point. It is not that Neville defines engagement in terms of Peirce's theory of signs; after all, axiomatic concepts cannot be defined in terms of more primitive concepts. It is rather that Neville's typical way of fleshing out the concept of engagement uses his own adaptation of Peirce's sign theory. For Neville, a sign is something that stands for something else. This "standing for" is never comprehensive but always in some particular respect, and there is always something to which this "standing for in some respect" belongs. The simplest illustration is the situation of human interpretation, in which a human uses a sign to represent something in some respect, as when a driver

6

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

interprets a stop sign to indicate that she should slow her car; the stop sign stands for an action to be taken, in respect of conventions surrounding traffic, and the interpretation is the driver's. Neville, however, like Peirce, makes "standing for in some respect" a basic category for describing all physical and conceptual relationships and sees human interpretation as a special case, emerging at extremely high levels of complexity from the generic semiotic texture of reality. Now, this pervasive "standing for in some respect" is nothing other than engagement, albeit abstracted from the full dynamism that "standing for" possesses for Neville. The semiotic framework brings conceptual coherence to the axiomatic concept of engagement and illustrates its basic position within Neville's metaphysics. It is tempting for (insufficiently Platonist!) moderns to imagine that "standing for in some respect" is merely an assignment of significance made by an interpreter, which would make of it a static concept. But Neville holds that this way of thinking squanders all of the advantages of the engagement concept, and underlies many of the intractable philosophical problems of the modern era (see The Highroad around Modernism). For him, engagement, or "standing for in some respect," is a thoroughly dynamic process in which value "flows" from the thing engaged to the thing doing the engaging. Just as Plato imagined a particular thing having value by virtue of its participation in a form of far greater goodness, truth, and beauty, so Neville pictures a flow or a "carry-over" of value from the sign-object engaged to the engaging sign. In fact, he even imagines a carry-over of value from that which is engaged to the wielder of the sign, which furnishes the ontological ground for the kind of transformative potency of signs that human beings are familiar with from reading powerful books and listening to wonderful music. This dynamic carry-over is precisely truth, for Neville, and the fact that value flows through engagement both to sign and sign wielder explains why he simultaneously affirms strongly objective and strongly subjective sorts of truth. In this way, he is able to develop a theory of religious symbols in which potent signs have double reference, both to an object and to the state of the sign-wielder's soul (see The Truth of Broken Symbols). Fidelity of engagement is, roughly, the degree or extent to which value is carried over in interpretation. There are many respects in which something can be engaged, however, so it is not possible to provide a neat measure of truth, or the carry-over of value. For example, one might interpret a friend rightly and deeply in terms

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

7

of his longings and needs, and yet fail to grasp his personal history and its conditioning influence, which might lead to complexly true and false characterizations of this friend. As for Plato, Neville's ideal human being is one who strives to engage reality as richly and truly as possible, which marks out a life-calling for every person who strives after the Good and the True and the Beautiful. In Confucian terms, this is the call of self-cultivation, and Neville has great sympathy for the Neo-Confucian rendering of this self-cultivation task as being enacted in ever-widening circles, from oneself and one's closest relationships outwards to the institutions of which one is a part and even to all of reality. He has equal sympathy for its Christian voicing as sanctification, which possesses an especially Methodist timbre in Neville's spirituality. From the headwaters of his dynamic concept of engagement, a multitude of powerful streams of thought flow, of which I will mention just seven. First, it is already clear in essence what Neville's theory of salvation will be: at minimum, and it turns out to be precisely this, salvation is sanctification, the quest for holistic and true engagement of reality. Second, truth is the carry-over of value from the object to the interpreting sign and the interpreter, so Neville will oppose both purely subjectivist interpretations of the meaning of truth (as opinion or consensus or power) and purely objectivist theories of truth that minimize or neglect the role of interpretation and engagement in discovering it. Third, the semiotic framework and the complexity of the call to engagement jointly entail not only a complex view of truth but also fallibilism in epistemology. Neville shares this commitment to fallibilism with other North American philosophers in the tradition of Peirce, which Neville calls "paleo-pragmatism" to distinguish it from the pragmatism of William James and the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty and others, in which the objective element of truth is obscured. Fourth, and connected with his fallibilism, Neville's philosophy will be empirically oriented, because we can only discover the ways things are through careful attention and testing that helps us formulate and correct the provisional "hypotheses" about reality that we need to live. This is quite different from somehow (with all foundationalist theories of knowledge) already knowing the way things are and being left with the challenge of reconciling what we know to be true with the world as we find it. This is evident particularly in Neville's sympathy for the natural sciences, which itself hearkens back to his years at the Hastings Center working on the ethics of psychosurgery. Fifth, this framework makes possible a

8

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

sophisticated theory of signs, and religious symbols in particular, which will affirm both the objective reference of those symbols and the importance of attending to the capacity of the symbol-wielder to engage the sign-object truly. Sixth, Neville's interpretation both of our basic beliefs (as correctable hypotheses) and of our need to use them to light our path through the world yields the meaning of faith for him. In one sense, faith is the task of courageously facing the provisional character of our basic, life-guiding beliefs. In another sense, faith is trust or confidence that the corrective mechanism on which we rely to improve our hypotheses will not lead us astray. The former sense corresponds to the existential dimension of classical Christian understandings of faith, as the courage to put God ahead of everything, even our most cherished convictions. The latter sense corresponds to the biblical portrayal of faith as a deeply personal act of trust in God, who covenants with creation. Finally, this view of faith as trust that reality will not leave us mired in our confusion but will reward our efforts to find goodness and truth and beauty is the finite condition of our lives that justifies speaking of its infinite contrast using the language of covenant. For Neville, God's creation expresses a covenant with us and with everything that this trust will prove wise and safe. Yet Neville's concept of engagement does not determine every aspect of his system of thought. For instance, the nature of that which we ultimately engage in this world is not specified. His anthropology is merely limned in the concept of engagement and much remains to be said about that, from ethics to reason, and from responsibility to social life, though I will not be able to cover much here. His specific relation to concrete religious traditions is also relatively unconstrained by his concept of engagement. Other axiomatic concepts settle all of these issues in his thought and I will broach some of these in what follows.

Creation Another axiomatic concept for Neville is the principle that the problem of the one and the many is the leading criterion of metaphysical adequacy, once the standard (Alfred North Whitehead's) criteria of applicability, adequacy to data, coherence, and internal consistency have been met. He is fond of repeating a saying of philosopher Paul Weiss, that the best way to test a voice

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

9

claiming to be God is to ask for the solution to the p r o b l e m of the o n e a n d the many. For Neville, an otherwise s o u n d metaphysical theory's account of how the many particulars of reality derive from an ultimate o n e is the best test of its superiority or inferiority to competitors. This axiomatic principle is amply evident in God the Creator. In the first o n e h u n d r e d pages or so, Neville unleashes an aggressive analytical a r g u m e n t for a particular conception of God a n d the world. Along the way h e identifies, classifies, a n d rejects all b u t o n e of the major, fundamentally adequate metaphysical theories. T h e b o t t o m line is that his theory of God the creator (in which being-itself is i n d e t e r m i n a t e with respect to everything with being) wins because it solves the p r o b l e m of the o n e a n d the many m o r e radically a n d m o r e decisively t h a n all of the alternatives. Neville does n o t acknowledge that invoking this criterion in the way h e does might be in any way optional, b u t his unself-consciousness about this does n o t seriously detract from the utter brilliance of the a r g u m e n t . It is the first significantly original, compelling a r g u m e n t for the reality of God (understood in a special way!) in centuries, the achievement of a brash young philosopher who already firmly believed in his early twenties that his philosophical a n d theological peers are Plato a n d Aristotle, Descartes a n d Spinoza a n d Leibniz, Kant a n d Hegel, Peirce a n d Royce, Whitehead a n d Weiss. T h a t kind of aggressive intellectual a p p r o a c h has characterized Neville's work ever since, from his three-volume systematic philosophy of thinkingas-valuing (The Axiology of Thinking consisting of Reconstruction of Thinking, Recovery of the Measure, a n d Normative Cultures) to the three volumes of the Crosscultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project (The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, a n d Religious Truth) to his e m e r g i n g systematic theology of symbolic e n g a g e m e n t (which is intimated in the volumes The Truth of Broken Symbols a n d Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement). Neville's solution to the p r o b l e m of the o n e a n d the many is blindingly simple, despite the intricacy of the a r g u m e n t supporting it. It is a natural extension of the creation ex nihilo tradition. T h a t tradition was inspired by a move m a d e by middle Platonists such as Philo (c.25 BCE-c.41 CE). Philo read Plato's Timaeus a n d took seriously the speculative theory of creation offered there: the d e m i u r g e shapes matter in light of the forms. U n h a p p y with three primitives (demiurge, forms, m a t t e r ) , however, his healthy obsession with the p r o b l e m of the o n e a n d the many led him to simplify

10

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

matters by imagining that the forms were actually God's thoughts in creating, thereby reducing the number of primitives to two: God and matter. Christian theologians including Tatian (second-century CE apologist) and more clearly Theophilus (late second-century CE Bishop of Antioch) responded to the middle Platonists by forging a better solution to the problem of the one and the many. They supposed that God creates everything from nothing, thereby reducing the number of ontological primitives to one (God). On the one hand, this emphasizes the dependence of the world on God, though at the price of having to treat the apparently preexisting matter of the first Genesis creation account as metaphorical rather than literal, which Philo had been unwilling to do. On the other hand, it makes sense of God's declaration in Genesis that the world is good, because matter comes from God - though it also implants the worry that God might not be quite as immune from "impure" matter as had previously been thought throughout Greek philosophy. In this way, creation ex nihilo gained a solid foothold in the western philosophical and theological imagination. Saint Augustine continued the trend of increasing dependence of the world on God by proposing that time itself was created, so that there was not a time before creation, nor a time at which creation occurred. Rather, creation itself marks the birth of time. Aristotle had entertained this idea but rejected it as incoherent, arguing instead that the world must be everlasting and without beginning. Augustine saw things differently and was content to ratchet up the dependence of the world on a supreme deity, while also increasing the theodicy problem. This tradition had to wait until Duns Scotus (1266-1308) for its next major development, a development that is finally culminated in Neville's theory of God as creator. Scotus faced a question discussed in various forms by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers of the medieval period, namely, whether God's will or God's love is more fundamental. The Muslim debate took place between the Ash'arites and Mu'tazilites, for example, with each taking opposite sides on all manner of issues. In relation to murder, the former said that murder is bad because God says it is bad, while the latter held that God declared that murder is bad because it is, in fact, bad. Similarly, the former asserted that the eternal God must create the Qur'an whereas the latter insisted that the Qur'an is an eternal part of God. Whereas the Mu'tazilites supposed that there is some fundamental moral law and ultimate truth to which God is subject and subjects others out of love, the Ash'arites stress the all-defining character of God's

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

11

will: it determines morals, truth, and aesthetics. Scotus affirmed the primacy of the divine will, much like the Ash'arites. Neville clarifies the complex thoughts of Scotus on this subject by taking the world's dependence on God to its logical extreme and thus maximizing the robustness of his solution to the problem of the one and the many. Specifically, for Neville, creation is a singular act in which both the world's nature and the divine nature are determined. Equivalently, being-itself has no determinate nature. That is, Neville rejects the idea of there being a God with a particular nature in accordance with which the divine will operates. On the contrary, God's will is understood perfectly abstractly as that which is the condition for the creative act in which God, as well as the world, acquires a determinate nature. The ideas of God having no determinate nature "prior" to creation and God acquiring a divine nature through a creative "act" of "divine will" are difficult to swallow for some. If they can be rendered coherently, however, these ideas jointly constitute the most profound and dramatic solution to the problem of the one and the many that one could ever imagine. And by invoking his axiomatic principle that a robust solution to the problem of the one and the many is the most important way to identify the superior metaphysical theory from among otherwise metaphysically adequate competitors, Neville propels this theory forward to the front of the pack. In my view, Neville's attachment to the problem of the one and the many is a kind of metaphysical arbitrariness. On other criteria, such as the problem of God's goodness, Whitehead's process metaphysics triumphs in the competition Neville imagines between big-deal metaphysical theories. And if the criterion is disciplined fidelity to human experience, then Mahayana Buddhism's metaphysically restrained account of liberation is the victor. In any event, Neville has made his choice and he has stuck faithfully to his criterion and to the metaphysical theory of creation that it favors throughout his publications. It is the choice of a conceptual artist. As for the coherence of the idea that a primordial act of creation determines the divine nature as well as the world's nature, I see no serious problem with it. If we reject this approach in favor of my own view that creation flows from an already determinate primordial divine nature, then we merely exchange one primitive (the divine "will") for another (the divine nature). The latter is less satisfying as a solution to the problem of the one and the many because the particularities of the divine nature remain unexplained (and,

12

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

as Neville rightly argues, unexplainable). The latter is also more mythologically and sacramentally resonant, with the primordial divine nature being that which luminescently appears in and through the created order. Neville forsakes this mythological and sacramental resonance in a kind of gentle fit of Protestant pique and, of course, is anxious to optimize his solution to the problem of the one and the many. With this, we arrive at the most intriguing question that one could have in response to this sort of theory of the God-world relation, namely, what exactly is the divine nature that is made determinate in the creative act? In principle, it could be anything, of course. And nothing in the axiomatic principles of Neville's system as I have presented it to this point dictates what the answer must be. Other principles will determine the answer to this question, and I will discuss the issue below. But there is no question that God is precisely the intriguing mystery with which we have to do ultimately when we strive to answer the call to engage reality as truly and richly as we can. In religious terms, salvation unites us with God - a thoroughly Platonic rendering of the goal of human life. Before moving on, it is worth noting that Neville's system expresses his ongoing fascination with the (metaphysically) astonishing fact that the world is particular; it is one way and not any other. This is distinguishable from the more famous (metaphysically) amazing fact that there is something rather than nothing. To make an analogy drawing on language from the philosophy of physics, the act of creation is the ultimate event of symmetry breaking, in which symmetric universal sameness or nothingness is fractured and made particular. Neville and I have argued back and forth about the relative virtues of the abstract concepts of symmetry and asymmetry in metaphysics. Because Neville imagines that God has no determinate nature prior to the creative act, and renders the divine will merely as an abstract condition for the possibility of the actual world, he effectively makes asymmetry fundamental; there simply is nothing particular whose symmetry is broken in creation. I possess (or am possessed by) the alternative metaphysical intuition that symmetry is fundamental, and thus that creation is a genuine breaking of this logically prior symmetry, for which the asymmetric world we know is the contrast term. This symmetry is finally the divine nature itself, which traditional Christian theology describes as the Trinitarian life of God. The breaking of this symmetry in creation is literally the disruption of the divine nature - a contraction or a smashing and

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

13

shard-scattering (as in Jewish mysticism), a kenotic or self-emptying withdrawal, a divine sacrifice or death. From the point of view of the eternal divine nature independent of creation (which Neville rejects, of course), the symmetry breaking in creation is a kind of divine play. The resonances here are with play as in lila, as voiced in the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta; or play as in divine self-exploration, as arguably elaborated in Friedrich Schelling's metaphysics; or play as in glorious self-expression, as in John Calvin's Institutes. A more mystically, mythologically, and sacramentally charged view of the God-world relation results from this view of symmetry breaking than Neville can manage with his view of a primordial asymmetry at the root of creation. Neville, of course, views this symmetric vision of reality as too controlling, as somehow attempting to guarantee that everything finally makes sense by vesting all of the particulars of the world in the divine nature. And while admitting that it is also a legitimate member of the ex nihilo tradition of creation theories, he regards it as insufficiently purged of mythological elements and perhaps even as a metaphysics for the sick-souled rather than the healthy-souled person, to invoke William James' famous distinction. Neville's view of the God-world relation, by contrast, leaves one directly face to face with the wonder of the world, whose outcomes we cannot know in advance of inquiring and experiencing and discovering, and whose value consists more in what we transiently make of it through imaginative engagement than in any supposed origins in a particular divine nature. God Neville's theory of creation gives him carte blanche license to specify the divine nature however he likes, subject only to consistency with the world as we encounter it. He might say that the primordial creative act determines God's nature to be that of a loving divine person, with intentions and capacities to act, much as we read about in many parts of the Hebrew Bible. He might say that God's nature is like Iblis in the Qur'an, the enemy of human beings. He might make of God a covenanter with a chosen people, an Aristotelian First Cause, a Thomistic Actus Purus, a Platonic Good, a Plotinian One, a Vedantan Nirguna Brahman (God beyond attributes), a Buddhistic emptiness, or a Chinese Tao (way) flowing with Te (power) through all created beings. To have established a God-world relation, a basic

14

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

ontology, the outlines of an anthropology, a theory of religious symbols, and a vision of human salvation and liberation without having stipulated anything about the divine nature is a theoretical achievement of great proportions! What is remarkable about Neville's theology is that he refuses to exploit the freedom his theory gives him to stipulate the divine nature. With impeccable restraint, Neville insists that we have no basis for knowledge of God's nature apart from the way it has been made determinate in creation, so we must discover God's nature as best we can as we go along in this life. It is here that Neville parts ways with the vast host of theologians of every religious tradition who in one way or another hold that revelation answers the question of the divine nature, regardless of the containing metaphysical system, by bringing us knowledge of God that we could not gain in any other way. In the modern western context, it is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who forced Christian theologians to greater reliance on revelation for knowledge of God, because theologians generally accepted Kant's arguments against the possibility of theoretical knowledge of God. Neville is simultaneously one of the few philosophers who has argued in detail that Kant was mistaken about the limits of human knowledge, and also one of the few theologians who refuses to accept the authority (though not the value) of any tradition of allegedly revealed knowledge of God. The lines of influence producing these features of Neville's thought are quite distinct. His rejection of Kant's critique of pure reason flows from a close reading of Kant's works, which produced both Neville's rejection of Kant's "antinomies" argument (in Book II of the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason) for the futility of applying the categories of the understanding to such objects as God, and Neville's Peircean, pragmatist conclusion that it is impossible to stipulate in advance how good an hypothesis about God, freedom, immortality, or even the metaphysical nature of the world may prove to be; it is necessary to try and to test and to see. By contrast, Neville's rejection of the authority (though, again, not the value) of religious traditions claiming revealed knowledge of God flows from the same source that Kant's similar rejection flowed, namely, the unappetizing choice that we face when we do not make this rejection. This is the choice between, on the one hand, the specter of irreconcilably conflicting truth claims that results when we admit revealed traditions conveying knowledge of God or, on the other hand, the distasteful arbitrariness of elevating one tradition of

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

15

revelation over others in order to resolve this tumbling confusion of conflicting truth claims. In other words, it is the challenging fact of religious pluralism that inspires Neville finally to insist that the nature of ultimate reality (or God, as he usually names it) has to be discovered as we go along, if it can be discovered at all. This clearly makes of Neville a natural theologian of a particularly striking sort: he rejects the authority of traditions of revelation to deliver reliable knowledge of God in favor of reliance on human reason, exercised fallibly in traditions and in dialogue between traditions, to discover what it may of the divine nature. He is not a rationalist in any of the usual senses, because of his fallibilism and because the fruits of the efforts of human inquiry remain unknown in advance, which are elements of uncertainty and nonfoundationalism that rationalists typically do not permit. Yet there is a definite preference for universal human inquiry over trust in communally mediated revelatory traditions. For Neville, religious traditions have the very great virtue of promoting engagement with ultimate reality by virtue of their symbols and practices - indeed, traditions of revelation are conditions for this sort of value. But their often rancorous claims to authority in matters pertaining to knowledge of the divine nature are delegitimated, and their actual achievements effortlessly exceeded, by the rational inquiries of crossculturally attuned philosophical theologians. What, then, does Neville think that philosophical theologians have discovered about the nature of God through studying the world and human beings within it? Is God loving? Personal? An intentionally active agent? Temporal? Infinite? Omniscient? Omnipresent? Empty? Negligent? Good? And if some of these attributes are affirmed, in what senses? Well, there are basic answers to these questions, though they lead directly into complex territory in the interpretation of Neville's thought. God is eternal, not temporal, with eternity understood as the togetherness of the modes of time, and as the infinite contrast to temporality, understood as the flowing of time sensed by some finite creatures such as ourselves. God is not personal, and thus neither negligent nor attentive, because God's nature is to be eternally a creative act. God is good, not in the sense of having a nature that is good but in the sense of creating good things. In all of these attributions of characteristics to God, note that it is features of the world that determine the content, with God the creator of those features and the infinite contrast term to their finitude. Equally important is what is not in play: revealed traditions of knowledge

16

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

about God play no role and neither do design arguments that move from structures of the created natural world to the conclusion that God must be an infinite being with intelligence and intentionality. God, then, is precisely what the world is in respect of being the eternal creative act by which it exists, and precisely what the world is not in respect of being the infinite contrast to finite particularity. This outcome is the consequence of Neville's intense Scotus-style decision to subordinate the divine nature completely to the creative divine act. The interpretation of Neville is nowhere more complex than when he speaks of the divine nature. In fact, I think we may have here one of those instances when a thinker places into the public domain a body of thought that invites interpretation to some degree against its author's intentions. In an attempt to make this clear, I shall take the liberty of arguing for a somewhat colorful thesis, namely, that on the terms of Neville's system we know nothing about the nature of ultimate reality. Though Neville never says this, it is the conclusion I draw from my reading of his works and discussions with him. We know nothing not because we can't know anything but just because the vast host of our working hypotheses about the divine nature does not, in fact, constitute knowledge of God; it is merely knowledge of the world transposed into a new language, and it can be stated without remainder by saying simply that God is creator. Further talk about God's nature is superfluous on Neville's premises, except as psychologically and socially appropriate means {uppaya) of cultivating engagement with God the creator, or so I would argue. From my point of view, Neville has two options for articulating the determinate nature that God takes on in creating. He might even try both at once (indeed, he does), but there is no third option. On the one hand, he can associate God's determine nature with the particulars of this world. This could never be pantheism, strictly speaking, because the condition for everything determinate is God's eternal creative act, which strict pantheism must reject (this is also why Spinoza is not a strict pantheist). Neville affirms both natura naturata (nature as determinate things) and natura naturans (nature naturing or creating), whereas a strict pantheist admits only natura naturata, and sees God as identical with the collection of particulars. Yet theologies similar to this reading of Neville have regularly been called pantheist, including Spinoza's and Schleiermacher's, for fear that this way of speaking of God merely duplicates the description of the world, thereby collapsing any basis in God's nature for saying that

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

17

God transcends the world. Neville can reply that his understanding of God as creator affirms transcendence decisively but this does not meet the objection because this transcendence is not vested in an eternal divine nature. Thus, the debate over whether Neville can avoid pantheism reduces to the fundamental medieval battle between the Scotist primacy of the divine will and the Thomistic primacy of the divine nature, whose resolution in favor of Scotus underlies Neville's creation theory. On the other hand, Neville might try to detect a transcendental structure in the world, by means of which he can infer features of the determinate divine nature. As a Scotist, he does hold out for the reality of universals, even if they are only ever present in the particulars of the created world. These higher order features of reality certainly may bespeak something about the divine nature beyond the sheer fact that they are created. Neville's logos theory lays out the structure of reality as the environment for the transient achievement of harmonies of essential and conditional features that constitute the value-bearing particulars of reality, which are always components organized and formed in complex ways. Of course, God's eternal creative act is the fundamental condition for this transcendental structure of reality and for each particular within it. But can we focus on the key categories of Neville's hypothesis about the transcendental structure of reality and infer anything about the determinate nature God takes on in creating? We can try. For instance, does God prefer formed components in value-bearing particulars or not? Well, the transience of the achievement of any harmony, and cosmologically speaking the blink-like transience of the conditions for harmonies in almost any form, equally suggests the opposite, that God prefers the randomized disruption of harmony. Much the same kind of argument can be made about divine goodness, divine love, or any other attribute one might be inclined to assign to God's determinate nature on the basis of Neville's diagnosis of the world's transcendental structures. I contend, therefore, that Neville has done such a superb job of registering the ambiguity and complexity of the world with his transcendental categories that they do not succeed in picking out anything that can count as determinate features of the divine nature that God takes on in creating. Speaking about God on the basis of Neville's logos theory thus effectively duplicates the description of the world due to the vagueness of the transcendental categories. This returns us the first option, above: on either path, a Nevillian description of the determinate divine nature duplicates

18

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

the description of the created world. Perhaps someone might reply on Neville's behalf that closer analysis of the world and of human experience of God might yield more specific information about the nature God takes on in creating. Well, God is creator, to be sure, and the ultimate goal of life is to engage God more truly and richly, so there certainly is good reason to study the world and human testimony to engagement with God closely. Yet the varieties of engagement with ultimate reality do not speak with one voice about the nature of God. Patterns of traditional agreements and disagreements such as we analyzed in the Crossculturai Comparative Religious Ideas Project lead to wellattested, robust hypotheses about human nature (see The Human Condition) far more impressively than they produce consensus on the nature of ultimate reality (see Ultimate Realities). So far, at least, I think that comparative theology furnishes no special reason to think that we have knowledge of God's nature. Neville really has perfected the spirit of Scotus's doctrine of the primacy of the will: God just is the eternal creative act and the created divine nature is nothing other than creation as created. To get anything more or different than this, we would need to reaffirm an eternal divine nature out of which the creative act flows - a primordial symmetry broken in creation - or accept the reality of cognitively lucid divine self-revelation, or the efficacy of design arguments and the like, and Neville accepts none of these. Neville seems to believe that it is possible somehow to stabilize theological discussion of the determinate nature of God between the two alternatives laid out above, thereby protecting the description of God's determinate nature from being merely a recapitulation of created nature itself. I do not see how he can do this, for the reasons I have given. But I also do not see why he would want to do this. In my view, the wildly severe and aesthetically breathtaking quality of his view of creation is muted if he actually ever arrives at stable inferences about the determinate divine nature. Better, I think, is to stay true to the original Scotist instinct (truer than Scotus himself) and to promote the crushing realization that the God whose nature is made particular in a primordial creative act, the God who it is our fate to engage in every moment and act and thought of our lives, is a God we know nothing concretely about. Neville would have to admit freely that this may change in the future, in principle - after all, comparative metaphysics is at a very primitive stage, with its full potential in the hands of astute philosophical theologians difficult

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

19

to gauge - but he could still confidently estimate the prospects to be rather slim that we would ever gain concrete knowledge of God's nature on the terms of his system. In fact, I think there is some independent evidence that my "creative misreading" of Neville is in its own way reflective of his deepest theological instincts. Consider that all of the rest of Neville's system, from his analysis of human responsibility to his Christology, develops into full flower without the benefit of any hypotheses about the divine nature, apart from the purely formal one that we are creatures who finally engage ultimate reality as we live our lives and that this ultimate reality is an eternal creative act. Even Kant needs more than this in his extremely austere theology, as when he has to postulate God as judge, and also posit both divine justice and grace in rather personal senses, in order to make sense of the inescapability of human sin and moral weakness (see Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). Neville's theology is vastly more extensive than Kant's, and yet the whole edifice is built without the aid of any concrete hypotheses about the divine nature and without the claims to knowledge of God eagerly offered by the revelatory traditions of the world's religions. It is tempting to reconfigure Neville's view of God, in a way that he never does, by saying that God is merely a placeholder concept, the terminus of any series of thoughts that aims outwards from the finitude of this world to its absolute condition. Neville conceives this sort of complex conceptual structure less as a "series of thoughts" than as a "finite-infinite contrast" in which God serves as the contrast term for any number of finite conditions. This is a kind of apophasis, a systematic refusal of the power of names to characterize God. But unlike most apophatic theology, in which all names fail to describe ultimate reality because it is so replete with meaning that it defeats human cognition and understanding, Neville's apophasis (on this reading) would be caused by the fact that God literally is nothing, that God has no nature. This would then explain why we know nothing of God's nature. On this formulation, engaging God is a way of speaking about engaging the world, and speaking of ultimate reality is a way of indicating a human drive to engage the world with ultimate seriousness (what theologian Paul Tillich would call "ultimate concern"). This is the "death of God" reading of Neville's theology, which his friend Tom Altizer (also a contributor to this volume) might approve. In Neville's case, this death of God is not the death of something that once existed (as if God ever existed), nor

20

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

death as kenotic exhaustion in creation or in Jesus Christ (as if God had a determinate nature prior to creation or incarnation). Rather, it is death as the making determinate of the infinite as world, death as the logical condition for the possibility of determinate creation, and death as the dispersal of human fantasies about the mythos of the divine nature. In the symmetry analogy, it is death not as the breaking of a preexistent, already determinate symmetry, but death as the creation ex nihilo of asymmetric particularity in the form of the world. This kind of apophasis is not especially appealing to mystical theologians such as myself; after all, as intensely beautiful as it is, there is not much mystery in the story of a primordial act of creation (an act that isn't the act of anything with a determinate nature) that yields a determinate world with God, its ground, determined in the same act to be natureless nothing. This reconfiguration of Neville's concept of God is equivalent to saying that the universe is self-grounding and that the power of its being is what we engage in our lives. If Neville ever pushed his theology in this direction, it would make clear in terms that theologians instantly recognize what his system actually seems to entail. But Neville prefers to use God language and even language about the nature of God, while in fact steadfastly and silently refusing to allow his system to manifest any dependence on specific propositions about the divine nature beyond the purely formal one that God is eternal creative act. In other words, there is definite textual reason to resist the death-of-God or atheistic reading of Neville's theology, but no concrete conceptual block. The final test of this question will be his systematic theology itself, and perhaps particularly what he has to say about the Holy Spirit. His prior discussions of God in which one might expect details about the divine nature (chiefly toward the end of God the Creator, in A Theology Primer, in Eternity and Time's Flow, and in The Tao and the Daimon, where he interprets the Holy Spirit as the presence of God) avoid acknowledging any objective, determinate features of the divine nature post-creation. In the fashion of theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Neville always keeps God as the contrasting reference for religiously relevant human experiences, as when Neville allows that God must be holy in the sense of somehow worthy of the worship people offer (see God the Creator, ch. 9), and God must be good in the sense that we should have natural piety toward everything created, but nothing is said objectively about the divine nature itself. Perhaps Neville's theology is the fulfillment of

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

21

what Schleiermacher could only imagine, namely, a theology that consists entirely of propositions a b o u t states of h u m a n religious selfconsciousness or about the world, a n d is entirely free of propositions about the divine n a t u r e (see the Introduction to Schleiermacher's Christian Faith). By r e n d e r i n g my critique of the consistency of Neville's view of God as a suggestion, a n d by working o u t this suggestion in some detail, I d o n o t m e a n to extend presumptuousness beyond the limits of courtesy. O u r theological conversation winds ever onwards a n d I am sure Neville will be eager to reply to my reading. But there is m o r e at stake than j u s t questions a b o u t how to interpret Neville's theology. T h e question I have raised h e r e is an extremely i m p o r t a n t o n e for c o n t e m p o r a r y theology. In particular, the entire radical orthodoxy movement, in tracing the d e e p problems of modernity to Scotus's doctrine of the primacy of the will, is arrayed against the view that Neville's theological system embodies. I trust that there is a place for friendly a m e n d m e n t s that seek to manifest the real conceptual artistry a n d discipline of a viewpoint whose principles are u n d e r fire in the c o n t e m p o r a r y western theological context. I close this section o n Neville's idea of God by asking about the axiomatic intuition guiding this phase of Neville's theology. I would say it is a principle of metaphysical reserve. It may seem shocking that this anti-Kantian metaphysician of metaphysicians would b o t h e r with metaphysical caution b u t h e does. T h e principle might as well be described as the drive to avoid metaphysical arbitrariness. While Neville does n o t follow the principle consistently in all phases of his system - indeed, how can any theory of anything avoid the arbitrariness of artistic expression? - h e certainly does pay attention to it in the context of his absolutely minimalist theory of the divine nature. H e r e we see, I think, the powerful impact that studying world religions a n d world philosophies, as well as the social problems of religious a n d cultural pluralism, have h a d o n him. H e will n o t invite the specter of intractable metaphysical disagreement o n the issue of the divine n a t u r e . H e will tolerate metaphysical conflict o n other issues, perhaps, b u t less readily o n God, because o n e of his aims is to inspire reconciliation a m o n g c o m p e t i n g theological visions a n d actually to invite people to engage God t h r o u g h the different perspectives a n d symbolic worlds of their various religious traditions. At this point we see Neville as peacemaker, as reconciler, a n d (incredibly, perhaps, to the outsider) as evangelist.

22

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

The Religious Life For the purposes of the discussion here, the final axiomatic principle of Neville's theological system is a pastoral one, in two parts. On the one hand, Neville believes that ideas have power, and that the wielder of ideas must take responsibility for their exercise, accordingly. On the other hand, he holds that the test of theological ideas is not merely their conceptual coherence or systematic consistency, but also their ability to make sense in practical ways of people's lives in a complex, pluralistic world. For this pragmatist, the acid test of his system is whether it works as a way of interpreting reality on a day-to-day basis for people. Obviously, the system works for Neville himself, which is why writing theology for him is as much a spiritual exercise as it is a venture in systematic metaphysics. But what will other people make of this way of seeing reality? Neville is far from naive about the emotional and practical difficulties some people may have with his theology, should they take the time to understand and apply it in their lives. Indeed, the subjective wing of his theory of truth entails that there is more to ideas being true than just being correct; they must also help people engage reality more truly. At any given time, however, people are at different stages of emotional and spiritual development, and force-feeding what passes for the "true theology" is pointless when people cannot hear and respond in healthy ways. The question of what practical techniques should guide the education and spiritual nurturing of people, particularly Christians, is not yet thoroughly answered in Neville's writings. Rather, it is to his life as an administrator and builder of institutions that one must turn to get a sense for his answer to this question. This is not the place for an analysis of Neville the bureaucrat; suffice to say that throughout his career he has undertaken many complex administrative tasks, usually many at once, and that this commitment to the nurture of institutions is directly connected to his philosophical and theological work. The connection between institution building and scholarly thinking is the strongest Confucian element of Neville's life and thought. The Confucian appreciation of ritual propriety (li) is often distorted in practice as a dull and overbearing ritualism that kills spontaneity and torments especially young people and women with irrational burdens of deference and obligation. In Neville's retrieval of ritual propriety, enshrined in so-called Boston Confucianism (which began as ajoke but has since taken off; see Boston Confucianism: Portable

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

23

Tradition in the Late Modern World), healthy rituals are the civilizing forces of society. Shared rituals are the means by which we make social room for others and for their concerns. Personal rituals (or ritualized habits) allow us to cultivate responsibility, enhance virtue, and graciously manage the inevitable over-obligation of our lives with increasing sincerity and human-heartedness (jen). Institutions are vast, coordinated composites of shared rituals and ritualized habits enriching and stabilizing complex societies. Educational and religious institutions have the special roles of helping people to deepen understanding and engagement with the complexities of the world. It is against this background that Neville understands his bureaucratic work and his scholarly work to be of one piece; in Chinese terms, he sees himself as a Confucian scholar-official. To that he adds his roles of preacher and priest, which he exercises with regularity and reverence - and great enjoyment. Though Neville sees himself as a Confucian Christian (strictly, I suppose, a Boston-Confucian Christian), there remains a pointed question of fit between his theology and any concrete religious tradition. For example, many people from Confucian cultures harbor resentment toward Confucianism because of the hardships it imposes and, to some of these folk, Neville's retrieval of Confucianism amounts to flogging a dead horse. Likewise, most retail Christianity proclaims different understandings of God, of Jesus Christ, of the human predicament, of the means of salvation, and of eternal life than Neville espouses. For whom besides Neville himself, then, can his intellectually innovative theology be a practical way of thinking about life? Can it guide any concrete religious institution? I hesitate to pronounce answers to these questions because institutions are complex and varied, and because some religious institutions can be relatively self-contained and self-defining. Moreover, experience shows that almost any idea can gain a small but loyal following. So I expect that Neville could make his theology fly for an entire group of people at once, that his theology could be made practically robust by means of education programs, and - this is most important - that as a priest and pastor he could mobilize familiar liturgical practices and religious symbols to equip people with the means to engage God in ever deepening ways, all consistently with his theological system. I also think that such a group would necessarily be small and selfselecting. Neville's theology is spiritually demanding. In place of the comforts that more conventional and familiar and popular theologies

24

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

offer, Neville offers the harder (but nonetheless authentic) comforts of demythologized worldviews and thoughtful metaphysics. In place of apodictic religious doctrines, Neville's system offers nothing about the divine nature, little about the nature of the church, and such a wealth of teachings about the human condition that one needs training in multiple religious traditions to grasp its rich significance. In place of a liturgy naturally determined by sacred founding events (as the Eucharist flows from the last supper and Easter Sunday celebrations from the Resurrection), Neville's theology must adapt to whatever liturgical and symbolic vehicles are available. The very fact that it can adapt so readily invites the question of what this theology would or could exclude from the liturgical life of a church. The criteria for belonging - indeed, the social dynamics of identity formation and preservation as a whole - do not flow from Neville's system of theology, any more than they flow from Plato's or Descartes' or Hegel's. In essence, then, Neville's theology is suited not for social embodiment but rather for education and inspiration. It is not theology in the sense of second-order reflection on the first-order practices of a church and its people, but theology as speculative theory building, reaching toward a social vision that it never can attain, just as Confucius and Plato could not realize their institutional and social-engineering dreams. By the same token, however, these characteristics make Neville's theology amazingly portable across religious traditions. It works as well for Confucians and Taoists and Jews as for Christians, save only that he sometimes writes specifically Christian topics (as with Symbols of Jesus, though that Christology would not trouble many Jews at the level of its basic concepts). Neville's system offers a way of thinking that is spiritually vibrant for the plural cultural and religious context of our lives and times.

Conclusion What kind of theology is Neville's? One answer is that it is a theology that is significantly alien to all of the concrete theological traditions within major religions. At the same time it shares many conceptual affinities with those religions, from Methodism to Confucianism, and can make ready use of their liturgical and ritual practices, whatever they might be, for the sake of enriching engagement with ultimate reality in the terms of each religion. His theology amply shares

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

25

their concerns with human salvation, liberation, self-cultivation, sanctification, and transformation, even while voicing these ideas in original ways and without the aid either of revelatory traditions or concrete beliefs about the divine nature. A bolder answer is that Neville's system may well be the most extensively developed strictly naturalist theology in the history of such efforts. In terms of richness of detail and dimensions of application, if not philosophical precision and creativity, Neville's system surpasses what survives of the systems of Plato, Plotinus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Whitehead. Neville takes Aristotle and Hegel to be his great philosophical enemies. Neville consciously aims to avoid Aristotle's fundamental mistake of failing to grasp Plato's view of form as value, and is equally opposed to Hegel's view of the divine nature and the eccentric interpretations of historical movements that it promotes (though this does point out a large gap in Neville's system in the area of a philosophical interpretation of history, one that cannot be filled in any positive sense without the aid of axiomatic concepts not yet present in the system itself). In terms of extent of systematic development among western philosophers of similar theological affinity and style, I think Plato, Schelling, and Whitehead would be Neville's nearest theological companions. All produced naturalist philosophical systems with rich theological implications, exhibit a definite preference for rational inquiry over the authority of revelatory traditions, and have similar concepts of value (though Neville rarely discusses Schelling). Neville's writings are consistent with his self-perception as a philosopher's theologian and not as a confessional theologian. He may be a church bureaucrat but he is not in any usual sense a church theologian. An answer regarding timeliness is also possible. The possibility and even the desirability of such a theological achievement is what Neville would call a "late modern" one. By this polemical phrase, he means to deny the claims of enthusiasts of post-modernity that an epochal intellectual change has already occurred in the west and to suggest that post-modernity is merely another permutation of modern presumptions. I think there is a lot to commend this point of view. The fallibilism, non-foundationalism, and hypothetical attitude to inquiry that guides the paleo-pragmatists (in whose intellectual footsteps I also travel) is a more significant transformation (or sidestepping) of modern assumptions than the hermeneutical and political sensitivities of so-called post-modern philosophical work (see The Highroad around Modernism). By speaking of late-modernity,

26

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Neville also means to predict that the era of modernity is drawing to a close, or must do so if we are to adapt to the challenges of cultural and religious pluralism in some other way than with what amounts to tribal parochialism and violence. This is as apocalyptic as Neville becomes anywhere in his theology. I doubt that historical analysis can support his hopes for the near future. But that some change in human affairs is necessary if we are to negotiate an increasingly perilous world seems beyond question. Neville hopes with genuine humility that a philosophically grounded theology such as his, which exhibits deep conceptual connections among religious and theological traditions while taking seriously the concrete religious practices of ordinary people, is a move in the right direction. In this, surely he is correct, even if his theology does not promise the kind of social power needed to win many hearts and minds among theologians who worry about the survival and nourishing of their religious institutions. One might also fairly ask at this point why both philosophers and theologians have largely neglected Neville's thought. One reason is that the system is vast and difficult to grasp in its entirety, which in an era of too many books requires that motivation be high to enter into the system. Another reason is that Neville writes quickly and sometimes fails to achieve the clarity and precision and nuance that he achieved in the first part of God the Creator. Among philosophers, when they read and understand Neville's theology, they often experience his theory as somehow uncontemporary (it is more Platonic and anti-Kantian than modern and post-Kantian, for example), as involved with philosophically unfashionable questions (salvation, engagement with God, religious symbols, Christology), proceeds in a manner held by most philosophers in opprobrium (he is a metaphysician in an allegedly post-metaphysical philosophical age), and takes an idiosyncratic approach to everything (as when he grounds the four-fold division of his systematic philosophy, The Axiology of Thinking, on the novel insight that thinking is valuing, and diagnoses the four principal kinds of thinking-valuing as imagining, interpreting, theorizing, and responsibility-taking). Finally, among church theologians, the few reading and grasping what Neville is up to rightly judge his system to be dramatically disconnected with the conventional lines of theological debate among theologians (as when his Christology contains no doctrine of the person and work of Jesus Christ, long taken to be the whole point of a Christology, and his doctrine of God says nothing about the determinate nature

NEVILLE'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC ENGAGEMENT

27

of ultimate reality). Some church theologians read Neville and get him wrong, which diffuses the impact of his reception among this large potential readership. Most don't read him at all (the latest large-scale theological treatment of creation, Alister McGrath's Nature, does not mention Neville, and does not even consider Neville's interpretation of creation ex nihilo in the abstract). Perhaps philosophical theologians like Neville need to be long dead before people are willing to regard their unfashionable, boundary-crossing, and actually boundary-abrogating, way of thinking as interesting or important enough to justify the amount of effort required to understand the system. The closing word about Neville's theology of symbolic engagement should be to praise its humanity, its pastoral sensitivity, its concern for matters of the heart, and conditions of life. I have seen Neville preach sermons directly from the core of his system that leave some of his listeners in tears, as he reaches them not merely through rhetorical skill but through the power of his ideas. A God who defies both our understanding and our futile attempts at regulation is a God that many Christians long to hear more about from the pulpit; it is such a relief after the "nice" God Christians have to hear about so much of the time. And to understand tragedy and loss not only as a natural part of our inheritance in this life but also (symbolically) as the incomprehensible, searing light-heat of God's presence in our midst is to know a comfort far exceeding the lame "there-there" assurances of featureless pastors and preachers. Neville may not be able to give assurance of life after death in any of the usual senses but he knows how to talk about eternity as the togetherness of the modes of time (see Eternity and Time's Flow), as an intense engagement of ourselves with ourselves and with our world and with the ultimate reality that is the creator of us all (see The Puritan Smile). Rarely has a theology been so explicitly attentive to the spiritual state of the religious person's soul, self-consciously embracing uppaya (artful means) for the sake of enhancing every person's engagement with the ultimate ground and condition of their lives. Rarely has a theology given such sustained attention to the challenges of being a spiritual being and a thinking being at the same time (see The Tao and theDaimon). And never has a theology exceeded Neville's in its capacity to support thinking and living through the challenges of religious and cultural pluralism. Neville is every bit as much practical theologian and pastoral theologian as he is systematic metaphysician.

2

Robert Cummings Neville and Theology's Global Future

Amos Yong & Peter G. Heltzel

The global face of Christian theology becomes more apparent every day. Through a series of intellectual, political, religious, and social forces our world is increasingly seen as a dynamic and organic confluence of cultures and traditions. The challenge for Christian theology is to systematically articulate the truth of the gospel ofJesus Christ within this crossroad of global interactions. Indeed, in recent decades Christian theology has witnessed a new genre of theological literature, loosely grouped under the title "global theology," attempting to respond precisely to this challenge. 1 Robert Cummings Neville has written not just one book, but a series of volumes addressing theology's global context in what he calls our "late-modern times." His theology of symbolic engagement poignantly demonstrates that Christian theology can continue to speak clearly, profoundly, and even prophetically in this new world context. But what are the most pressing challenges for theology in our contemporary situation?

The Twenty-First Century Context of Christian Theology Our current global context faces at least four challenges:

30

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

globalization and its processes, the modern scientific worldview, an increasing awareness of religious pluralism, and what has come to be known as the "postmodern" condition. Each challenge raises its own distinctive set of issues, even while their mutual conditioning also poses even more complex questions. The processes of globalization have rapidly brought our world closer together. The term globalization refers to a general system of social forces including technology, telecommunications, urbanization, and democratic capitalization. Through this pervasive system almost all of the world's inhabitants are incorporated into a single way of life. Economic globalization specifically refers to a form of "post-1989 freetrade capitalism" which has facilitated a transformation of national economies into regional and international trading blocks that carry out massive global transfers of financial capital.2 While economic globalization seeks to stimulate economic growth internationally, many thinkers seek to envision an alternative because it often has negative consequences for impoverished nations, the poor in all nations, and the environment. 3 So although the global economy promises prosperity to all the citizens of the world, it is often on the terms and to the advantage of the countries of the Northern hemisphere. Various questions arise for Christian theology in this globalizing and globalized context, the most important of which have to do with the ethics of environmental sustainability, distributive justice, the imbalance of socio-political power localized in the hands of a few, and the quality of life for oppressed and disadvantaged people groups. The challenges for Christian theology posed by globalization are intimately linked to the challenges posed by modern science. Arguably the historic roots of globalization lie in the social forces of modernity that gained momentum in part through the emergence of scientific enterprise in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. While intellectual historians debate the genealogical origins of modernity, during this period theology itself has increasingly encountered a shift from philosophy as her dominant dialogue partner to the theories and practices of modern science as primary interlocutor. The Galileo controversy in the second decade of the seventeenth century was but a foretaste of the struggles to come, even as the Darwinian theory of evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century placed a moratorium on the idea that theology could proceed apart from engaging the sciences. The science and religion "debate" has often been combative since then, even though there are signs that

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE AND THEOLOGY'S GLOBAL FUTURE

31

theologians and scientists are more open to collaboration in the present situation. One urgent question for Christian theology in this context remains that of understanding its claims to truth amidst the ever-shifting framework of the sciences. Increasing awareness of the diversity and plurality of religious traditions and spiritualities poses further challenges to Christian theology. While Christian theologians in the medieval period defined themselves principally over and against those in the other two western monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, as a result of the European colonization there has been an influx of religions from the East which permanently broadened the framework of philosophy, religion, and theology. We see this in the influence of Asian religions on Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion and on the influence of Buddhism on Shopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche. Even though Eastern religions were exoticized by the nineteenth century romantics, they have become an increasingly persuasive alternative vision to western Christianity over the course of the past century. As the ancient synthesis of Christianity and western culture began to disintegrate, there has been a widespread religious turn to the East. The non-monotheistic and even non-theistic religious traditions of India and China posed new questions for Christian theology. Christians debated with those in other faiths, both sides motivated by convictions about their own superiority. Prolonged exposure to religious others, however, has led to the increasing realization that debates will score points, but usually produce neither definitive intellectual victories nor the full religious conversion of the other. The question today for Christian theology is whether or not and to what extent it can learn from the world religions even while remaining true to the essentials of Christian faith. What will guide our interactions with those in other faiths that our religiously plural context demands? In addition to globalization, modern science, and religious pluralism, Christian theology is also confronted by our postmodern situation. This situation is understood best as signifying a postEnlightenment, post-colonial, post-patriarchal, and post-Christian era. First, if the Enlightenment can be characterized as the triumph of reason, our post-Enlightenment situation emphasizes instead the limits of human reason. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers claimed that it was possible, at least in principle, to master the world through reason, post-Enlightenment thinkers are no longer so confident. Enlightenment rationalism aspired to attain universal and necessary

32

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

truths; what it produced, however, was either abstract theory and metaphysical schemes on the one side or intellectual skepticism and existential nihilism on the other. Lost in the process was the particularity of distinctive cultural modes of thinking, the centrality of praxis to human reason, and the narrative dimension of human cognition. Insofar as our postmodern situation is therefore a postEnlightenment one, the questions for Christian theology are straightforward: how can it proceed recognizing the limits of reason on the one side without capitulating to relativism on the other, and how can it continue to make universal truth claims even while preserving the particularistic, practical, and narrative aspects of thought? The challenges posed by our post-Enlightenment situation are intensified when considered in terms of our post-colonial situation. Post-colonialism has been defined as the condition of "a national culture after the departure of an imperial power."4 It signifies a world slowly freeing itself from the grip of Western colonizers. For this reason, some consider our post-colonial situation to also be a post-Western and post-Euroamerican one. In this situation, colonized persons and groups are slowly unmasking the ideologies behind colonial (Western) texts and theories. They are re-claiming their places as agents and subjects in the historical process, and are re-establishing their identities apart from the interrupting history of colonialism. As countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America began to gain cultural independence after colonization, there were often revivals of their indigenous religious traditions that became vital in the constitution of their new cultural identities. Now we are seeing an influx of missionaries to the West from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and they are not all Christian evangelists. The questions for Christian theology in this context are both if and how the Bible can speak to the post-colonial situation, and if and how Christian faith can be relevant to persons and groups seeking liberation from colonialist Christian practices and ideologies.5 Theology's post-colonial context is particularly acute with regard to the United States. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that after the Cold War, the U.S. was the sole successor of the regulatory myth of empire that animated Western Europe in the nineteenth century.6 After the tragic events of 11 September 2001, there has been a deeper interrogation of American empire. The U.S. government is perceived as often operating unilaterally with the sole goal of expanding its economic empire in a manner that does not threaten

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE AND THEOLOGY'S GLOBAL FUTURE

33

its "national security." Since common confession of the Lordship of Jesus Christ unites the global church, loyalty to a particular nation is problematic. Theologians in the U.S. must come to terms with their post-colonial context through active engagement with theologies of those who have often been excluded from the "American dream," including liberation theologies and "Two-Thirds world" theologies. 7 In this liberation theological context, our postmodern situation is also a post-patriarchal one. 8 The women's movement and the civil rights movement joined together in the 1960s to challenge U.S. society to affirm the full equality and dignity of all people regardless of their gender, race, or ethnicity. While feminist critiques of modernity have exposed the way that rationality and social structures were and are used to suppress and oppress women, feminist theologians have revised Christian theological categories to ensure that it speaks to those who are over half of the world's population. Contemporary Christianity's universal affirmation of all humanity is deeply indebted to the tireless labor of feminist thinkers. Yet questions persist, particularly about the possibility and extent of retrieval and reappropriation of the sacred scripture and motifs of the Christian tradition that emerge from patriarchal contexts. These challenges combine to point to our post-Christian situation in the West. Now it is certainly the case that Christianity is flourishing in pockets in the West and in the non-Western world. The Christian church is experiencing tremendous growth in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, particularly in evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic churches. 9 Moreover, our post-Christian culture is not entirely bereft of Christian influence.10 But especially in the West, post-Christianity adequately captures the ethos and mindset that is thoroughly secularized on the one hand and yet relativized by religious diversity on the other. The former was signaled by the "Death of God" movement beginning in the 1950s (transitioning from anti-Christianity), most palpable in the 1960s (transformed into post-Christianity), and continues today in the serious quest of doing theology without the traditional idea of God.11 The latter calls attention to the flourishing of the world religions even here in the West, along with the emergence of New Age retrievals of pagan religious ideas and practices in the West and syncretistic amalgamations of Christian and indigenous religious traditions in the Eastern and Southern hemispheres. 12 In this post-Christian situation, not only are all authorities and claims on par (Christianity is no longer considered as having a

34

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

privileged authority 13 ), but worse, previous authorities such as the Christian tradition and community are understood to have been illegitimately constituted through rhetorically charged ideologies and strategically marginalizing politics. Christian responses have ranged across the spectrum, including those calling for a renewed sectarianism on the one side to those attempting a reconfiguration of Christian identities (plural) via a retrieval of the various (plural) traditions and practices informing such identities. In either case, of course, there is the risking of a parochial mentality and a relativist epistemology and ideology. The challenge for Christian theology, then, is clear: how to speak publicly and authoritatively in a situation where Christianity is no longer the dominant political and cultural force. Given the preceding discussion, the challenge to Christian theology in our postmodern situation can be characterized simply as this: whereas Christian theology was previously assumed to be a universal discourse conveying universal truths to all persons, everywhere, at all times, this is no longer the case. Westerners are skeptical about Christian theology because of secularism and religious pluralism, while non-Westerners are skeptical because of their negative experiences under colonialism. Contemporary Christian theology must face the myriad complex of questions raised by theology's global context. Robert Cummings Neville has distinguished himself among North American theologians by accepting this challenge in bold, comprehensive, and creative ways. Robert Cummings Neville's Global Theology Neville's theology of symbolic engagement provides a model of a vital and generous Christian theology for its multiple contexts, including the church, the academy, the world religions, and society. According to Neville, theology is a systematic inquiry into ultimate realities and their influence on human behavior in the world community. Global in both scope and method, Neville's theology provides a unique theological vision that deliberately addresses globalization, modern science, religious pluralism, and our postmodern situation. Neville sees globalization as both a promise and a curse. He is passionately concerned about distributive justice in light of the economic inequities in the global market, while viewing the new

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE AND THEOLOGY'S GLOBAL FUTURE

35

convergence of religious cultures as presenting a timely and strategic opportunity for systematic theology. Neville writes, "One of the chief functions of the great world religions in our day is to help turn the world society ofblind forces into a civilized community."14 Practicing rituals of love and global justice are concrete ways that the world religions fulfill their civilizing mandate to create a peaceful global community.15 As a result of globalization, human cultures, including religious cultures, are increasingly in daily contact with each other, changing the dynamics of inter-religious encounter and the very fabric of Christian theology. Neville writes, Because of the global economy, global political and military situations, global scientific and technological community, global means of communications, and global educational enterprises, our communal responsibilities and interactions are global, not just Western. Therefore we are the people of the world, not just the West, and our culture is the human tradition, however fragmented.16 As "people of the world," Christian theologians in the West are encouraged to engage the cultural and religious traditions that are outside of their traditional purview, working for a theological reconciliation. If theology is to be truly accountable to a global community of thinkers, it must also be accountable to the empirical discoveries outside of the disciplinary confines of theology. Scientific knowledge of the world and the cosmos is essential to knowledge of God. Neville writes, "All determinations.. .must have a common source or creator, which we now call God."17 He courageously takes on the theological problems raised by the determinate reality of nature as interpreted by modern science and argues that theological claims must always be intelligible to the most recent expressions of scholarship in the natural and social sciences. Following Ernst Troeltsch and Rudolph Bultmann, Neville rejects the supernatural, absolutist metaphysics of much traditional theology because it is no longer plausible in light of modern science. Dismissing outmoded thought forms frees theology to adapt and evolve with science's own theoretical paradigm shifts. While his first book God the Creatorwas written when the steadystate theory of the origin of the universe was the common wisdom, Neville's metaphysical theology is equally hospitable to contemporary

36

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

big bang cosmologies. Theology therefore needs to make itself vulnerable to the criticisms of all disciplines and fields, including the humanities and the literary arts, and practical normative fields like law and political ethics. Contemporary normative inter-disciplinary discussions are an essential context for a reconstruction of the Christian symbol system.18 It is Neville's pragmatic epistemology in the context of his systematic philosophy that allows his theology to be corrected by as many disciplinary angles as possible. Following an impulse both within continental mysticism and American pragmatism, Neville argues that all theological claims are hypothetical and thus open to correction. Christian theologians have a responsibility as public intellectuals to seek correction of theological proposals in as wide an intersubjective sphere of inquiry as possible. Along these lines, while the academy provides one global context for theology, the dialogue among the world religions provides a further context for Christian theological reflection. While the "multicultural embodiment of Christianity is by no means new," what is new is the ease in which inter-religious dialogue currently takes place.19 Given our current international political situation, inter-religious dialogue has become a necessary part of working for international peace and justice. It is only through sustained interaction with thinkers from other religious traditions and academic disciplines that Christian theology can truly become global. The inter-religious conversation that is emerging as a result of globalization holds new possibilities for theology. Neville seeks to develop a theological method that is generous enough to include all interlocutors in this emerging global public, but analytically precise enough to discover religious truth. Neville thus views our religiously plural situation as an opportunity to help theology become truly global through collaborative interreligious theological inquiry. From Vatican II, held from 1962 to 1965, to the Fourth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Uppsala, Sweden, in July 1968, theology was transformed from a primarily western enterprise to a truly global one. On the one side, liberation theology played a vital role in deconstructing the eurocentric matrix of Western theology. On the other, increasing engagement with Eastern and Southern modes of thinking which do not bifurcate religion from philosophy or religion from culture has forced Western Christians to think theologically in dialogue with the world's religious traditions.

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE AND THEOLOGY'S GLOBAL FUTURE

37

As a tireless p r o p o n e n t of theology's global public, Neville himself has played a vital role in this transformative process. T h r o u g h his writing a n d institution building, h e has developed a theoretical paradigm a n d educational curriculum of comparative theology that is at once b o t h comprehensive a n d generous. Neville's comparative theology provides o n e attempt to construct a global public t h r o u g h developing the philosophical infrastructure for a universal, comparative theological discourse. Inspired by Paul Tillich's category of "ultimate concern," Neville has developed a c o m m o n set of vague categories that provides a framework t h r o u g h which religious symbols can be c o m p a r e d as specifications of c o m m o n religious truths. While accepting that all religious traditions are cultural/linguistic systems, h e goes o n to develop a sophisticated pragmatic epistemology to help adjudicate the truth of religious arguments a n d symbols. 20 H e was able to refine his theory of comparative theology t h r o u g h a four-year collaborative research project c o n d u c t e d by scholars representing many disciplines a n d religious traditions. 2 1 A c o m m o n public discourse is vital for the religious thinkers of different traditions to reason together. Religious symbols a n d symbol systems outside of Christianity shed i m p o r t a n t light o n ultimate realities. Since Neville conceives of theology as an inter-religious, inter-disciplinary search for theological truth, the inter-religious e n c o u n t e r must move beyond dialogue to a c o m m o n search for truth. Comparative theological dialogues provide a vital forum in which the provisional theological truth claims of each tradition can be tested a n d refined in the context of cordial, inter-religious engagement. Neville's inter-religious m o d e of theological inquiry opens u p new theological possibilities, including comparative theology a n d multiple-religious identity. Confucianism has b e e n the central subject of his own scholarship in comparative theology. Neville writes, as my research pendulum has swung between study of Christian sources and Chinese sources, the latter have often been the medium of access to the former. Christian sanctification becomes an issue transcending technologies of spiritual practices when one asks whether there is a Christian equivalent or alternative to the Confucian way of the sage. Christianity needs to be understood from the outside in order to be understood fully: not to do so is to suffer an intolerable innocence for a scholar.22

38

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

According to Neville, we can only understand our own deepest doctrinal convictions as Christian theologians when we are able to see them through the eyes of a religious other. Through the process of inter-religious dialogue, Neville argues that we should be open to transforming our own religious identity. He writes, "the global interaction of religious traditions is yet another novelty of late-modernity, a challenge in itself to religious identity."23 Embodying a multiple-religious identity, Neville himself claims to be a Christian and Confucian.24 Provocatively he calls the United Methodist Church to a new "Confucian Methodism."25 His book Boston Confucianism seeks to critically retrieve the classical Confucian symbols in a manner that is plausible for the Northeastern establishment in the United States in particular and for world philosophical reflection in general. Elsewhere he suggests that, "...it is by virtue of engaging one another's spiritual practices, even more than reading one another's texts, that deep understanding of other traditions is possible."26 Neville founds this new religious fusion with the philosophical rigor of Boston personalism and the religious ecumenicity of Mircea Eilade. But theology for a truly global public must speak not only with and to all academic disciplines and world religions, but also with and to any and all who are interested in the subject matter. Neville writes, "The work of Christian theology can be stated in a formula: to understand, to express, and critically to examine the truth of the gospel in the experience and language of all the world's peoples, and in reference to all natural and social contexts."27 Here, of course, Neville is addressing the trends characteristic of our allegedly post-modern, post-Enlightenment, post-Euroamerican and post-patriarchal situation which embraces the plurality of voices and decentralizes and destabilizes hegemonic frameworks of discourse. Neville's response is at least two-fold. First, as reflected in the quotation in the preceding paragraph, Neville demands that theological issues and questions be broached from as many vantage points and perspectives as possible. Each approach will shed light on the issue at hand, and will correct other viewpoints even as it is itself corrected and supplemented by other approaches. Clearly, public theology with this global scope and methodology is a courageous and complex enterprise. But part of the challenge and complexity of contemporary theology in this so-called "post-modern" situation is that not all perspectives are equal, nor valid. Herein emerges Neville's

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE AND THEOLOGY'S GLOBAL FUTURE

39

second response to the contemporary situation, one that defends a "late-modern" rather than post-modern orientation. 28 He argues against post-modern thinkers by holding out for a universal mode of engagement in which all theological claims can be judged, at least provisionally, to be true or false. Certainly, many perspectives are complementary, and the theologian's task in these cases is to reconcile their various claims. Yet how is such complementarity discernible aside from a "broader" context able to interpret the multiple perspectival contexts? To assume the possibility of such a broader context is to reject the relativism that comes with postmodern perspectivalism. This is especially crucial if there are perspectives that are not complementary but contradictory. For this reason, Neville defends the possibility of religious truth against postmodern skepticism and argues that this truth is accessed through symbolic mediation. Such symbols not only enable engagement with reality, but also provide for truth claims to be measured by reality. According to Neville, American pragmatista Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey both anticipated and provided an alternative to the postmodern critique of knowledge, providing a "highroad around modernism." 29 Adopting and applying the pragmatic epistemology of Peirce updated and expanded in his multi-volumed Axiology of Thinking, Neville argues that all theological claims are hypothetical and vulnerable to correction. 30 This epistemic humility is better understood as a late-modern virtue since it recognizes the fallibility of human cognition without denying the import of religious truth (which postmodernists have to inevitably capitulate). By defending the latter and upholding the possibility of a universal, global discourse for theology, Neville is distinctively and tenaciously un-postmodern. To be sure, since the universal context of global theology is itself always changing, all theological claims are provisional and subject to correction. But this does not justify retrenchment into religious fundamentalisms. As insular and insulated, they are disturbing, as are neo-Hegelian attempts to achieve a complete totality in systematic theology. Rather, Neville's project depends on the possibility of a global and universal theological public. For if a theologian is truly confident in the core beliefs of the faith, she should be eager to defend them to as broad a public as possible. And it is this posture that opens up new possibilities for comparative theology in global context.

40

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

"The World is My Parish" Investigating its doctrinal claims in as broad of a global public as possible is Christian theology's outrageous task. Neville writes, "as a Christian...part of my motive is ecclesial outreach beyond the Church in its largest sense. The intent is to aid the understanding of Christianity as a religion (and perhaps other religions insofar as they have analogous symbolic usages) and to be understood by non-Christians as a Christian articulating at least one stream of Christianity."31 While Christian theology is for those who live it in the church, it is also for those who live outside it. Neville brings new rigorous systematic form to John Wesley's saying the "The World is my parish." The global public is Neville's audience, an audience he hopes to woo as a Christian theologian. To write global theology today, Christian theologians must be biblically symbolic, culturally sensitive, philosophically rigorous, politically concerned, and socially engaged. It is an impossible task, yet there is not one greater to dedicate one's life to.

NOTES 1

See, e.g., William R. Burrows, New Ministries: The Global Context (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1980); Hans Kung, Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic (New York: Continuum, 1993); Francis Bernard O'Connor, C.S.C., Like Bread, Their Voices Rise! Global Women Challenge the Church (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1993); James E. Will, The Universal God: Justice, Love and Peace in the Global Village (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994); William R. Barr, ed., Constructive Christian Theology in the Worldwide Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997); Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen, Holger Lam, and Peter Lodberg, eds., For All People: Global Theologies in Contexts (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2002); and Archbishop Anastasios (Yannoulatos) Facing the World: Orthodox Christian Essays on Global Concerns (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2003). 2 Larry Rasmussen, "'Give Us Word of the Humankind We Left to Thee': Globalization and its Wake," Episcopal Divinity School Occasional Paper 4 (August 1999): 1-20, identifies three waves of economic globalization: colonialization, development, and post-1989 free-trade capitalism. Rebecca Todd Peters, The Ethics of Globalization: Assessing the Postmodern Landscape (London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), discusses theories of globalization in four categories: neoliberal globalization, developmental globalization, environmental globalization, and post-

ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE AND THEOLOGY'S GLOBAL FUTURE

41

colonial globalization. Cf. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Routledge, 2002); and Charles Taylor, "Defining Globalization," Ecumenism 149 (March 2003): 6-13. 3 See Ulrich Duchrow, Alternatives to Global Capitalism: Drawn from Biblical History, Designed for Political Action (Utrecht: International Books and Kairos Europa, 1995); William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2002); and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis; Fortress, 2002). 4 Susan VanZanten Gallagher, "Introduction: New Conversations on Postcolonial Literature," in Susan VanZanten Gallagher, ed., Postcolonial Literature and the Biblical Call forJustice (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 3-33, quotation from 4. 5 R. S. Sugirtharajah, Asian Biblical Hermeneutics and Postcolonialism: Contesting the Interpretations (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998), 16-17; cf. R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., The Postcolonial Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), and Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial, and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 2000). Cf. Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder, trans. Ames Hodges (New York: Semiotext(e),2002). 7 See Joerg Rieger, Remember the Poor: The Challenge to Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1998); Joerg Rieger, God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001); and Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 8 Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Lan, eds., Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 9 See Philip Jenkins. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002). 10 Christian values, symbols and images as a common inheritance continue to persist and inform the culture of the West; on this point, see Rudolph Binion, After Christianity: Christian Survivals in a Post-Christian Culture (Durango, Colo.: LogbridgeRhodes, 1986). 11 Representative of early voices is Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era (New York: Braziller, 1957), and Mary Jean Irion, From the Ashes of Christianity: A Post-Christian View (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1968). Contemporary spokespersons include Don Cupitt in Britain and Thomas J. J. Altizer in North America. 12 With regard to the last, an early assessment of the African indigenous churches in the 1960s concluded that they were, "...easy bridges back to nativism. They are neither Christian nor traditional, but a syncretism of both, and thus a new religion." See G. C. Oosthuizen, Post-Christianity in Africa: A Theological and Anthropological Study (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1968), xi.

42

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT 13

The clear implication in the sub-title of Walter Brueggemann, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). 14 Robert Cummings Neville, Religion in Late Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 135. 15 Ibid, 150-57; Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 201-04. 16 Robert Cummings Neville, "Responding to My Critics," in J. Harley Chapman and Nancy K. Frankenberry, eds., Interpreting Neville (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 291-328, quote from 299. 17 Robert Cummings Neville, God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968), 111. 18 Neville, Religion in Late Modernity', 211. 19 Robert Cummings Neville, A Theology Primer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 134. 20 See Robert Cummings Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); also Neville, Religion in Late Modernity, 45-65. 21 Published in three volumes as The Comparative Religious Ideas Project; see Robert Cummings Neville, ed., The Human Condition; Religious Truth; and Ultimate Realities (all three volumes, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 22 Robert Cummings Neville, Behind the Masks of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 164. 23 Neville, Boston Confucianism, 209. 24 Ibid., xxi-xxxv. 25 Robert Cummings Neville, "Preface" in The Cosmology of Freedom, new ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), xiii. 26 Neville, Religion in Late Modernity, 141. 27 Neville, Behind the Masks of God, 30. 28 Neville writes, "Late modernism includes modernism/postmodernism, romanticism, process thinking, and pragmatic culture all insofar as they interact with cultures outside the North Atlantic sphere, especially as all are connected through electronic communications. From the pragmatic late-modern perspective defended here, the dominant modenist/postmodernist stream of later modernism is a serious mistake" {Religion in Late Modernity, 144). 29 See Robert Cummings Neville, The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 30 Robert Cummings Neville, The Axiology of Thinking, 3 vols.: Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981); Recovery of the Measure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); and Normative Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 31 Robert Cummings Neville, Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 259.

3

Global Citizenship, Religion, and World Order

Rodney L. Petersen

"As citizens, [Christians] share all things with others, and yet endure all things as ifforeigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers...." - Letter to Diognetus 1

Two political events shape our understanding of global citizenship, religion, and world order in the early years of the twentyfirst century. They are, first, the end of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union and its Allies, commonly dated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The second event is the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on 11 September 2001. How the Cold War ended, whether with the military build up and political activity inspired by the American President Ronald Reagan, by a steady and growing opposition in civil society symbolized in the Polish movement of Solidarity and through the efforts of John Paul II and other religious groups, or some combination of the two, raises important questions about religion, nation-states, and social transformation. 2 With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. remains the world's superpower and the whole world watches to see how the U.S. will use its economic and military strength.

44

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

This global scrutiny has been intensified in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. The foreign policy of the Bush administration has been dominated by organizations like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose goal is to promote a neoconservative vision of American global leadership. 3 How one interprets the attack on 9/11 drastically shapes our understanding of religion and public life: Was this an uncalled for aggression, parallel to the attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor (1941), or was it in its own way a preemptive attack on America by elements from the Islamic world fearful of an American attack upon it, growing out of thinking seen in the PNAC or even reaching back to the end of the First Gulf War (1991)?4 As a result of 9/11 the U.S. has had to begin thinking about the "religious other" and to do so in the context of a doctrine of preventive or multi-lateral diplomacy. Were the terrorists responsible for the attacks of 9/11 practicing Muslims? Or were they, like convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (1995), misguided in their thinking and poor representatives of their tradition? Even George Bush acknowledged at the time that Islam is "a religion of peace." While this view was not shared by many of his friends on the religious right like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Franklin Graham, Bush signaled a more nuanced perspective on religious difference, more "multi-lateral" in approach: Demonizing the religious other is not only a form of idolatry but regressive in conflict resolution. A more constructive approach is to get to know the religious other through conversation and dialogue. 5 This dialogical approach to religious otherness is the fountainhead of the theology of Robert Cummings Neville. Neville's philosophical theology provides a framework for engaging the religious other. It promotes the creation and enactment of multi-religious, civic rituals as a vital way to transform religious practice into social engagement. Neville's public theology provides for emergent global citizenship through concepts of creation and covenant. It offers a more multi-lateral approach to religious difference that enables conflict resolution to discover a more humane world order.

Emergent Global Citizenship The context for global citizenship is globalization. While there are many definitions of globalization, religion is often a factor.6 The global

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP, RELIGION, AND WORLD ORDER

45

vision is intrinsic to many of the world's living religious traditions, particularly those of Abrahamic vintage. While Islam envisions one world order in submission to God, or Allah, Christianity seeks one Kingdom of God under Jesus Christ. This has been central to the Protestant and Roman Catholic mission movements that reshaped global social reality through the years of Western imperialism and subsequent de-colonization.7 It also shapes Muslim theory and practice. Whether different visions of globalization work themselves out in cooperative or hegemonic patterns will shape the nature of the history we face.8 Emergent global citizenship, the pursuit of corporate public responsibility amidst the constant transitions of globalization, requires a theoretical religious framework and practical ethic. 9 This sense of citizenship takes shape around issues of identity, lifestyle, and global needs and networks.10 The very technology that makes global citizenship possible is also a factor in itself that is shaping emergent global citizenship. So, too, there is also a growing sense across the globe that rights and obligations arise from people themselves, particularly since WWII, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set forth by the United Nations (1948). This was given further significance for religious consciousness and liberties in the U.N.'s Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief (25 November 1981). The social reality of people migrating around the world, and an increasing tendency to standardize citizenship, has promoted a sense of global citizenship. Global citizenship may also grow as the indirect result of America's global dominance, its espousal of programs like the Project for a New American Century, and rejection of the post-WWII human rights construct - embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in subsequent international covenants - in favor of a human rights policy fixated on freedom from fear.11 While the United States represents in itself much of the thrust toward global citizenship, its national attitudes and actions also shape a global response to American hegemony that can be equally hegemonic. While the United States has helped to shape and has given leadership to such organizations as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and other global institutions, insofar as it has fostered feelings of imperialism and dominance among other nations, this may result in a sense of global citizenship that is in opposition to American interests.12

46

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Whether we conceive of globalization in terms of time-space relationships, planetary integration, and compression or as the "triumph" of neo-liberal economics, 13 globalization creates a human reality that, in the manner of Emile Durkheim, contributes to the construction and destruction of local lifeworlds as transitions occur in local societies. Globalization is pushing a social reality that is conducive to emergent global citizenship. Issues of religion and religious understanding are interrelated with each of the issues cited earlier as shaping emergent global citizenship, issues of identity, lifestyle, global needs and networking, technology and location, culture and politics. In other words, religious discourse and ritual, views on space-time rhythms and social engagement are being shaped by globalizing forces. Religions may embrace, alter, or even resist globalization, but the religions of the world are not unaffected by changing social realities. We might ask: How can the ritual structure of religion provide a resource for responsible global citizenship? Should religions and their rituals be co-opted and transformed by the processes of globalization? Should they resist? Or are there forms of accommodation in religion-state relations that can tolerate religious ritual in contexts of religious diversity with integrity and without loss of meaning? An aspect of religious communities becoming attuned to globalization is the number of religious communities (and secular NGOs) who see the injustices promoted by current global economic policy (NAFTA, CAPTA, and the FTAA) as intolerable. 14 These trade agreements often cause greater global income disparities. In our world around 19,000 children will die today because of the preventable diseases of poverty, while the twenty richest people in the world control more wealth than the forty-seven poorest nations put together. Ethical questions that arise in the face of such social crises also animate a sense of global citizenship. Of the five categories of persons that Richard Falk identifies as engaged with global needs and networks - global reformers, elite global business people, global environmental managers, politically conscious regionalists, and trans-national activists - four of the five have grassroots activism at their core. 15 In his later discussion of globalization, Falk makes the distinction of globalization from above and from below, the former being economistic and often brutal in nature and the latter oriented to global human rights, often alive in relation to living religious traditions. 16 Legitimacy for such activism is not drawn from any state, whether in areas of global economics, environmentalism or human

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP, RELIGION, AND WORLD ORDER

47

rights, but from a kind of natural law although seldom identified as such.17

Global Citizenship in Neville's Theology There is a moral core that sustains the work of this new breed of global humanitarians who work for a just globalization "from below." Robert Cummings Neville is one of these global citizens who see the wisdom traditions of the world religions as an untapped resource for a framework of engagement and for ritual acts of social transformation. Neville's progressive conception of theology supports a developing sense of the role of religion in relation to emergent global citizenship. This arises from the way in which he constructs his theology. He asserts the importance of working from themes available to all, a broad theology of creation ex nihilo, the affirmation of public theology, the value of a history of religions approach to any theological formulation, and an empirical base and scope in the philosophy of religion.18 Grounding Christian theology in the creation of a good earth into which God enters in covenantal relationship, Neville's public theology draws on "natural law," the same "natural law" that Richard Falk sees as the common denominator among the new class of grassroots global citizens. Creation and covenant are the themes that unify Neville's natural theology. In the spirit of Reformation dogmatics, he asserts that humanity has a covenantal responsibility before God, with the earth and with one another. 19 The covenants established by the Triune God with the people of Israel are fulfilled in Christ and lend concrete form to this one set of religious narratives. The tradition of covenant theology bears upon the relationship between power and religion. Power is located in the role of theology to promote an inquiry into truth, an inquiry and truth that are always socially engaged. 20 Power is derivative of and not in conflict with natural law and an acknowledged universal public responsibility. Natural law provides the moral norms for public responsibility. Religions offer the symbolic and ritual practices to organize and communally structure the moral order of society and the formation of global citizens. Because all religions can access this common law of nature, Christian public theology must be practiced in a multi-religious framework. This is religious multi-lateralism. Like the work of David

48

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Tracy, Neville's theology emphasizes the value of the religious "other," the person not to be merely tolerated, or ignored or even the object of conversion, rather the one with whom direct engagement is necessary. It is the work of the public theologian to give leadership to such inter-religious dialogue as makes this engagement happen. This is work that may even necessitate establishing new civic rituals that recognize religious diversity. It is work that leads to new covenanted relationships with all persons in society. Inter-religious dialogue is the basis for inter-religious cooperation toward the end of a more humane world order. Neville underscores the importance of the religious "other" in shaping global citizenry.21 Emergent global citizenship may offer a veneer of growing mutuality and a certain standardization of understanding, but the reality of the religious "other" gives complexity and depth to this perspective. Citizenship can be inclusive as well as a form of exclusion. It must be made available for all, i.e., there must be a sense of equality in religious citizenship that is a recognized and a valued component of global citizenship.22 It might be said that religious citizenship is that citizenship which your state allows you to have in the free exercise of religious matters. 23 It is an aspect of the citizenship that a person may exercise in a specific community. It involves the rights that individuals have, the capacities they may exercise in specific contexts, and the obligations that they acquire. In the international community, the right of religious citizenship is one that grows out of Universal Human Rights, a right specific to the freedom of religion.24 The reality of the religious "other" is also an opportunity for the formation of theological identity in the context of the right to free expression of religion. Theological identity, as with all identity, is formed in the context of dialogue and engagement. 25 How we express that theology brings us to God to whom we seek to make ultimate reference? In order to deal with the complexities of theological truth, Neville identifies three kinds of reference, "iconicity," or ways by which theology mirrors the way reality really is; "indexical," or ways in which theology engages us and shapes our behavior; and "conventional," or the ways in which we use language in interpretation and engagement. 26 The ability to discern what is really at stake in theological interpretation and the imagination to remain open and vulnerable to correction is what shapes our theological identity. Our identity determines the nature of our engagement with one another and the world order. What is at stake is not merely knowing about

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP, RELIGION, AND WORLD ORDER

49

theological matters, but becoming more religious by way of being more thoughtful and holy, particularly in areas that are relevant to society in the twenty-first century, areas shaped by the discussion of religion with the sciences, our environmental responsibilities, our encounter with other religions traditions, and ways of living justly with all peoples. 27 Neville's public and comparative approach to theology affirms the role of the public theologian. In this he draws upon a vibrant Christian activism that stands in the moral tradition of African American Christianity, embodied in the lives of Boston University luminaries Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr. Neville's conception of the Christian political activist/public theologian is also one that takes on aspects of the Eastern model of sage.28 The Confucian sage tradition in Neville's thought reaches a high watermark in his participation in the small, but important school of Boston Confucianism.29 Apart from Christianity's claim to ultimate salvation, which is a topic deserving special treatment, Boston Confucianism recognizes the ways in which all of our religious traditions are complex. Dual or multi-polar religious identity is important for Neville's neoConfucian ideal of the scholar-sage and central to his conception of Boston Confucianism. Christianity has, in the past, shared its identity with such schools of thought as Platonism and Aristotelianism. It is appropriate, therefore, in an era characterized by growing globalization and integration to see dual or multi-polar identity shared with such East Asian traditions as Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. The Confucian-Christian dialogue can demonstrate that among the world's great civilizations, a clash such as that envisioned by Samuel Huntington is not inevitable. Noting the importance of such complex religious identities, Neville finds the important events of the first third of the nineteenth century not to be those of European settlement or boundaries and regimes in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, but the extension of the United States and Russia to the Pacific Ocean, the development of the China-India-West trade cycle, and the factors that increased Asian populations. The value of Boston Confucianism is that it opens up dialogue with Asian partners in a world of interlocked fragility. What was true of the nineteenth century, and even truer in the twenty-first century, is profoundly important today. Confucian ideas of ritual/etiquette can help us understand the nature of roles and relationships. The Confucian cultivation of the moral self can connect

50

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

with Christian ideas of virtue. The Neo-Confucian idea of "principle" can provide a "bridge" to the Christian idea of transcendence. One of the great contributions of the Confucian tradition to our latemodern North American context is the vital importance of public rituals in cultivating global citizenship. A recognition of the religious "other" in such a way as to grant religious citizenship to the "other" means acknowledging civic rituals that are inclusive in orientation. Neville writes of the need to develop global rituals in normative cultures for an array of traditions. 30 The value of such ritual is underscored by Marc Gopin in relation to rituals that promote an attitude conducive to restorative justice and reconciliation. 31 In the United States this might mean a transformation of civic holidays in such a way as to recognize the growing religious diversity of the American population. In any culture holidays are less stable than we might at first imagine. In the period that emerged from medieval Europe, holidays evolved out of a myriad of Saints' days to an affirmation of the regular weekly celebration of Sunday in addition to Easter and (often) Christmas in the Protestant nation-states. Other civic holidays soon crept into the calendars of these emerging nations. Christians celebrate Christmas, but the holiday has become exceedingly commercial to the dismay of many Christians. Is an antidote to this the acknowledgment of deeper meaning in a number of religious traditions celebrated around the time of the winter solstice? Thanksgiving is increasingly shaped by football and turkey jokes. Might this holiday evolve into a National Day of Thanksgiving and Reconciliation in analogy with the transposition of the Day of the Vow (December 16) in South Africa, once a day of thanksgiving to God for the victory of the Voortrekkers, but now a day of reconciliation and national unity for all South Africans? So too, might the Fourth of July become a day that not only celebrates the independence of the United States but also expresses our hope that all people throughout the world might be invited into the same liberties that we enjoy? Civic and religious holidays in the sense described above might represent a momentum toward global citizenship with full rights granted to religious citizenship.

Global Citizenship, Religion and the Challenge for World Order The emergence of the concept of global citizenship presents a

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP, RELIGION, AND WORLD ORDER

51

challenge to politics and religion as often practiced. The political challenge comes with the recognition of local, national, and global civil realities. The religious challenge is also such as to acknowledge that particular religious claims upon us may come in the context of a religious diversity that we are required to recognize at some level so as to accord the rights of religious citizenship for all. Among the challenges for nation-states in the twenty-first century is the degree of allegiance citizens give to local, national, and international participation, apart from the quality of that participation, whether oriented toward an individual or communitarian political ethic. The concept and practice of citizenship emerged out of what it meant to be part of a tribe, to be "subject," or even a "national."32 The aftermath of the American and French Revolutions in the eighteenth century saw the emergence of civil citizenship.33 The idea of political citizenship can be seen to have arisen in the nineteenth century, that of social citizenship in the twentieth century.34 Following this sense of evolution from narrowly defined loyalty to greater civic tolerance, the idea of an emergent global citizenship with religious rights and responsibilities has arisen as a growing social reality. Elise Boulding connects this evolution with the principles that led to the emergence of the United Nations.35 She argues that a new model of citizenship that is multicultural - involving respect for all groups within the state - multinational and multidimensional is on our political horizon: a threefold citizenship to local community, the nation-state, and global agreements. 36 In this context, religious citizenship is a dimension of citizenship at each level.37 Rather than regressive in its commitments, 38 religion offers deep meaning, the energy for moral vision and a means to reconciliation and peace that is increasingly recognized.39 Neville's theology is useful precisely because many of the challenges to religion in emerging world order are parallel to the challenges faced by nation-states. His vision of inter-religious dialogue, a kind of multi-lateralism, makes it possible to move out of tightly knit hermeneutic circles and into wider patterns of understanding in the public square. This grants the rights of religious citizenship to all.40 The challenge of identifying with one religion while confronted by religious plurality, or the degree of commitment to different religions and religious ideas,41 is one that is openly confronted. One may be a committed Christian, but also recognize the ways in which Christianity and Judaism are deeply interrelated, or understand the

52

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

ways in which each of the Abrahamic religions reflect a common monotheism and share in many stories and in much of their moral vision.42 Neville makes the case in this regard for Christianity and religions of the ancient East in his vision for Boston Confucianism. Just as the question of religious citizenship poses a challenge to the individual and the state around the question of religion, it also challenges particular faith communities: What is the church? Or, what are communities of faith? Speaking of the church, and only indirectly of other faith communities: Is the church of the twenty-first century a backwater or ethnic eddy in the swiftly moving currents of political history? Or does it represent an essential reality on the cutting edge of that flow? These are issues faced by Orthodox Churches as they wrestle with new social conditions, particularly in Eastern Europe but also in North America, and wonder whether now is the time for an Orthodox Council in the face of changing social conditions and ecclesial realities.43 These issues are also faced by Roman Catholic Churches that continue to work with the legacy of Vatican II and a heritage that understands Rome alone as defining of the Church. 44 New patterns of engagement are present for all Christian Churches as some Evangelical and Pentecostal communities define themselves in opposition to older forms of Protestantism.45 The impasse over a mutually acceptable understanding and affirmation of each other's ministry across different Christian churches bears within itself these tensions.46 Such internal division among churches not only calls into question their own essential nature, but affects their engagement with other faith communities, truncates mission, and marginalizes religious commitment from social engagement. With such a constriction of mission, churches increase the level of alienation and foster their own sense of self-privilege.47 A judicious use of politics stands between the lures of sectarianism and the blandishments of power that allow for boundaries without domination, but promotes conversation. Both sectarianism and domination in religious matters lead to a truncated engagement of religion with politics. It further diminishes religion's voice in the public square as the social revolutions of recent years have yielded an increased emphasis on personal autonomy, removing the churches from their traditional role as institutions mediating accepted values.48 To this must be added the recent patterns of immigration with their changing impact on American religious demography. 49 How can we move beyond social division without overcoming

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP, RELIGION, AND WORLD ORDER

53

disagreement? What can religion contribute to a public square fractured and difficult to locate? How can we do this in a way that affirms difference without loss of commitment? Neville's theology offers a kind of religious pragmatism that leads not to history's preemptive conclusion, but to the possibility of human flourishing. It fosters an acceptance of one's finite critical perspective as a creative given. One lives with integrity and courage as one begins to accept the location in which one finds oneself. It suggests personal commitment through covenant that acknowledges the being and worth of one another. Neville stands in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. in his affirmation that nothing should be done that cannot be done in love. It points to life beyond the drama of victim and victimization through forgiveness. It is a theology that finds that the greatest enemy of the good is the perfect, the cosmic narratives that misrepresent individuality, and keep us from taking the particular steps that make reconciliation possible. This implies moral action and social change in the context of historical ambiguity. Only this kind of a religion can give us the courage we need to find the way toward a humane world order. 50

NOTES 1 The Epistle to Diognetus, v. 5 passim; see Kirsopp Lake, trans., Apostolic Fathers, Vol. II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 359-60. 2 While the work of the churches in the political realm is difficult to assess, George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (New York: Harper Books, 1999), argues that John Paul II had more to do with bringing the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion than all of the feverish braggadocio of Ronald Reagan's military build-up and Star Wars. Weigel draws attention to John Paul IPs interposition in such troubled spots of the world as Nicaragua in 1983, Czechoslovakia in 1986, Paraguay in 1988, and Cuba in 1998. Lamentably, a private initiative to the former Yugoslavia failed in 1994 to end the slaughter. A perspective that assesses Reagan's role more generously is that of Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster Books, 2000). 3 See Thomas Donnelly, et al., Project for the New American Century (PNAC) (available from 1150 Seventeenth Street, N. W. Suite 510, Washington, DC 20036). Formulated in 1997, much of the thought given in this document extends back to the end of the First Gulf War in 1991. 4 David Cook details Islamic apocalyptic thought that envisions the destruction of the United States as an imminent act of God for American immorality and idolatry in "Daniel 9:24-27 in Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic literature," paper delivered at the conference, "Millennial Texts in Apocalyptic Contexts," 9-10 November 2003,

54

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

sponsored by the Boston Theological Institute and Center for Millennial Studies, Boston University. Cook's notes are rich in citations of contemporary Muslim thinking. Robert Jay Lifton puts this thinking into a larger framework reflecting on America's international activity since 9/11 in Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York: Nation Books, 2003). 5 David Tracy, "On Theological Education," and Francis X. Clooney, S. J., "Reading the World Religiously: Literate Christianity in a World of Many Religions," in Rodney Petersen with Nancy Rourke, eds., Theological Literacy for the Twenty-First Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 13-22 and 242-56 respectively. 6 Peter Berger argues that "evangelical Protestantism, especially in its Pentecostal version, is the most important popular movement serving...as a vehicle of cultural globalization"; see Berger's "Introduction: The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization," in Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1-16, quote from 8. 7 Robert Schreiter suggests that catholicity is "the theological equivalent of globalization"; in Karl Mùller, et al., eds., Dictionary of Mission: Theology, History, Perspectives (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998), 176.1 owe this reference of Dana Robert, "The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement between the World Wars," Newsletter of the Boston Theological Institute (3 October 2001): 1. 8 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). 9 Bart van Steenbergen, "The Condition of Citizenship," in Bart van Steenbergen, ed., The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 19, esp. 2. Discussion of the nature of citizenship finds a useful starting point with T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto Press, 1987). 10 On "lifestyle politics," see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). On the "politics of identity" and related matters, see Jonathan Sacks, "Judaism and Politics in the Modern World," in Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 51-63. 11 John Newhouse, Imperial America: The Bush Assault on the World Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 12 See Lifton, Superpower Syndrome, 128-30; cf. Jùrgen Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity," in Bart van Steenbergen, ed., The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 20-35, and Richard Bellamy, "Citizenship Beyond the Nation State: The Case from Europe," in Noel O'Sullivan, ed., Political Theory in Transition (London: Routledge, 2000), 91-112. 13 Compare John and Jean Comaroff, Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), and John and Jean Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 14 Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda, Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002). 15 Richard Falk, "The Making of Global Citizenship," in Bart van Steenbergen, ed., The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 127-40, esp. 138. 16 Richard Falk, Religion and Humane Global Governance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 17 Compare Rico Lie and Jan Servaes, "Globalization: Consumption and Identity

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP, RELIGION, AND WORLD ORDER

55

- Toward Researching Nodal Points," in Georgette Wang, Jan Servaes, and Anura Goonasekera, eds., The New Communications Landscape (London: Routledge, 2000), 307-32, and Margarett Scammell, "Internet Civic Engagement: Age of the CitizenConsumer" [http://jsis.artsci.washington.edu/programs/cwesuw/scammell.htm] (2001), with Hans Kùng, A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Much of the work of the World Council of Churches in its efforts on "Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation," has developed in relation to a Natural law perspective. 18 The contributors to J. Harley Chapman and Nancy K. Frankenberry, eds., Interpreting Neville (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), highlight four other aspects of Neville's theology: a methodological and constitutive dialectical approach that reaches into his sense of ontology; a speculative pragmatism derivative of the importance of critical judgment; a comparative approach to theology that casts Christian theology into a place of critical assessment with respect to other world religions; and an engagement with issues of contemporary culture. 19 See Robert Cummings Neville, A Theology Primer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), esp. ch. 5. This is a perspective that Neville shares with his wife and artist, Elizabeth. Her own environmentally sensitive artwork was featured prominently at the conference, "Consumption, Population and the Environment," co-sponsored by the Boston Theological Institute with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (9-11 November 1995). 20 See Robert Cummings Neville, "On the Complexity of Theological Literacy," in Rodney L. Petersen with Nancy M. Rourke, eds., Theological Literacy for the TwentyFirst Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 39-54. 21 Robert Cummings Neville, Religion in Late Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press: 2002), esp. Part Two. 22 Paul J. Weithman, Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 23 Under the U. S. Constitution (1789), Article Six forbids any religious test for the holding of national office. The First Congress of the United States passed ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment to the Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The First Amendment also guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. See also Amendment XIV: Citizen rights not to be abridged. 24 The rights of religious citizenship, including freedom of religion, can reference such documents of the United Nations as the Declaration on the Elimination ofAll Forms of Intolerance and ofDiscrimination Based on Religion or Belief (2b November 1981). 25 Donna Hicks, "Issues of Identity and Protracted Conflict," in Raymond Helmick, S.J., and Rodney L. Petersen, eds., Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001), 127-49. 26 See Robert Cummings Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), ch. 2, esp. 37-47. The distinction is made between religious language as signs of transcendence (symbolic instrumentalism) or as symbols embedded in religious forms of life (linguistic pragmatism) as directed by the work of Charles Peirce or Ludwig Wittgenstein. 27 See Robert Cummings Neville, The Tao and theDaimon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982); Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative

56

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); and The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 28 Robert Cummings Neville, Soldier, Sage, Saint (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978). 29 Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 30 Robert Cummings Neville, Normative Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), esp. ch. 7. 31 Marc Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2000), 192-93. 32 Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation. Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), argues that European nationalism emerged in the early modern era as a form of mass political engagement based on religious conflict, intolerance, and exclusion. 33 The first to receive the enfranchisement were adult males who also happened to serve in the American and French armies. See Lars Bo Kaspersen, "State and Citizenship under Transformation in Western Europe," in Connie L. McNeely, ed., Public Rights, Public Rules: Constituting Citizens in the World Polity and National Policy (NewYork: Garland Press, 1998), 125-51. 34 Bart van Steenbergen, "The Condition of Citizenship," 2. However, it might be argued that even our contemporary recognition of emergent global citizenship is seen in Jean Jacques Rousseau's notions of "citoyen de Genève' and "citoyen du monde." 35 Elise Boulding, Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). 36 The Charter of the United Nations begins: "We the peoples of the United Nations determined...." See also Guy Ankerl, Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations (Geneva: INU Press, 2000). Interestingly for an emergent global citizenship, the United Nations was founded as an association of "we, the peoples," not as "we, the states." Further, as the citizen army is replaced by the professional army, a central cog in the bonds between state and citizen is removed. Voting turnout decreases, and the public has a low regard for politicians. With such loose ties between the citizen and the state, the emergence of global citizenship cannot seem farfetched. 37 Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed., Obligations of Citizenship and Demands of Faith: Religious Accommodation in Pluralist Democracies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 38 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, rev. and exp. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), esp. 15, writes in order to understand particular acts of violence and the role of violence in the religious imagination. 39 See Richard Falk, Religion and Humane Global Governance, and Marc Gopin, Between Eden and Armageddon, 13-32. 40 See David Chidester, Global Citizenship, Cultural Citizenship and World Religions in Religion Education (2002); e-edition found at www.hsrcpublishers.co.za. 41 In seeking to explain why the light of God's forgiveness might appear as clearly or more so without reference to Jesus Christ, the theologian Karl Barth suggested the use of the image of three concentric circles: an inner circle of Bible and Church, another of mixed traditions and backgrounds, and a third of pure secularism. For Barth, and for Christian theology, their common point of reference in Jesus Christ, even if unacknowledged, unites all three. See Barth, Church Dogmatics TV/'3/1, trans.

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP, RELIGION, AND WORLD ORDER

57

G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1961), 38-165. 42 Paul Hiebert's analysis of the term "Christian" draws upon the mathematical categories of "bounded sets," "fuzzy sets," and "centered sets" as he seeks to bring clarity to the meaning of the term. Opting for the latter category, he writes that a line of demarcation exists but the focus should be on "reaffirming the center" and not on "maintaining the boundary." See Hiebert's article, "The Category 'Christian' in the Mission Task," International Review of Mission 72 (1983): 421-27, esp. 424. 43 See, e.g., Stanley Harakas, "Orthodoxy in America: Continuity, Discontinuity, Newness," in Theodore Stylianopoulos, ed., Orthodox Perspectives on Pastoral Praxis (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1988), 13-30, 44 See Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Jesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, in Origins, 30:14 (14 September 2000): 4. 45 Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), argues that American Evangelicalism thrives because of its oppositional approach to American culture. Cf. Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston, eds., The Variety of American Evangelicalism (Downers Grove: In terVarsity Press, 1991). 46 The value of the Faith and Order work of the World Council of Churches is underscored here, particularly the document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper No. I l l (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982). A helpful overview is found in Gun ter Gassmann, Documentary History of Faith and Order, 19631993, Faith and Order Paper No. 159 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1993), and Michael Kinnamon and Brian E. Cope, eds., The Ecumenical Movement: An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997). 47 Trevor Williams and Alan Falconer, eds., Sectarianism (Dublin: Dominican Publicans, 1995); and see Alan Falconer and Joseph Lichty, eds., Reconciling Memories (Dublin: Columbia Press, 1998). 48 See Phillip E. Hammond, Religion and Personal Autonomy: The Third Disestablishment (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992). 49 This theme is discerned and developed by John Berthrong, The Divine Deli: Religious Identity in the North American Cultural Mosaic (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999). 50 Inspired by Paul Tillich, Neville writes of the courage "to embrace the ambiguous and fragmentary and to go on with moral and spiritual life, as the essence of faith" (Neville, The Highroad Around Modernism, 200). Cf. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952).

4

Civilizing World Society: Order, Terror, Piety

Andrew Irvine

A striking feature of Robert Neville's late modern Platonism is the importance placed on poetry for the formation of a responsible community. This is, of course, in contrast with the famous passages from the Republic where Plato's Socrates advocates banishing the poets from the ideal city. In Neville's vision, poetry has a vital and irreplaceable role in civilizing the world society of late modern times. Poetry or, more generally and more accurately, poetic appreciation of things civilizes a community's life by opening critical and creative perspectives on the community's habitual orders of experience. Poetic appreciation of a thing evokes and nurtures a sense for the infinite value that thing has in its own singularity. This value cannot be grasped; it can only be deferred to in a disposition of piety. The critical and creative tension between a community's habitual ways of ordering the world and the unconditional demand of piety toward singular things is a vital energy for civilizing ventures. Religions traditionally have been among the most important cultural practices concerned with this energy. The present essay seeks to examine the tension between order and piety as focused in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and following. It responds to a question which may be stated thus: what good could it mean to consider the horrifying destruction of the World Trade Center in New York or the Sari Nightclub in Bali as poetic acts? The first part of the essay explicates Neville's understanding of

60

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

poetic appreciation in relation to his overarching "cosmopolitical" theory of civilizing world society. This part will shed light particularly on the first term in the essay's subtitle, order. The second part provides a qualified poetic appreciation of the acts of terrorism previously mentioned. The qualifications come from interpreting those acts theologically, as deficient religious responses to a tension between piety and the order (such as it is today) of late modern world society. At least in part, religious terrorism reacts to and exploits a more general terror characteristic of the experience of most of the world's inhabitants. This part will shed light on the second term in the subtitle, terror. The third term in the subtitle, piety, threads throughout the essay, giving disposition and direction to the quest for ways to civilize world society in late modernity. In light of recent religious terrorism, civilizing world society requires pious concern for the religious practices of the victims of the prevailing world order, those on the "underside" of late modernity. Before proceeding, it remains to me to perform an act of piety, and defer to my teacher, Robert Neville. In addressing the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this essay pursues a lead pointed out by Neville in a sermon delivered at Boston University's Marsh Chapel shortly after that date. The civilizing work necessary to make our world better for its inhabitants is a hugely complicated undertaking. It cannot be initiated, let alone accomplished, without learning through cross-cultural dialogue and cooperation. Bob Neville has made available ways to pursue such learning clearly, coherently, flexibly, and critically. I am privileged to have been his student. Poetry and Competing World Orders Poetry succeeds, Neville argues, where it evokes and nurtures piety toward the singular, infinite values in things. Whatever activities enable agents to defer to such values are in that respect poetic. A religious ritual, love-making, and the spontaneous vigils kept in New York after the September 11 attacks may all be poetic in Neville's sense. Poetry is in any effort to appreciate piously the singular, infinite values in things. Piety, and therefore poetry in this expansive sense, is vital to the cultivation of a good society. Plato, on the other hand, rejected poetry as a medium for cultivating a good society. This difference between Plato's assessment and Neville's is elucidated by their respective historical contexts and the distinctive

CIVILIZING WORLD SOCIETY

61

civilizational challenges each tries to meet. Plato's Greece was a primarily oral, n o t literate, culture. In cultures of primary orality, continuity of the community d e p e n d s u p o n the preservation a n d transmission of living m e m o r y t h r o u g h oral repetition. Eric Havelock has shown how the H o m e r i c epics served as an encyclopedic repository of cultural wisdom a n d know-how, a n d also how that role d e p e n d e d o n an entire style of experience, which Plato comes to disparage as mimesis. Mimesis was, for H o m e r i c Greece, "a total technology of the preserved word." 1 T h u s Havelock says of the epics: [T]hey recall or memorialise acts, attitudes, judgments, and procedures which are typical. As they accumulate, they begin to read like a running report of that society to which the bard addresses his tale, but a report drafted also as a series of recommendations. This is the way in which the society does normally behave (or does not) and at the same time the way in which we, its members, who form the poet's audience, are encouraged to behave. 2 F u r t h e r m o r e , the poetic p e r f o r m a n c e was, for all involved, an intensely psychosomatic ritual of confirming a n d conforming to type, an intensive working o n oneself. In response to the question, what kind of learning process was this?, Havelock answers: Surely it was one in which you learned by doing. But the doing, so far as it concerns the preservation of important language, was of a special kind. What you "did" were the thousand acts and thoughts, battles, speeches, journeys, lives, and deaths that you were reciting in rhythmic verse, or hearing, or repeating. The poetic performance if it were to mobilise all these psychic resources of memorisation had itself to be a continual re-enactment of the tribal folkways, laws and procedures, and the listener had to become engaged in this re-enactment to the point of total emotional involvement. In short, the artist identified with his story and the audience identified with the artist. This was the imperative demand upon both of them if the process were to work. You did not learn your ethics and politics, skills and directives, by having them presented to you as a corpus for silent study, reflection and absorption. You were not asked to grasp their principles through rational analysis.

62

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

You were not invited so much as to think of them. Instead you submitted to the paideutic spell. You allowed yourself to become "musical" in the functional sense of that Greek term. 3

In attacking mimesis, then, "Plato's target was indeed an educational procedure and a whole way of life." 4 Plato is the first Greek to pursue (and write down) so systematically the worldordering project of a new kind of self. This new self is one made feasible by the invention of literacy, one no longer dependent on the typifying impress of the poetic process, who could become, with the appropriate encouragements, critically aware of the implicit content of the poems. 5 Education in Plato's ways of thinking demanded disenchantment from the spell of poetry, abstraction from the concrete succession of imitated images in quest of timefree intellectual visions - "theories" - of unifying pattern, the forms of knowledge. With Plato and others like him, a new theoretical style of experience vied with mimesis to be the medium of communal instruction and authority. "[H]is polemics against the poets are not a side issue, not an eccentric piece of Puritanism, nor a response to some temporary fashion in Greek educational practice. They are central to the establishment of his own system."6 Thus, a social and a personal process, the emergence of a literate elite and the theoretical ascesis of experience, helped to consolidate their common subject's eminence in the new cultural-political order: Plato's portrayal of the philosopher-king has endured as a stroke of rhetorical genius, however different times and places have varied in esteeming it as political wisdom.7 Neville's emphatically different evaluation of poetry rests on his sense of the distinctive challenges of civilizing late modern world society. In this society people from many different cultures, with (at least as yet) incommensurate visions of what it means to live well, are continually impacting each other with little discrimination as to how they should regard the effects or influence them. "The fundamental problem with our world's society," says Neville, "is that it is not civilized. It is not a true or good community, but just a set of powerful systematic causal interactions that produces benefits and harms far in excess of the cultural intentions of any of the parties." 8 Such fragmentation of intention is a core motif of late modernity, exhibited widely in, for example, the visual arts, literature, psychology, architecture, philosophy and historiography. Poetic appreciation

CIVILIZING WORLD SOCIETY

63

holds the promise of altering the experience of fragmentation, of restoring a true tension between the need for order and the demand of piety, in this way creating unity not entirely at the expense of diverse singularities. "The most obvious avenue to a world community is through a common world culture," Neville goes on to observe.9 Late modern world society comprises many different cultures though, including several great civilized traditions, and among them there is no persuasive consensus vision of what a common world culture should be. Rather, the main dynamics of contemporary world society indicate that, willingly or not, people tend to be gravely insensible of the experience of others. Political, cultural and economic inequities among the world's peoples identify just a few dimensions of the problem: for now, the strongest candidates for world cultural status are too much extensions of some particular culture forcing itself on the others. Though the conclusions Samuel Huntington drew from this problem some years ago are too crude, nevertheless he pinpointed its character saltily: "At the end of the twentieth century the concept of a universal civilization helps justify Western cultural dominance of other societies and the need for those societies to ape Western practices and institutions. Universalism is the ideology of the West for confrontations with non-Western cultures."10 Late modernity is therefore quite troublesome for Plato's paideia. From its beginning, the grafted image of Plato's philosopher-king carried over from politics into philosophy a preference for norms of order over values pertaining to diverse things in their own rights. As Stephen Toulmin has recounted, this preference became a forceful prejudice in Europe during the seventeenth century, in what he calls the rationalist trajectory of modernity.11 Today, though, the intensely felt plurality of human experience undercuts confidence in grand theoretical claims to find, or impose, a unitary order for it all. At the least, norms of order are not the only norms there are for human life. The struggle to have the other values acknowledged is insistent in our time, so world society is generally wary of proposals for "new world orders."12 Neville traces the troubles of the Platonic vision to a two-fold problematic. First, Plato did not fully reckon with the fact that his identification of norms for civilized life through theoretical abstraction, unification and idealization was shaped by, as well as gave shape to, the cultural ethos of his society. From inception to outcome, Plato's norms were conventional as well as normative. For this

64

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

reason, we may conceive processes of n o r m cultivation, including Plato's paideia, as rituals. Neville points o u t his d e b t in this m a t t e r to the philosophers of ancient China, who were m o r e a t t u n e d to it a n d recognized that "culture is something a d d e d to n a t u r e in the sense that it provides rule-governed, symbolically meaningful behaviors that overlie, enrich, a n d complicate natural behaviors, a n d [that] it is in these additions that h u m a n life takes o n the excellences of civilization." 13 In fact, any civilizing n o r m has to be cultivated. Since t h e r e is n o g e n u i n e world culture to provide civilizing n o r m s suitable for everyone, the question t h e n arises, "[h]ow can we develop a theory that embraces cultures all of which claim (rightly, let us suppose) to be ways of normative h u m a n life a n d yet each of which is conventional (and perhaps recognizes the others to be subject to different conventions)?" 1 4 In o t h e r words, how can we transform the e m b r a c e of world society from a deadlock into a sign of m u t u a l nurturance? These questions lead into the second aspect of the problematic. If theories of how to civilize world society necessarily will e m b o d y some local n o r m s , t h e n any theory that will have a chance of addressing the first p r o b l e m must cultivate ways to r e s p o n d to the n o r m s of others o n their own terms, n o t only its own. T h a t is, actually thinking a theory of "normative cultures" should be, at least in part, a ritual for its participants, cultivating in t h e m deference to n o r m s a n d e m b o d i m e n t s of n o r m s that are n o t (at least as yet) included in their own lives a n d in the theory's own structures. In m o r e "theoretical" terms, a theory of normative cultures must e n h a n c e responsiveness in its a d h e r e n t s to criticisms of a n d alternatives to its hypothesis of what would constitute a g o o d world order. Neville puts it this way: [TJheory needs to be able to recognize the theoretical implications of the ways metaphors, symbol systems, and even pluralities of theories pile up on one another in layers. Poets make points by overlaying metaphors; religions fill liturgical life with vast stretches of massed symbol systems. Indeed, this is another Confucian problematic because this overlaying of meanings is the way rituals pile on one another, each itself an archeologically deep set of nested habits.... Theories need to be able to register poetry and theology without having to reduce them to consistent, univocal expressions; otherwise they would miss the singularity of so many things, a singularity that consists precisely in a density of incompatible interpretable features.15

CIVILIZING WORLD SOCIETY

65

This passage gives the essential clue to understanding Neville's repatriation of all forms of poetic appreciation to a late modern Platonic cosmopolis. Whereas the poetry of Homeric Greece was a technology of mimesis, poetry in a late modern civilization of entrenched - perhaps we should say, "inscribed" - dominance, such as the West has been, is one of the few resources for deconstructing that civilization's theoretical and technical habits of prescribing its own sense of an orderly world to all others. In such a milieu, poetry strains against the repetition of the script of ordering conventions, to attend to singularity, to the inimitable.™ Thus, poetry (in the broad sense advertised at the beginning of this section) is vital to a new, cosmopolitan paideia.17 Cultivation in poetic appreciation of things can sensitize late modern "world citizens" to the inimitable singularity of others, evoking and nurturing the disposition to defer piously to the infinite value each possesses. In this way, the energizing tension between the need for order and the demand for piety may be renewed in and through rituals.18 Impiety and the Ritualization of Terror As mentioned before, religions traditionally have been among the most important cultural practices concerned with the poetic tension between piety toward singular things and ordering the world. Religions have a distinct interest in cultivating poetic appreciation because of the ways they variously interpret infinite value as indicative of an absolute ground: things in the world come to symbolize the ontological contingency of the world and everything in it. The things as symbols and the rituals around them simultaneously mediate and mark off the absolute ground that both sustains and threatens the world. The various world-making functions and dysfunctions of religious symbols and rituals are well known. They have aroused admiration and also revulsion, assuredly no less in modern times than in other ages. Modernity in the West has not always been antipathetic to religion in general, but the disastrous seventeenth century Wars of Religion encouraged moderns gravitating toward the rationalist trajectory in taking a dim view of all that was irrational by rationalism's lights, including much of religious life. Reflecting the modern ambivalence regarding religions, Neville argues that "[o]ne of the chief functions of the great world religions in our day is to help turn the world society of blind forces into a

66

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

civilized community," while also acknowledging that all the traditional religions struggle with modernity; and so he places his ironized hope in "Maitreyan strategies" of waiting on a renewal of transcendence which may or may not be recognized as such by the religions.19 Recent religious terrorism undercuts any urbane irony. Poetic appreciation of the infinite value of singular others is all very well, but how should those who hope for the civilization of world society value acts so apparently impious as those of 11 September 2001 ? Surely promoting a rival order that will undo the order of terrorist networks is part of a civilizing response - piety can wait. However, this dictum easily becomes nothing but euphemism for some very brutal business. A crucial requirement for a civilizing response, then, is recognition that the crude interactions of orders that currently constitute world society already terrify most of the world's inhabitants. It is difficult to grasp the scope of this reality, but hard, too, to underestimate it. So many dimensions of people's experience - political, sexual, economic, ecological, bureaucratic, to name just a few - are insinuated with terror. Repression, rape, starvation, pollution, social death, statelessness, chronic unemployment: these are day-to-day realities for the majority. In light of these realities, terrorism appears symptomatic of a systemic terror that attends life on the "underside of modernity."20 Not that Osama bin Laden offers a cure for the victims of modernity. Yet, to restore hope (at least ironic hope) in the promises of religions in late modern world society, it helps to appreciate that religious terrorism aims at transforming a systemic terror in which even the blithest beneficiaries of modernity are implicated.21 That is to say, the acts of religious terrorism we have witnessed can and ought to be interpreted as religious acts. In themselves, these acts aim at a poetic transformation of the systemic terror propagated by late modern world society by engaging people with the singularly terrifying ultimacy of the divine. In other words, they have a ritual force: the scenes and events they set in motion are religious symbols.22 Plainly, Rudolf Otto's study of the terrific presence of the mysterium tremendum influences this claim. Otto's analysis shows that even an idolatrous act remains a poetic effort to grasp, or be grasped by, the singular presence of something holy.23 Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane is also important here. Eliade argues that religious symbols and rituals serve to realize as fully as possible a human world by instituting and intensifying patterns of order and piety through which to communicate with (Eliade generally says, "imitate") the ultimate reality of the Sacred. In ritual, humans work to transform the

CIVILIZING WORLD SOCIETY

67

terror that comes from existing profanely, at once alienated from yet subject to the Sacred norms. 24 What matters in the "imitative" aspect of ritual is not mimesis per se, then. After all, no one has imitated the Sacred except through the conventions and inventions of ritual. At stake rather is a transformative engagement, better or worse as specific symbols and rituals allow, with the ultimately inimitable reality of the sacred.25 Therefore, dismissing or disguising that the infinite is at hand will not do. If the religious engagement asserted in the terrorist attacks is not felt and reckoned with, though all norms of order presendy enjoyed or yearned for should justify condemning those same acts as perverse, barbaric and evil, then the poetic tension between piety and order from which the terrorists drew will not truly be appreciated, and a power for civilizing world society will be wasted. An energetic theological interpretation will instead try to explicate and evaluate how the attacks of September 11 and since, understood now poetically as symbols for religious transformation, may engage interpreters with the infinite.26 Denying that the symbols do so engage, or simply seeking to trump them, is an inadequate response to the complex challenge of civilizing late modern world society.27 A more nearly adequate response will acknowledge the piety intended while showing that it is a piety distorted because not cultivated in poetic tension with the need to order. To use a term closer to the biblical religious traditions, a more nearly adequate response will evaluate the terrorist assaults as acts of idolatry. Beyond this, evaluation can be further specified in ways that touch more deeply each distinct tradition. For instance, Bruce Lincoln suggests the September 11 terrorists' intent was to demonstrate that, "all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, they possessed a power infinitely superior to their adversary's and of an entirely different order.... [They] meant to display power that was not only overwhelming and decisive, but unprecedented and incomparable. "28 If Lincoln's speculation is credible, based as it is on analysis of the written instructions to the hijackers and the 7 October 2001 videotaped address by Osama bin Laden, then the attackers might be judged to have arrogated to themselves the infinite power of their God. By thus associating their own deed with divine right, their piety is twisted into shirk - in Islamic doctrine the fundamental impiety of denying God's absolute uniqueness. And, indeed, this aspect of the

68

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

attacks adds to the horror felt by more truly pious people. 29 An energetic theological interpretation of terrorist acts such as those of 11 September 2001 and 12 October 2002 will acknowledge the ultimately inimitable divine presence at hand in the other, even the idolatrous other. Such interpretation is a risky undertaking. It requires imaginative readiness to appreciate the poetic character of those acts, their attention to the inimitable and infinite value of those on the underside of history in face of the habitual extension of partial world orders that allow the excellences of a civilized life only to a relative few. Moreover, the interpreter will understand that it is necessary to acknowledge the divine presence with the other in order to secularize properly his or her response. 30 The idolatry of religious terrorists does not deliver up ultimacy to anyone else's project. However, understanding acts of religious terrorism this way does not entail condoning them either, as the foregoing approach has demonstrated. Rather, it urges a greater piety toward those on the underside of modernity: deferring to them, learning to appreciate their symbols and rituals, the poetry of their lives. Such a piety can renew a tension with the orders prevailing in late modern world society, and so spark new civilizing rituals. Their terror must be transformed in order to undo one cause of terrorism.

Conclusion This essay has offered a vague interpretation of the terrorist acts of 11 September 2001 and since as religious symbols aimed at transforming the generalized terror infusing life on the underside of late modernity into a visitation of divine terror upon the imagined perpetrators of the world's evils. The acts have been judged religiously deficient, idolatrous, because they neglect the inimitable ultimacy of the values they seek to engage. This interpretation, although vague, strongly indicates that a civilizing religious response to the deep problems of late modern society must make a priority of attending piously to the symbolic practices of those suffering on the underside. Neville's appreciation of this priority is difficult to resolve from his writings: perhaps the problem is a reflex of his focus on the normative aspect of culture. As the present essay does not offer any more of a concrete course of action, though, it would be ungracious to tax Neville on this count. It is better to recognize how his late modern cosmopolitical theory, attuned as it is to poetic modes

69

CIVILIZING WORLD SOCIETY

of appreciation, deconstructs the habit of unilaterally imposing partial orders on diverse others. More particularly, it is fitting to acknowledge a deep indebtedness to Neville for his powerful theory of symbolic engagement of religious reality. This theory enables one to grapple with the role of religions in civilizing world society in late modernity. In sum, the good it could mean to consider the horrifying destruction of the World Trade Center or the Sari nightclub as acts of poetic engagement, as religious symbols, is the good of reviving self-critical religious engagement with one of the greatest challenges of our times.

Acknowledgments This essay is a compressed presentation of an argument that needs eventually to be made at greater length. Thanks to Joel Rasmussen for his questions and comments regarding this version. Requirements of length prevented me addressing many of his suggestions as they deserved. Even so, the essay is greatly improved thanks to him.

NOTES 1 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963), 44. The identification of mimesis as the object of Plato's attack indicts not just the Homeric epics but "cultural performance" in a very wide sense indeed. Therefore, the wide sense of "poetic appreciation" adopted in this essay from Neville is roughly extensive as what Plato meant by poetry. Cf. ibid., 20-31. 2 Ibid., 87. 3 Ibid., 159. Walter Ong corroborates that, "Copying becomes an overwhelming and preemptive state of mind," in primary oral cultures. Cf. Walter J. Ong, "From Mimesis to Irony: Writing and Print as Integuments of Voice," in Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 284. One should note that the "paideutic spell" of mimesis provided for a considerable freedom in action: "Only when the spell is effective can [the Hellene's] mnemonic powers be fully mobilised. His receptivity to the tradition has thus, from the standpoint of inner psychology, a degree of automatism which however is counterbalanced by a direct and unfettered capacity for action, in accordance with the paradigms he has absorbed. 'His not to reason why'" (Havelock, Preface to Plato, 19899). 4 Ibid., 45. 5 That the discovery is initially negative and hesitant can be seen in how Socrates' claim to wisdom rested on the Delphic oracle's injunction to "know thyself," yet had

70

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

to be stated negatively: the superiority of Socrates' knowledge over his opponents consisted in knowing that he knew nothing. 6 Ibid., 201-202. 7 Indeed, not until the Romantic Movement of the late eighteenth century did a literate mode of experience truly displace the primacy of orality in Western cultures. (Cf. Ong, "From Mimesis to Irony." This rich essay probes the cultural effects of the historical transition from primary oral to literate experience, including "secondary orality" in the modern media of radio and television.) Havelock's comprehension of the meaning of Plato's censure of poetry has been endowed with greater historical and philosophical nuance in the years since its publication. For example, Thomas Gould, The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), is to be recommended. Gould explores the "ancient quarrel" as above all a psychological-theological contest between celebrants of divine injustice, whose piety is at the heart of ancient Greek poetry and religion, and the justifiers of god (s) who constitute the Socratic line and accuse the poets of corrupting the capacity in men's souls for blessedness or eudaimonia. Moreover, Gould mounts a profound contemporary defense of the piety of divine injustice. I cannot doubt Gould's arguments will radically reshape the thinking canvassed here. I owe thanks to Joel Rasmussen for steering me to this fascinating book. 8 Robert Cummings Neville, Religion in Late Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 135. 9 Ibid., 136. 10 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Penguin, 1997), 66. 11 Stephen Toulmin Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990). That Neville works as a Platonist helps moderate at least somewhat the impression supported by Toulmin that the imperiousness of the rationalist trajectory is intrinsic to the Platonic ideal of theory. 12 Neville offers an account of the inherence of a bias toward norms of order in civilization as such in Normative Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 119-20. Cf., from 120: The rise of civilization only made manifest normative processes that previously and elsewhere must have been operative on other scales in non-civilized societies. Doubtless, tribal heads (men or women) have always had to impose order over the inevitable conflicts of family life and interpersonal relations. Individuals have always had to impose the orders of discipline over their own warring impulses and habits. In civilized reflection, however, the aura of the king imposing order on a society whose components would go their disastrous own ways unless integrated has become paradigmatic for reflections on morality and justice. 13

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 16. A helpful sketch of the problem in sociological perspective is given in Peter L. Berger, "Introduction: The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization," in Peter L. Berger and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1-16. 15 Neville, Normative Cultures, 17, italics Neville's. Neville here refers readers to his The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) for 14

CIVILIZING WORLD SOCIETY

71

m o r e o n m e t a p h o r i c a l overlay. 16 As Walter O n g has a r g u e d , t h e association of poetry with inimitability comes i n t o view within literate cultures a n d can b e taken to d a m a g i n g extremes, to further disparage non-literate cultures a c c o r d i n g to t h e prejudices of a full-blown ideology of cultural p r o d u c t i o n . H e observes, for e x a m p l e : "Poets, as idealized by c h i r o g r a p h i c cultures a n d even m o r e by typographic cultures, were n o t e x p e c t e d to use prefabricated materials." Cf. Walter J. O n g , Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word ( L o n d o n a n d New York: M e t h u e n , 1982), 22. Mimesis, it m u s t b e said, is n o t inimical to e x p e r i e n c e of t h e inimitable. T h a t is a R o m a n t i c prejudice whose weight late m o d e r n s still feel, a n d seek to shift with, say, irony, or "second naivete," o r parody, o r pastiche. At t h e same time literacy makes possible kinds of focused, reflective poetic appreciation impossible within orality. In Plato's case, t h e n , his attack o n poetry is actually s h a r p e n e d by his own appreciation for, a n d use of, poetic advantages of mimesis. See Gould, The Ancient Quarrel between Poetry and Philosophy, 8-12. 17 To see s o m e t h i n g of t h e revolutionary c h a r a c t e r of Neville's repatriation of poetic styles of appreciation, especially vis-à-vis t h e rationalist trajectory of modernity, cf. Toulmin's Cosmopolis, particularly eh. 2, " T h e 17 t h -Century Counter-Renaissance," a n d ch. 3, " T h e M o d e r n World View." Neville accounts for his own "para-modernist" p a t h in The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1-21. 18 Neville argues that t h e theoretical quest for normative, unifying p a t t e r n s is d e p e n d e n t u p o n poetic appreciation at even t h e most basic levels. Consider t h e following passage from Normative Cultures, 94: [T]he description of phenomena is a poetic act. Poetry in this sense is not the mere metaphorical representation of something but the attempt to say what is most important and valuable about it by overlaying metaphoric and other descriptions. Poetry aims to highlight and preserve the very singularity that theory can obscure. Unlike causal metaphors, there is a thoroughness about poetry, or if not thoroughness, a drive to say what is most important in the context. The art of poetry is not just to find the 'right' metaphor but to find the combinations of metaphors such that the interplay and resonances among them articulates something that none says alone or all say in disjunction. An integral poetic act of resonating metaphors so engages its referent as to open it up to interpretation, but it does not allow any metaphoric sign, or even the whole 'poem,' to stand for the referent as an interpretive replacement. A poem, in its resonances of metaphors, takes the interpreters into its referent without the reverse possibility of the referent being represented reductively within the interpreter. Poetry exposes otherness in the referent as it quickens the interpreter's understanding. Theories can practice pious deference to the singularity of their phenomena by acknowledging the appropriateness and irreducibility of developed metaphors. Those metaphors occur in the dialogical description of phenomena in which theoretical development must engage when it evaluates the theories' own well-formed descriptive categories.... The point here is to note that appropriately poetic metaphors themselves testify to a singularity that cannot be positively represented in theory and to which theories need merely piously to defer. 19

T h e q u o t a t i o n is from Neville, Religion in Late Modernity, 135. T h e b r o a d e r assessment of t h e social p r e d i c a m e n t of t h e religions is neatly p r e s e n t e d o n 146-50.

72

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Neville's hopeful stance follows o n 150-57. 20 Cf. Gustavo Gutierrez, "Theology from t h e U n d e r s i d e of History," The Power of the Poor in History, trans. R o b e r t R. Barr (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1983), 169-221; also t h e essays collected in E n r i q u e Dussel, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, trans, a n d ed. E d u a r d o M e n d i e t a (New Jersey: H u m a n i t i e s Press, 1996). A selection of p a p e r s from t h e first E c u m e n i c a l Dialogue of T h i r d World T h e o l o g i a n s , h e l d in Dar es Salaam in 1976, was p u b l i s h e d as Sergio Torres a n d Virginia Fabella, eds., The Emergent Gospel: Theology from the Underside of History (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1978). An essay in r e s p o n s e to S e p t e m b e r 11 by Turkish sociologist, Nilùfer Góle, dramatically resonates with t h e motif of t h e u n d e r s i d e . In "Close E n c o u n t e r s : Modernity, Islam, a n d Violence," available at h t t p : / / w w w . i n t e r d i s c i p l i n e s . O r g / t e r r o r i s m / p a p e r s / 2 (accessed 24 O c t o b e r 2003), she writes: " S e p t e m b e r 11 was m e a n t to express a radical anti-modernity, b u t by t h e same t o k e n its actors have confessed to their b e i n g close to modernity. T h e 'neo-martyrs', t h e de-traditionalized actors of t h e Muslim world, in destroying t h e m o s t t r o u b l e s o m e symbols of modernity, t h e Twin Towers,... have p u s h e d Muslims to m o u r n their own modernity." Gòle's essay was previously p u b l i s h e d in Craig C a l h o u n , Paul Price, a n d Ashley T i m m e r , eds., Understanding September 11 (New York: T h e New West Press, 2002). 21 Cf. T h o m a s F r i e d m a n ' s bleak supposition that bin L a d e n is "the closest t h i n g . . . t o a n A r a b Robin H o o d - a n a u t h e n t i c figure w h o challenges t h e p o w e r structure"; F r i e d m a n , Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (New York: F a r r a r Strauss Giroux, 2002), 317. In light of this, it is worth clarifying that implication in t h e terrible p r o b l e m s of late m o d e r n world society, which is pretty m u c h unavoidable, does n o t necessarily entail culpability for t h e m . It does, however, entail responsibility to c o n t r i b u t e to a m e l i o r a t i n g o r solving t h e m . (As a side n o t e , it is strange that Farrar Strauss G i r o u x s h o u l d r e p r o d u c e Vasari's Battle of Lepanto- d e p i c t i n g t h e 1571 sea battle b e t w e e n O t t o m a n a n d Catholic forces - o n t h e j a c k e t of F r i e d m a n ' s book, which argues against i n t e r p r e t i n g al-Qaeda terrorism as p a r t of a "clash of civilizations." Professor M e h m e t Pacaci of A n k a r a University alerted m e to this curiosity.) 22 Mark Juergensmeyer, in Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, u p d a t e d edition with a new preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 144, says this of religious terrorism: [The] global dimension of terrorism's organization and audience, and the transnational responses to it, gives special significance to the understanding of terrorism as a public performance of violence - as a social event with both real and symbolic aspects. As [sociologist, Pierre] Bourdieu has observed, our public life is shaped as much by symbols as by institutions. For this reason, symbolic acts - the "rites of institution" - help to demarcate public space and indicate what is meaningful in the social world. In a striking imitation of such rites, terrorism has provided its own dramatic events. These rites of violence have brought an alternative view of public reality - not just a single society in transition, but a world challenged by strident religious visions of transforming change. T h e p r e s e n t a p p r o a c h differs in emphasis from J u e r g e n s m e y e r ' s in insisting o n t h e inimitable reality symbols e n g a g e , a n d thus in c o n s i d e r i n g acts of religious terrorism n o t as "imitations" of rites of social institution b u t as p r i m a r y acts themselves, however distorted from acceptable n o r m s .

CIVILIZING WORLD SOCIETY

73

23 Cf. the analysis of tremendum in Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 2nd ed., trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 12-24 24 Thus, Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), 64: "... religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his inhabited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness." 25 In The Truth of Broken Symbols, Neville offers a general theory of how religious symbols engage the infinite - that is, religious symbols are "finite/infinite contrasts" - and illustrates the theory in numerous analyses of particular religious symbols and symbols complexes. The "poetic tension" discussed in the present essay intersects with the tension set up by a finite/infinite contrast. 26 Neville's sermon mentioned in the introduction attempted to lead a congregation in exploring the religious symbolism of September 11. 27 The name initially chosen for the campaign against the Taliban, "Operation Infinite Justice," implied the trumping approach. John J. Thatamanil succinctly exposes the implication in, "Is God on Our Side? Or Is He on Theirs?" Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2001, B13. One interpreter who pursues, with considerable finesse, the way of denying ultimate reference approach is Edward Said, in an interview given soon after September 11. Said begins by noting that the attacks "transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical." However, this means for Said something quite remarkable: "Note that there was no claim for these attacks. There were no demands. There were no statements. It was a silent piece of terror. This was part of nothing (italics mine.) Said advises against trying to trump the terrorists, recognizing in that response the same deadly absolutism. But he seems further to suppose that any religiously concerned response could only be "metaphysical," too - "part of nothing." Instead, he says, "we need to secularize the man. We need to bring him down to the realm of reality." For Said, respecting the religiousness of the religious assertion in Bin Laden's terrorism is to cede responsible understanding (what he elsewhere calls "secular" understanding) and sever ties with reality. Thus Said's bid to "secularize the man" denies the possibility of religious transformation through symbolic engagement with an inimitable reality, denying with it the possibility of a civilizing religious response to religious terrorism. Cf. Edward W. Said, "Interview," with David Barsamian, The Progressive (November 2001), available atwww.theprogressive.org/0901/intvll01.html. On the opposition between "secular" and "religious" understanding in Said's thought, see the introduction, "Secular Criticism," and the conclusion, "Religious Criticism," to Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1-30, 290-293, and idem., Representations of the Intellectual, The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 103-121. The opposition does not seem to me to be consistent, nor systematically connected with Said's influential writings on Islam and Orientalism. A frustrated attempt to find both is William D. Hart's Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 28 Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 17-18. 29 1 have neither the expertise nor the authority of a Muslim legal scholar, and would not compare my foray here to any authoritative fatwa issued against terrorism.

74

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

A few reports in English on recent Islamic legal opinions condemning terrorism are reproduced at http://www.fatwa-online.com/. 30 Although not written as a theological piece, William Langewiesche's American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (New York: North Point Press, 2002), is precious for the way it secularizes without profaning that site of terror. Langewiesche's account finds and nurtures a civilizing, humanizing response in the chaotic ruins of September 11.

5

Borderline Ethics and Intra-Community Violence and Murder among Young Afrikan American Males

Rufus Burrow, Jr.

What follows are some rough reflections on the relation of social ethics to "borderline ethics." A question I have pondered for a long time is: What is the relevance of such an ethics for the tragic phenomenon of black against black violence and murder among young Afrikan American males? This is an extreme emergency situation, and one that shows no evidence of yielding to more conventional tactics. I do not in this selection presume to provide £/^ solution to this particular type of violence, but if we understand borderline ethics and the nature of the borderline response to the extreme emergency situation, it will be seen that what I propose regarding the tragedy of intra-community violence and murder will also have implications for people of faith who are forced to address other types of violence. In light of the person being honored in this collection it is most appropriate that I acknowledge that I am an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology and the Graduate School. My degrees were in theological social ethics. I did much of my work under Walter G. Muelder, Dean of the School of Theology and Professor of Social Ethics (1945-1972). Moreover, he was a pioneer in Christian social ethics, and an avid proponent of the philosophy of Personalism,

76

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

systematically developed at Boston University by Borden P. Bowne (1847-1910). By the time Robert C. Neville arrived as Dean of the School of Theology I had already been teaching at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana for four years. Not long after Neville's tenure began three interrelated events occurred that made our meeting inevitable. First, one of my students, Jimmy L. Kirby, was admitted to the Doctor of Theology program in Social Ethics and Christian Education at B.U. Kirby took a theology course under Neville and wrote to me a number of times about the breadth and depth of Neville's knowledge, his deep sense of faith, and his tremendous energy level. He also informed me that Neville seemed to have some sympathy to the Boston Personalist tradition, but did not seem to be in the Personalist camp. Second, Paul Deats, Jr. and Carol Robb edited and published The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics, and Theology in 1986. The book was important enough to Neville that he wrote a review of it.1 When I read the review it was clear to me that Neville was at least a "friendly" critic of Personalism. When I pursued more of Neville's stance on Personalism I discovered that he was rightly critical of the mind-centered Cartesian and Kantian idealism of early Personalists in the Bowne tradition. A third event was the invitation I received from Tom Buford, then editor of The Personalist Forum and Professor of Philosophy at Furman University, to read a paper on "God as Person" at a meeting of the Personalis tic Discussion Group. Buford informed me that Neville would read a paper that would offer some challenges to the "God as Person" thesis. That was the occasion of our introduction, an experience I continue to cherish. In ensuing years I have followed particularly Neville's incisive contributions to Focus (a publication of the Boston University School of Theology). These articles demonstrate his deep commitment to social justice and the eradication of all forms of violence. From The Cosmology of Freedom to The Puritan Smile to his recent sermons, Neville has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to overcoming violence through Christian peacemaking. 2 In addressing violence in our world, Neville argues that Christians should address the social conditions that cause, facilitate, and exacerbate violent behavior of any kind. As Dean of Boston University School of Theology, Neville established a long and consistent track record of being deeply committed to theological social ethics.

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNITY VIOLENCE AND MURDER

77

In an earlier article, "Martin Luther King, Jr., Personalism and Intracommunity Black Violence,"3 I addressed black against black violence and murder among young Afrikan American males by applying two of the rich resources of Boston University's moral philosophy: Boston Personalism and the moral vision and practice of Martin Luther King, Jr. Building on this work, in this chapter I will explain the relevance of this current "borderline situation" for theological social ethics. I am particularly concerned here about a specific type of borderline situation, viz., the tragic phenomenon of intra-community violence and murder among young Afrikan American males, and what may need to be done to address a n d / or eradicate it as responsibly as one can. On virtually any day in major cities in this country one hears or reads about such tragedies taking place where victim and perpetrator are young black males. In part the tragedy of this phenomenon is the sheer numbers of these incidents. So serious is the problem of violence and murder among young Afrikan American males (especially since the mid-1980s) that they have been referred to as "an endangered species." This tragic phenomenon jeopardizes an entire generation (or more) of young black males. Periodically, church, community, and civic groups organize to protest nonviolently against the tragedy that has led to such a conclusion. There is some value in this approach, but generally gang members and drug traffickers are not impressed enough that their behavior is deterred. However, I also know of a few instances in which some participants in the aforementioned groups understand that in order for gang members and others to really get the message that the violence must stop now, it may be necessary to adopt measures that at least approximate those of the perpetrators. I cite one such instance in the last section of this chapter. Such persons, like the character Hoederer in Jean-Paul Sartre's play "Dirty Hands", acknowledge that their hands too are dirty: "Right up to the elbows. I've plunged them in filth and blood."4 Such is the nature of the tragedy of the borderline situation and what, realistically, it elicits from would be liberators. One tries as best she can to prevent a greater evil by adopting morally dubious means, because she has found other ethical strategies to be worthless. The beginning of this chapter is devoted to an initial characterization of borderline ethics and an explanation of the nature of the borderline situation. I then examine the phenomenon of black against black violence and murder, followed by a brief

78

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

consideration of a borderline ethics response. Borderline Ethics One looks in vain for a definition of borderline ethics in the work of theological ethicists and in dictionaries of theology and ethics. Having never heard nor seen the term borderline ethics in print, I found myself using it not long after I began reading and reflecting on Helmut Thielicke's discussion of "the borderline situation" (discussed below). One does not find the term borderline ethics in Thielicke's work, and yet it seems an appropriate term for what must be involved in serious attempts to address the borderline situation. Although I am not yet prepared to offer a concise definition of borderline ethics, there are a number of ideas that must have bearing on such a definition. There is no question that this is a hybrid of situation ethics, popularized in the mid-1960s with the publication offoseph Fletcher's Situation Ethics? Indeed, the situational principle was articulated three decades earlier by the Boston University Personalist, Edgar S. Brightman (1884-1953) in his Moral Laws.6 In the development of his moral law system Brightman included The Law of Specification as one of the eleven moral laws. This law states: "All persons ought, in any given situation, to develop the value or values specifically relevant to that situation."7 The drift of the situational principle is that the intensity and focus of one's moral efforts is the immediate situation. One is morally obligated to address both the values and disvalues of the immediate situation. (In Brightman's moral law system one's eye, in the immediate moral situation, is always on the achievement of the best possible values.) Although a basic principle behind one's action may be love-justice, for example, the situation itself does much to dictate how best to concretize that principle. Borderline ethics, then, must be a militant type of situation ethics geared to the profoundly outrageous situation of the borderline, for such a situation invariably requires the willingness to do wrong - at best a dubious principle - in order to prevent more devastating wrongs. Moreover, borderline ethics cannot escape the inevitable tension or conflict that arises between responsibility for actions and inactions and their relation to moral principles. At any rate, one judges the Tightness or wrongness of such actions by the complexities of relationships in the situation itself, rather than on the basis of

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNITY VIOLENCE AND MURDER

79

moral principles as such. We will see momentarily that the borderline situation is an utterly impossible ethical situation, inasmuch as one is faced with impossible alternatives, all of which are value destroying rather than value enhancing. One is faced with vicious moral dilemmas, and is thereby forced to choose between value destroying alternatives. It is therefore clear that any way of characterizing borderline ethics must take this specific type of debilitating moral situation as seriously as the need to do something about it, rather than merely theorize about it Important as thinking and basic moral principles (e.g., love and justice) are, the emphasis of borderline ethics is on what one does to significantly reduce or eradicate the tragedy at hand. In addressing such a situation there is always also an eye to what can be, e.g., the community of love beyond the destructiveness of the borderline situation. The element of hope must therefore be an important feature of borderline ethics, for it is, after all, about the creation of more abundant life for those trapped in the borderline situation. Indeed, I would say that the focus of borderline ethics is most particularly on the well being of those in borderline situations. The emphasis, then, is on the liberation and enhancement of persons, not on principles as such. Borderline ethics requires that we love persons both for who they are, and for what they can become. The Borderline Situation The borderline situation, a, term that Helmut Thielicke borrowed and adapted from Karl Jaspers, 8 is precisely the place where the theological social ethicist is forced to do her work. One of her fundamental questions must necessarily be: How do I and my community (church and non-church) act obediently and faithfully in those ethical situations in which no available solution seems to make moral sense, or is capable of enhancing or preserving the lives of those being victimized? The borderline situation, which is on the margin, "border or boundary of the world,"9 may be described as that most extreme, most unusual, most conflictive of situations where conventional moral (and other) responses make little or no sense to those being subjected to dehumanizing, life-threatening conditions. And yet it is precisely this type of context, i.e., the borderline situation, where the rubber hits the road in theological social ethics. It becomes, in effect, its point of departure. Just as Jesus came not for

80

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

those who are "normal" or well, but for the "abnormal" and sick, so too, theological social ethics is - or should be - primarily concerned with the abnormal, overbearing, extraordinarily conflictive situation in which one sees no hope for relief or deliverance. The borderline situation is one in which any choice or action that may be chosen leads inevitably to dirty, even bloody, hands of all would-be liberators, as much as those who have forced them into a borderline context. In the borderline situation the person's or group's back is pressed against the wall, and the only available choices or alternatives are lifethreatening. And yet the moral agent is forced to choose between the available alternatives, any one of which will demean, cheapen, and undermine his own life and-or the lives of his group. The question of what one ought to do in the borderline situation, which is generally a situation involving extreme violence, is absolutely critical in theological social ethics. Indeed, it might well be that the borderline is a most favorable place from which to learn or grow in knowledge.10 This is only to say that to be in the borderline situation privileges a person or group to experiences and knowledge that escapes those outside the borderline, and who in fact may benefit from the pain and agony being experienced in it. This is not an argument for the necessary existence of the borderline situation wherein human value is undermined and destroyed; where human life is forced to endure utter misery by the ruthless practices of dictatorial tyrants who possess massive unchecked power.11 A most pressing, urgent question that the theological social ethicist must ask and address is precisely this: What can be done to prevent the emergence of borderline situations in the first place? This question goes to the issue of addressing fundamental causes, as well as identifying and addressing the systemic injustices that are the causes of many borderline situations, e.g., the tragic phenomenon that led the Centers for Disease Control to declare in 1985 that Afrikan American males between 15-24 years of age "an endangered species," and that intra-community homicide is the leading cause of their deaths. 12 Situations such as this, as well as other borderline situations, give the appearance of being impossible to produce value, especially for those being dehumanized and otherwise oppressed. Thielicke had this in mind when he reflected on practices that emerged in reaction against atrocities of German Nazism - practices, many of which, were at best dubious. Thielicke put it this way: Where are the seeds hidden today which will inevitably

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNITY VIOLENCE AND MURDER

81

produce the underground movements and illegal activities? The lying and deception practiced in helping the persecuted Jews, for example, which while it stems from agape is nonetheless an ethically dubious kind of illegality, is simply an active and painful representation of that which others have brought about by compliance, by their failure to 'resist in the first beginnings,' which makes them indirectly and implicitly responsible. Which of the two forms of wrongdoing will be able to stand before him who looks upon the heart rather than the person (Mai. 1:9; Acts 10:34; Rom. 2:11; Eph. 6:9; I Pet. 1:17) or the institution? Neither form! But which of the two can refer to the love which has the promise of manifold forgiveness? (Luke 7:47). "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her" (John 8:7).13

Which of the two forms of wrongdoing - that caused by selfishness and injustice, or that which appeals to violent means to contend against them - will be able to stand blameless and without judgment before the God of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ, "who looks upon the heart rather than the person or the institution?" Thielicke answers that neither form of wrong-doing will be able to stand innocently before God and without judgment, although the one which earnestly seeks to end injustice and degradation is a more viable candidate for divine forgiveness. The ruthlessness and brutality of the oppression and the injustice caused by a vicious tyrant, for example, might well require a borderline response, i.e., one in which the only responsible and reasonable response is one in which the responders' hands will get every bit as dirty and bloody as the oppressor's. Therefore, the real question must be: Which of the two forms of evil, that perpetrated by vicious power mongers, or that which acts to eradicate such behavior, can refer to a n d / o r stand more innocently before "the love which has the promise of manifold forgiveness?" Which is more likely to be recipient of divine forgiveness? In the borderline situation, then, one may be forced by the oppressive conditions to adopt the means of her opponent or oppressor in her effort to survive and be liberated, or to help liberate those being oppressed. There is thus a strong likelihood that her hands will be dirtied, even bloodied, in the moral muck and mire. Such a one must be willing to name and confess this to be the case, and not try to sanitize it in any way. If the action taken involves killing the

82

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

oppressor, for example, it must be admitted that the action is sinful. Period. Thielicke has written most persuasively a n d systematically o n the b o r d e r l i n e situation, a n d how a person and-or g r o u p t r a p p e d in the m u c k of an e x t r e m e situation may be forced to r e s p o n d in ways that would cause many religious a n d non-religious persons to reject b o r d e r l i n e actions. A n d yet o n e must be willing to confess the sin even of the borderline response. This is essentially what Dietrich Bonhoeffer did w h e n h e agreed to participate in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. W h e n the plot failed o n July 20, 1944, Bonhoeffer c o m p o s e d the p o e m "Jonah" the next day, in which h e wrote of the sin of murder, the n e e d to confess it, a n d the consequences before God. 1 4 Bonhoeffer, unlike most people who cite his involvement in the assassination plot as support for their p r o p o s e d acts of violence, confessed that the willful killing of a person is sin. For Bonhoeffer, as for the borderline ethicist, all h u m a n life belongs to a n d is highly valued by God. "In the sight of God there is n o life that is n o t worth living.... T h e fact that God is the Creator, Preserver a n d R e d e e m e r of life makes even the most wretched life worth living before God." 15 Precisely because of this anyone - particularly persons of faith - who takes the life of even the most vicious scoundrel sins before God, a n d must answer. Much of Thielicke's ethical writings were in response to the ruthless behavior a n d practices of Hitler a n d his h e n c h m e n d u r i n g World War II. This was by all accounts a p e r i o d of e x t r e m e emergency, a n d o n e that required e x t r e m e responses - responses that h a d moral implications for all parties in the conflict. Writing a b o u t the duty of fighting against b o r d e r l i n e situations p r o d u c e d by cruel dictatorships, for example, Thielicke insisted that to carry o u t such a duty is possible only by a d o p t i n g the m e t h o d s of t h e tyrant dictator. In o n e instance h e wrote: One must necessarily - and this means willingly going against one's own will - share in the depravity of these methods, i.e., get one's hands dirty. The church as such may be obliged to suffer wrong rather than do wrong; it can hardly be said to have the right of putting up political resistance. But by the same token the individual Christian who is called to political responsibility is ineluctably forced into a situation in which he must act within a framework of injustice. As Gebhard Muller, minister-president of BadenWurttemberg, has put it, "He cannot sit back with folded hands and watch the forces of the abyss devastate and

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNITY VIOLENCE AND MURDER

83

destroy his land, the people committed to his care, and the values which he holds sacred."16

When the conscience of the oppressor is such that it does not respond reasonably to moral suasion and other forms of nonviolent resistance, how is the responsible moral agent who stares injustice and human brutality in the face to respond? This is the question that one faces in the borderline situation. Indeed, not to resist the brutality and devastation of the borderline situation is to be complicit in such tragedy. There is absolutely no place for moral neutrality in such an extreme emergency situation as the borderline. Reminiscent of Reinhold Niebuhr we may say that in the borderline situation one is either on the side of the perpetrators or the victimized and their collaborators in the struggle for liberation. 17 The borderline situation is generally characterized by a ruthlessness and abusiveness of power, and an undermining of the worth of a particular group of persons, such that it almost defies description. The oppressor in such a situation is known to be ruthless in his exercise of power over a people, and willing to do anything whatever to retain the upper hand over them. Borderline ethics acknowledges the right, as well as the moral obligation of the oppressed to fight to be liberated from such an opponent. But - and this is a crucial point - it also recognizes that the nature of the situation of oppression will likely mean that would-be liberators may have to adopt methods similar to those of the opponent. This can only mean that at the end of the day repentance and forgiveness will play a key role in borderline ethics, for the methods of both the oppressor and the oppressed must be questionable and highly suspect in the face of theological social ethics in general, and Christian ethics in particular. Indeed, the methods of the oppressed in the borderline situation may have the character of being simultaneously permitted, and forbidden. 18 The method may be permitted because persons are being dehumanized through ruthless practices of those who lord power over them, or are able to subject them to a reign of terror, fear, and violence, as in the case of intra-community violence and murder among young Afrikan American males. Precisely because they are children of God and are being disregarded and dehumanized, the systematically violently oppressed are morally obligated to fight against any and all practices that undermine their humanity and dignity. Indeed, if humanity as such is infinitely and inviolably valuable and precious to God; if

84

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

God is fundamentally love, a n d has conveyed to the p r o p h e t that all life belongs first a n d last to God only (Ezekiel 18:4), a n d that every person is precious a n d sacred because each is in intimate a n d personal relation with God, who has called each by n a m e (Isaiah 43:1), borderline m e t h o d s may be necessary, t h o u g h they fall well below Christ-like expectations a n d m e t h o d s based o n the agape love imperative. Borderline ethics maintains that e x t r e m e situations have m u c h to d o with the types of m e t h o d s to which she resorts in o r d e r to eliminate the problem. To be in the extreme emergency context, as the borderline situation generally is, will likely m e a n appealing to e x t r e m e m e t h o d s . But when o n e does this she must d o so with heaviness of h e a r t a n d conscience. Moreover, she should be willing to repent, admit having invoked a n d used a morally questionable m e t h o d even to prevent a greater wrong, a n d ask forgiveness. T h e r e is something a b o u t the borderline context itself that forces or necessitates a certain c o n d u c t of the oppressed, which is also a restriction o n the will. For example, certain choices or alternatives are n o t available to young Afrikan American males in u r b a n war zones. T h e lack of quality choices in effect restricts the will. This makes for a real messiness in the sphere of moral choice a n d behavior, inasmuch as o n e is confronted, n o t with the so-called n o r m a l situation, b u t the e x t r e m e emergency of the borderline situation. In the case of y o u n g Afrikan American males, for example, o n e wonders w h e t h e r their actions even m e e t the criteria of a moral act. I will r e t u r n to this i m p o r t a n t p o i n t subsequently. Thielicke summarized four essential marks of the borderline situation that we n e e d to keep in mind: First, the struggle against the blatant representative of injustice is not a personal struggle against a personal enemy but a struggle to preserve orders, values, and the lives of men from external destruction and internal perversion; to make this struggle is thus an inescapable duty. Second, the struggle against the blatant representative of injustice can be carried on only if to a certain degree, which cannot be calculated in advance, one is prepared to use his methods (and thus to incur a measure of guilt), methods which have a logic of their own and a tendency progressively to limit one's freedom of action. Third, the whole sphere of methods or means is thus shown to stand in need of forgiveness. Fourth, the ability to act in this sphere without hatred implies that while one's external actions are indeed

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNITY VIOLENCE AND MURDER

85

bound by the logic of methods, he himself as a Christian never looks upon the opponent as a mere agent of these methods but - in the manner of Francis Drake - as a child of God who has been bound by the chains of evil and thus gone astray; there thus persists a human sphere which is not swallowed up in the autonomous machinery of the conflict.19 In the borderline situation, then, o n e may be forced to d o wrong, in o r d e r that a greater wrong may be prevented, 2 0 a n d openings for a greater good be created. It is i m p o r t a n t to remember, however, that borderline actions are engaged first a n d foremost by those who find themselves in the extreme emergency situation wherein it appears n o good can be p r o d u c e d by appealing to conventional or m o r e genteel m e t h o d s . Extreme measures may n e e d to be taken by those who suffer as a result of the extreme emergency situation they find themselves in. This, I contend, must be a fifth mark of the borderline situation. T h a t is, borderline actions should be initiated by those who are suffering in borderline conditions. This is an i m p o r t a n t caution, for without it, it becomes possible for a m u c h stronger g r o u p or nation o n the outside looking on, fueled by possible ulterior motives, or interests, to claim to be liberators of the g r o u p in the extreme borderline context. 2 1 It is i m p o r t a n t that those most affected by the borderline situation initiate steps to e n d the oppression. Involvement of an outside g r o u p or nation should be allowed only if a b r o a d cross section of the oppressed g r o u p s u m m o n s their assistance t h r o u g h an international tribunal such as the N o r t h Atlantic Treaty Organization or the United Nations. Otherwise the instigation of borderline actions against oppression should c o m e from within the g r o u p being oppressed. Moreover, in borderline ethics persons have n o choice b u t to choose between remaining in the borderline situation, or to fight against it. In this respect there is n o avenue of escape. O n e has to choose, 2 2 either to continue passively in the borderline situation, or to extricate oneself and-or one's g r o u p from it. In either case, o n e chooses. Even if o n e opts to d o n o t h i n g it is i m p o r t a n t for h e r to u n d e r s t a n d that even that is a choice. Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us that by virtue of the fact that o n e is " c o n d e m n e d forever to be free," 23 o n e is therefore c o n d e m n e d to choose, a n d to this extent is at least responsible for how she responds to h e r condition, however oppressive it may be. T h e i m p o r t a n t point to r e m e m b e r is that

86

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

whatever action she takes - including the decision to d o n o t h i n g - is still a choice. In borderline ethics one's choice of liberation implies n o t only the n e e d for readiness to shoulder guilt, b u t as n o t e d previously, a readiness to d o wrong in o r d e r to prevent a greater wrong b e i n g d o n e . As for being ready to bear the guilt for having to make an impossible decision in the borderline situation, E u g e n e Kogon provided an illustration from a situation in a concentration c a m p . When the SS demanded that the political prisoners in the concentration camps should quickly determine which of their fellow prisoners were "unfit" - that they might be summarily executed - and threatened that any delay in making the selection would result in an even harsher system of sanctions, there had to be a readiness to shoulder guilt [italics by Kogon]. The only choice was between active participation and an abdication of responsibility which, as experience showed, could only bring down even greater evil. The more tender the conscience, the harder was the decision.24 We see from this illustration that because of the real possibility of e n d a n g e r i n g the lives of many m o r e , a n d possibly all of the imprisoned, they are compelled to give serious consideration to the d e m a n d of the SS that the weaker m e m b e r s be identified a n d h a n d e d over for execution. A n d yet, to make such a decision would m e a n a willingness to shoulder the guilt of having d o n e so. Of course, it is quite possible that the decision could be m a d e by the imprisoned to n o t h a n d over the weaker m e m b e r s , which m e a n s they would essentially decide that all would suffer execution together. This would m e a n that there would be n o survivor (s) to even b e a r witness to the executions, a n d thus to record a n d share with posterity the stories of those executed. T h e theological social ethicist c a n n o t deny that the idea of the n e e d to be ready to d o wrong in o r d e r that a greater wrong might be minimized or prevented is a questionable principle, inasmuch as it implies that the e n d sought somehow necessarily justifies the means. In addition, it implies that o n e has given u p completely o n the possibility that m u c h less ruthless m e a n s may be found. It might well be that the most we can say is that if all the available evidence suggests that the only way o u t of a borderline situation, i.e., of committing a wrong in o r d e r to prevent an even greater wrong, is the

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNI1Y VIOLENCE AND MURDER

87

killing of persons, one must do it. But one must do so with extreme heaviness of heart and conscience, as well as awareness that he has sinned. For unless it is purely accidental, killing is sin. He should also acknowledge that he stands before the Judge of all persons with bloodied hands and conscience. Not only must he be willing to accept "legal responsibility"25 for such actions, but moral responsibility as well. Every such decision and act, Thielicke maintains, "stands under an ineluctable burden of guilt which apart from forgiveness would be quite unbearable." 26 It might even be that divine forgiveness itself might not be sufficient to sustain such a one. A critical concern of theological social ethics, then, is the borderline, the margin, or the extreme emergency situation. It is quite possibly the case that living in such a place is where one at once recognizes limitations, and discovers new possibilities, both of and about one's self, as well as others. Indeed, it may be that the most interesting subjects in the borderline situation are those who have been systematically forced to live there against their will, against all reason, and against the expectations of the God of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ.

Intra-Community Violence and Murder Among Young Afrikan American Males Homicide disease continues to be the leading cause of premature death among young Afrikan American males 15-24 years of age. The disease is generally transmitted from one Afrikan American male to another. This often occurs in the course of drug deals, street robberies, gang fights, accidental shoving, "dissing" (being disrespected or the perception thereof), etc. So frequently, and so long has homicide disease been inflicted upon one young black male by another in the nation's urban centers, 27 that "its shock value" has diminished to the point that many in and out of Afrikan American communities have gotten used to it - so much so that it is seldom seen as news worthy. Jewelle Taylor Gibbs reports that tragically: 'Young black males kill each other over drugs, women, money, or simply to avenge a real or imaginary insult."28 In general the killings are utterly senseless, and too easily provoked. At any rate, a good predictor of the occurrence of homicide disease in urban centers is not the more generalized poverty, but income inequality.29 It has also been shown that the combination of the easy availability

88

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

of handguns, automatic and semi-automatic weapons, "the social disorganization of the neighborhood," and the declining economy of cities (especially in the Northeast and Midwest) serves merely to exacerbate the proliferation of the violence and murders. 30 What, then, are some implications of borderline ethics for this tragic phenomenon? For our purpose, I want to suggest in a general way what may reasonably be done to significantly reduce or eliminate the incidence of this tragedy. Moreover, since the phenomenon of intra-community violence and murder may be classified as an extreme emergency, it is important to understand that any real solution will require extreme measures.31 Therefore, one must at least be willing to give serious consideration to such measures. The phenomenon of intra-community violence and murder is an example of a severe borderline situation and depicts an extreme emergency. And yet it is important to make a distinction here. Thielicke is certain that a chief characteristic of the borderline situation is that the victims are "confronted by an opponent who is known to be bent wholly on the exercise of power, and who is obviously on the side of evil."32 While it is true that many young black males (especially those in gangs) in urban centers frequently subject members of their communities to fear and violence, it cannot be said that they possess and lord massive power over them. Nor can I see that they are on the side of evil as such. Rather, it is generally the case that these young males are making desperate attempts to ascertain the power to be, and to be with dignity. They themselves are victims of injustice, racism, and economic exploitation on a massive scale. Failing to get relief from the wider society, many assert their "manhood" in ways that are life threatening to themselves and to others in their community. The borderline situation is the type of situation that many inner city Afrikan American communities find themselves in today, and many are held hostage to the indiscriminate violence perpetrated by young black males. Sons of the black community, these black men, for all intents and purposes, feel they have known nothing in their life time but disappointment, degradation, and defeat. Many of those who have tried to abide by the rules and values of their communities and the wider society have found that there is nothing but disappointment at the end of the day. Meaningful and gainful employment for too many is scarce to non-existent. So they find themselves doing menial labor in fast food restaurants for little more than minimum wage. Such experiences generally serve as

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNITY VIOLENCE AND MURDER

89

a disincentive for younger black males to even make a legitimate effort to stay in junior high and high school, to consider going to college as a viable option, and to exhibit respect toward themselves as well as members of their communities, including the elderly. It is no wonder that so many young black males become involved in the sale of drugs, and before long find themselves entangled in a web of violence, the likes of which one imagines (or wishes!) only existed in the movies. Inasmuch as persons are fundamentally free, autonomous beings, Afrikan Americans are responsible for how they respond to this tragedy. It is important to know that any response whatever, e.g., resignation or resistance, is a choice. There can be no, "not deciding," regarding the issue of black against black violence and murder. It is crucial to ferret out the meaning of this for individuals and the community. The bottom line is that the onus is on members of the Afrikan American community to solve the high incidence of violence, even though the basic causes are extra-communal. Earlier I referred to criteria for moral acts and moral responsibility. I wondered whether this is problematic regarding many young Afrikan American males who find themselves enmeshed in drug trafficking and violence. In order for an act to be considered moral the actor must have a sense of knowing what he is doing, a sense of the most foreseeable consequences, as well as their implications for himself and his community. This implies the presence of not only a certain level of intelligence, but of maturity or character development. In addition, there must be some sense or awareness that one is engaging in a moral act.33 But what happens when the actor fails to meet one or more of these criteria, as I think is too frequently the case with many inner city Afrikan American males in their teens and early twenties? There can be no doubt that any one of these young men that pulls the trigger of a gun that maims or mortally wounds another is legally responsible and accountable to civil authorities. What is not always as clear, however, is the extent to which he may be deemed morally responsible, or whether such responsibility lies more with those who contribute significantly to the factors that create the openings for such behavior. In any case, since Jewelle Taylor Gibbs and her colleagues have convincingly shown that many of the young black males who get entangled in the violence and homicides were frequently suspended or expelled from junior high and high school, or simply dropped

90

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

out,34 we can be reasonably certain that many of them do not possess a real sense of what they are doing, nor of the social, moral, and other implications of their behavior. Moreover, it is questionable as to how well the intellect and character of such ones is developed or has been trained. Furthermore, if the unemployment rate is as high among this group as studies reveal, it is also questionable as to whether there may not be a sense of feeling compelled to engage in drug trafficking without really knowing what they are getting into, only to find themselves entangled in a web of violence. Therefore, if the most qualitative choices do not exist for many young black males, one must wonder whether they freely choose their course in life, or whether circumstances compel them to do so. The factors that have led to the tragic phenomenon of intracommunity violence and murder among young Afrikan American males are varied and complex. Because it is an example of a borderline situation, we can be certain that conventional turn the other cheek methods will not adequately address or eradicate this state of affairs. So what must be the nature of such response? What can be done to significantly reduce or stop the violence and murders in order to save those young Afrikan American males who can still be saved in urban battle zones?

A Borderline Ethics Response Even though the level of moral responsibility is questionable regarding many young Afrikan American males, we can be certain that the incidence of black against black violence and murder must be stopped. My own sense and my experience tells me that the best way to effect this is by adopting a form of militant nonviolent resistance against known pockets of violent perpetrators, but with an openness and willingness to consider even harsher responses if necessary. Because these are the sons of black communities militant nonviolent tactics must be the strategy for the long haul. However, any serious desire to stop the violence and murders in the short term may require the adoption of more punitive and retributive methods. The crucial point is that whatever is done should be done intracommunally, without seeking either the advice or the aid of white outsiders who, historically, have exhibited no genuine concern for the well being of young black males, but instead have been privileged at their expense.

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNITY VIOLENCE AND MURDER

91

Of course, trying to do something like this would be very difficult for the Afrikan American community, since the claim of many in this country is that we are a nation of laws. And yet it continues to be the case that Afrikan Americans are generally victimized by the laws (or more accurately, by their application or lack thereof). Therefore, if it is deemed that intra-communal punitive measures should be taken against one or more young black males, it should be done without conscious efforts to inform and involve the white authorities. The problem of black against black violence and murder will be solved intra-communally, or it will not be solved. The black community itself will have to decide to solve the problem and then design means to do so. This will be complicated by the fact that the decision will also have to be made to come to terms with the increasing possibility that an entire generation of young black males will be (indeed are being) lost before the violence and murders abate to any substantial degree. There have been a number of instances in various parts of the country (e.g., Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia) over the past twenty-five years when community activists, including former gang members, became victims when they devised nonviolent schemes to confront the violence. Borderline ethics requires that we examine whether it is even reasonable to consider conventional nonviolent tactics against an opponent whose moral sense is underdeveloped to the point that he does not respond either to moral suasion or to nonviolence. This puts the Afrikan American community in a real quandary. On the one hand, the perpetrators of much of this physical violence are sons of the community. On the other hand, there is a real desire among community members to stop the violence, and yet there is the awareness that in the short term, at least, the only viable methods of would-be liberators are those that will dirty and bloody their hands. Although all militant nonviolent means should be exhausted, there should be no hesitancy to consider resorting to self-defensive and even punitive means if necessary. This might be something along the lines of what Reverend Cornel Lewis is doing in a drug and violence infested area of Hartford, Connecticut. It is not unusual for Lewis to engage in hand-to-hand combat with drug dealers, for example. Lewis seems committed to responding to the problem in both language and actions that opponents both understand and will back down from if they see no good outcome for themselves and the drug business. For obvious reasons Lewis's approach puts his life in

92

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

jeopardy, but the truth is that this would be the case even if his were solely a nonviolent approach, or if he decided to do nothing. We at least have in Reverend Lewis a person who recognizes that the extreme emergency situation requires extreme measures, even if it means getting his own hands as dirty and bloody as those engaging in oppressive behavior. The borderline situation generally requires methods that would be deemed by most believers to be less than "genteel and respectable." But the borderline situation is not the typical or "normal" ethical situation, and therefore requires methods that may leave one's hands dirty. This will require one to exhibit awareness that she is not to hate the evildoer (but his deed), and be ready to both repent and ask forgiveness.

NOTES 1

Paul Deats and Carol Robb, eds., The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics and Theology (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1986); cf. Robert C. Neville's review in The Personalist Forum 5:1 (1989): 62-64. 2 Robert Cummings Neville, The Cosmology of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); The Puritan Smile (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); and The God Who Beckons: Theology in the Form of Sermons (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). 3 Rufus Burrow, Jr., "Martin Luther King, Jr., Personalism and Intracommunity Black Violence," Encounter 58:1 (1997): 41-60. 4 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Dirty Hands," in his No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books A Division of Random House, 1955), 224. 5 Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966). 6 Edgar S. Brightman, Moral Laws (New York: Abingdon Press, 1933). 7 Ibid., 171. 8 See Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics, 3 vols., ed. William H. Lazareth (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 1:580. 9 Ibid., 647. 10 See Paul Tillich, On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966), 13. Tillich first wrote of the significance of the boundary for the ascertainment of knowledge in his Religiose Verwirklichung (Religious Realization) in 1929. 11 Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976), 124. 12 See Richard Dembo, "Delinquency among Black Male Youth," in Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, ed., Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species (New York: Auburn House, 1988), 129-65, quote from 138. 13 Thielicke, Theological Ethics, 1:630-31 (my emphasis). 14 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Jonah" in Letters àf Papers From Prison, New Gready

BORDERLINE ETHICS AND INTRA-COMMUNITY VIOLENCE AND MURDER

93

Enlarged Edition, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1972), 398-99. 15 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Neville Horton Smith (New York: Macmillan Company, 1959), 119. 16 Thielicke, Theological Ethics, 1:585. 17 See Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Ethics ofJesus and the Social Question," in Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D. B. Robertson (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1976), 40. 18 Thielicke, Theological Ethics, 1:587. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 590. 21 Some of this may be at work in the United States' military campaign in Iraq. 22 Thielicke, Theological Ethics, 1:594. 23 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 276. 24 Quoted in Thielicke, Theological Ethics, 1:589. 25 Ibid., 590. 26 Ibid., 591. 27 In 1986 it was found that intra-community homicide among young black males has ranked highest in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Detroit, and New Orleans. See Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, "The New Morbidity: Homicide, Suicide, Accidents, and Life-Threatening Behaviors," in Taylor Gibbs, ed., Young, Black, and Male in America, 258-93, esp. 262. 28 Ibid., 260. In addition, it is no small matter that black males are more susceptible to police brutality and police incidents that lead to the deaths of black men. In the present discussion, however, the focus is on homicides perpetrated against young black males by young black males. 29 Ibid., 266. 30 Ibid., 267. 31 There was a time when I seriously considered a strategy based on extreme retaliatory violence - essentially an eye for an eye tactic. Presently I forego this in favor of a version of intra-community nonviolent resistance against the perpetrators of the violence and murders. 32 Ibid., 585. 33 See John Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics, rev. ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1932), 176. 34 Gibbs, "Health and Mental Health of Young Black Males," in Taylor Gibbs, ed., Young, Black, and Male in America, 219-57, esp. 237-39.

6

Axiology and Ecology: Neville's Contribution to an Ecological Ethic

RolfBouma

Among life's embarrassing moments I count one from my graduate days at Boston University. It happened early on, at an orientation event for new doctoral students. When asked to share reasons for undertaking graduate studies, I announced my desire to explore the relationship of theology and ecology through the doctrine of creation because, as I opined, "the doctrine of creation has long been neglected by Christian theologians." Silence followed, accompanied by puzzled looks on the faces of those faculty members in attendance, which is the proper response, I surmise, when theological ignorance is uttered a mere stone's throw from Robert Neville's office. In subsequent years I came to appreciate Neville's concept of creation ex nihilo, its intellectual rigor, and the way in which it grounds his theological and philosophical program. I also grasped that a focus on creation does not necessarily result in an ecologicallyattentive theology, which is not to suggest that Neville's thought is inattentive to ecology. On the contrary, Neville's thought is, in many ways, well suited to the convergence of theology and ecology. It is not Neville's doctrine of creation per se, however, that accomplishes this. Rather, it is his philosophy of nature that opens the door to fruitful ecological ethics.

96

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Neville's doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which understands God as the indeterminate ground of all things determinate, manifests a peculiar disjunction between theology and an ethical approach to nature. Creation may be good, but its goodness is linked tenuously to God and somewhat in reverse of what one might expect. Since nothing determinate can be predicated of God apart from creation, one may well assert that God's goodness (or lack thereof) follows from creation's goodness (or lack thereof) rather than creation's goodness following from the character of the divine, determinate nature. Whatever reasons might lead one to adopt a different concept of creation and its relationship to the Creator than Neville's, none obviate the fact that I remain deeply grateful to Neville for the attention he pays to the doctrine of creation and an accompanying philosophy of nature. While recent theology has made great strides in addressing the value of non-human creation, at times it has lacked the clear, conceptual thinking that gives coherence and shape to ecological ethics. Neville's philosophy of nature provides two important components that can help shape the future of ecological ethics. First, Neville provides a strategy for navigating the "naturalistic fallacy," encouraging careful attention to nature as it constructs an ethical ought with respect to nature. Second, Neville offers a theory of value that does justice to the plethora of values found in nature and sheds needed light on environmental decision-making. Most contemporary ethics, including theological ethics, struggles to take "nature" seriously in formulating an approach to the environment. To use nature to construct an ecological ethic depends upon a strategy that links an ethical ought to the is of nature, overcoming the so-called naturalistic fallacy, an argument made famous by G. E. Moore in his Principia Ethica of 1903.l According to Moore, oughts cannot be derived from is? If nature is unavailable as a source of ethical norms, then the most likely alternatives are a transcendent realm of ethical values accessible by human reason (Moore's preferred alternative) or perhaps the subjective projection of human will or consciousness. The ethical schools associated with these options - Kantian deontological ethics or ethical intuitionism in the case of the former and relativism, emotivism, or will-to-power ethics as examples of the latter - continue to have their proponents among contemporary ethicists. There are a few who refuse to bend the knee to Moore's insistence on the disjunction between ought and is. Some philosophers, for

AXIOLOGY AND ECOLOGY

97

instance, take a naturalistic approach and look to human desires and their satisfaction in natural objects. Mary Midgley, among others, argues that oughts arise in response to basic human needs. 3 Since these needs exist objectively and are grounded in nature, the oughts that arise from these needs are natural in character. Ethics adjudicates between competing desires for those things in nature that we need. Since things have value because we need/want them, the wellspring of value is desire. Correlatively, the impulse that gives rise to ethics is "desiring" by animate things. For Midgley, it is not so much that there are values in nature as that there are evaluations with respect to one's needs or wants. Valuation is principally instrumental - things are valuable to something else. The only reality in this world that appears to be valuable per se is the wellspring of valuation, i.e., desiring. Desiring must be protected in and of itself, for it is the ground of all other value. Values exist because there are valuations, not valuation because there are values to be perceived. This makes value overly instrumental and too much the product of cognition and volition. The strong implication of Midgley's approach is to limit a duty of respect to humans and animals, i.e., sentient creatures capable of forming desires, and to make ethics the adjudication of instrumental values. Her attempt to bridge the is-ought divide has little to offer beyond an insistence that desires need adjudication. This approach, while of modest help, is merely a halfway house for persons interested in finding ethical guidance from a close consideration of nature. It falls short in providing an axiology for assessing a range of values. Phenomenologists, too, have attempted to avoid the naturalistic fallacy, pointing out that our experience of the world includes a perception of incompleteness from which an ought can be derived. Far from an admission that obligations are mere human projections upon a disinterested nature, this approach asserts that perception, however filtered by the human mind, is of that which is real. Some of these oughts are moral, and imply a "moral requiredness". Thus, ought derives from the is of incompleteness. Exemplary of this approach is a pair of articles in the Journal of Religious Ethics by Arthur J. Dyck, who identifies "good" or "right" as a characteristic of natural systems.4 The characteristic of "moral requiredness" is considered in such a system like the characteristic of "yellowness": indefinable in other terms, yet an experience of a real characteristic in the world, and one that gives rise to moral obligation. Requiredness manifests itself

98

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

on a variety of levels: aesthetic, logical, and moral. The experience of an arc of 350°, for instance, reveals a "gap-induced requiredness" that the circle be completed, an aesthetic ought. To satisfy one's sense of aesthetic completeness, the circle urges completion. Punishment to fit the crime, restitution to make a victim whole, and bread to feed a starving child are examples of moral requiredness. Certain actions are required, i.e., are fitting and appropriate, in order to make the situation a satisfying whole. In terms of nature, a close study of the natural world may reveal gaps or incomplete-nesses which we sense should be filled or repaired. Ultimately, this strategy bridges the gap between fact and value by turning values and obligations into facts. Values and obligations are facts of a certain kind, i.e., facts of moral requiredness. They exist objectively and are discerned in the sense of (in) completeness in given situations. Ideal constructs of completeness and harmonious wholes help us to identify these moral facts. To ignore an obligation or a value is to ignore a fact that exists in the real world. As a strategy, perhaps the divide between fact and value can be negotiated in this fashion. This is accomplished, however, by making values (and obligations) one kind of fact. Obligations are facts that demand a response. While this approach fits our experience in that not all situations seem to demand a moral response, it does so at a price. A divide must be maintained between moral and non-moral facts - between facts with values or obligations and facts without. Ethics becomes the search for those facts with a moral dimension of value or obligation. There is no presumption of value or obligation. It may be there or it may not. Ethics is the determination of the presence or absence of moral requiredness and our response to it. In contrast to Dyck's phenomenological approach, Neville reverses the movement within the fact-value distinction. He subsumes facts under the wider category of values. To assert a "fact" is to encounter imaginatively values present in the world and to offer an interpretation of that encounter. Any assertion of fact entails a discernment of values within a given context. Facts are construals of reality, and in construing reality the person asserting a fact selects out elements of prehension that are deemed to make a thing or an event what it is. The elements discerned are values present in the object. Thus, even an assertion of "bare" fact is an expression of valuation. What is generally referred to as a "fact" is to Neville a "cognitive judgment" in distinction from a "moral judgment." 5 Cognitive judgments involve interpretation in nonvaluational categories or

AXIOLOGY AND ECOLOGY

99

non-determinative assessments of the obligations that values place on moral agents. On first impression, Neville's initial strategy for negotiating isought seems to concede more than it secures. The solidity of factuality is exchanged for the vagaries of valuation. Rather than "raising" valuation to a "higher" level by defending its factuality, this approach levels the playing field by "lowering" factuality to the same subjectivity as valuation. All reality is then interpreted reality. As Neville himself points out, "the seeming consequence of interpretation-theory [is] that the world is just to be reduced to interpretations." 6 Suspicion of valuation in contemporary thought diminishes anything said to be of a sort with valuation. If facts are values and values are inherently subjective, then facts must also be subjective. In one sense, this is true. Neville does deny the unassailable certainty of facts. Human perception of the world does not provide unambiguous information regarding the construction or composition of the world or its operation. Human comprehension of reality is inevitably constructed comprehension, and scientific explanation is not immune from this "fact" of cognition. On the other hand, to admit that there is a subjective element to valuation carries no concession that valuation is entirely subjective or that value itself is subjective and projected. If values exist objectively in the world, the task for philosophy and ethics is to interpret the world faithfully and cautiously, formulating a fitting response to the values present in it. Neville's thoroughgoing critique of the is-ought dichotomy effectively abolishes the distinction except as a conceptual abstraction. The challenge is no longer avoiding a fallacy, but faithfully interpreting reality by discerning and applying the norms that govern interpretation of nature. Oughts are the responsibilities that arise as an integral dimension of human thinking about the world. Oughts are neither tacked on nor superimposed, but are an indispensable element of the orientation to discerned values that thinking demands. Neville lays the groundwork for identifying the "value" dimension of existence and for providing norms governing our evaluations. Value exists objectively in the world insofar as occasions and entities achieve value. Philosophical cosmology lays out a description of the process whereby values are prehended, appreciated, and appropriated. Our thinking about the world is a part of the process by which we internalize values and synthesize them in our own occasions. The culmination of thinking is responsibility because

100

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

thinking indicates our ability to respond (response-ability) to values encountered in the world. How, then, do oughts relate to thinking? Obligations are integral to thinking because thinking, according to Neville, involves the intersection of four dimensions: imagination, interpretation, theory, and responsibility.7 The first three dimensions recognize that thinking extends beyond the application of formal logic to facts and propositions. Imagination synthesizes the elements of perception into a background of experience and a focal point of attention. Interpretation is a semiotic interplay between an object judged, a judgment, and a judge. Theory, as distinct from interpretation, unifies the variously interpreted elements of the world into a coherent vision. An additional word here regarding interpretation highlights the groundedness of Neville's theory in nature. Neville argues that truth is the carryover of value in the reality in which it is achieved to the interpretation of it. Interpretation is always qualified by multiple considerations: biology, culture, semiotics, and purpose. To say that interpretation is "qualified" by these considerations is to acknowledge the ambiguous effects of these considerations. Each affects our interpretation of nature, offering warrant for our determinations of value as well as casting doubts on the accuracy of their interpretation. A consideration of biology, for instance, embraces the insights of sociobiologists as to the origin of moral impulses. As Midgley pointed out, we are adapted for life in this world, and it is no leap of faith to say that our wants are things we ought to want. If value exists in the world, it is entirely understandable if we develop the sensory and cognitive abilities to prehend values, especially values of direct benefit to us. At the same time, biology, in the sense of our evaluative apparati, mandates caution. Evaluative mechanisms are biological adaptations principally oriented to self-survival and inevitably lead to interpretations of the world skewed toward self-interest. Nor do our evaluative mechanisms directly mediate the world to us. Biology limits the world that human beings perceive, just as biology opens up to us an important window on the world.8 Likewise, culture denotes the social setting within which interpretation takes place. The culture in which we are raised often provides us with the interpretative framework by which we engage the world. Culture also provides a community of interpretation that serves as a check upon our personal interpretations of the world. Culture also, however, may well mediate false interpretations, providing communal warrant

AXIOLOGY AND ECOLOGY

101

for inaccurate and harmful activities. C. S. Peirce held that the interpretive community was ultimately the arbiter of truth, although in an ideal sense where it scrupulously corrected false opinions by applying error-determining methods. Neville's rejoinder to Peirce is that nature itself is the ultimate norm by which truth is measured. 9 Moving beyond the link between fact and value, Neville develops an axiological theory in which value has both metaphysical and cosmological dimensions. The metaphysical dimension concerns the character of value in any world, whereas the cosmological concerns value in this particular world. In Neville's metaphysical analysis, values are harmonies that exemplify a dual aspect of simplicity and complexity. Complexity is the diversity of kinds of things included within the harmony; it is subject to degrees, and the minimal degree is homogeneity. Simplicity is the character of organization within the harmony whereby the togetherness of components constitutes a new reality within which the components are harmonized.10 Complexity relates to the panoply of elements that comprise the harmony; simplicity relates to the tightness of organizational oneness that makes a unity out of the diverse elements within. The cosmology of value applies the metaphysical norms of value to this world. From the modified process perspective to which Neville subscribes, value is the harmony of given contents of occasions and spontaneous contributions within occasions. All occasions have some value; some have more than others do as they manifest simplicity and complexity, i.e., harmonization. Individual atoms have value, but discernibly less than a quartz crystal. Rocks pale in comparison with plants; animals embody even greater harmonies. Ecosystems display varying degrees of harmony depending upon their achieved integration. A finely tuned ecosystem such as the coastal rainforest of Brazil manifests a high degree of complexity within its simplicity. Its complexity establishes its superior value to a diversitychallenged northern hardwood forest; its simplicity (unity) grounds its superiority to an equally diverse, yet humanly constructed and maintained, botanical garden. Value is cosmically present and, at least to our current knowledge, anthropo-apical11 Considerations such as these make Neville's approach preferable to even such a close cousin as the process perspective of John Cobb

102

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

and Charles Birch in The Liberation ofLife. Cobb and Birch emphasize the pan-psychic element in process thought, where what is valuable is the subjective experience, or "feeling," of the entity. They identify value in terms of richness of experience. 12 Intrinsic value is the richness of an entity's and its constituent parts' experience. In terms of a hierarchy of value, they point out that "the intrinsic value that can be attributed to the subjective experience of events at the subatomic, atomic and molecular levels, is so slight that for practical, and therefore ethical, purposes, it can safely be ignored." 13 A plant is "the sum of the values of the cells." Although they acknowledge that plants are "marvelously complex societies of cells," the structural harmony of the plant does not factor into its value, only the values of the individual cells insofar as they enjoy subjective experience. 14 Since plants do not "experience" consciously as we do, the intrinsic value of a plant is the simple addition of the experiences of the cells that comprise the plant. By contrast, Neville interprets Whitehead as identifying value with a "harmony of components," thereby avoiding the anthropomorphic danger of subjectivizing all entities. Value, for Neville, is not equated with "subjective experience," but with objective determination of harmonious components. 15 The challenge in an axiological theory such as Neville's is not, as it was for phenomenologists, to identify isolated "value facts" in a factual world, but to make sense of the plethora of values embodied in the world. Neville's world is so imbued with value that finite evaluators inevitably simplify evaluations, allowing important values to coalesce and stand out from their background. The human imaginative, interpretive, and theoretical capacities do not create value; rather, they simplify the apprehension of value and enable a calculus of value to determine responsibility. One might say that ethical principles are mathematico-ethical devices that allow the estimation of value to a few significant digits, appropriate to our level of sophistication in a world redolent with value. The fact-value distinction, in one sense, is a misguided means of coping with value overload. Similarly, a danger of any ethical system is the tendency to isolate one or two components of value and treat them as the axiological universe. Rationality (Aristotle), Mind (Descartes), pleasure/pain (Bentham), preferences (Singer), humanity (anthropocentrists), sentience (animal rightists), life (Schweitzer) - all have been offered as the fundamental value from which all other values derivatively spring. All are abstractions, singled out from the multiplicity of values that exist.

AXIOLOGY AND ECOLOGY

103

An important part of Neville's contribution to axiological theory is his refusal to narrow the identification of value, insisting that nature is the final arbiter of the full range of values. Value is achieved both at what would be considered the organismic as well as at the organic level, i.e., in the individual as well as in the system. Individual organisms achieve value as entities with a high degree of complexity and simplicity, often composed of other entities that are nested within the organism.16 Individual organisms are themselves nested within larger systems, which in turn comprise even larger systems. No entity exists independently, although entities may relate with greater or lesser degrees of harmonic interaction. The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) in a bamboo forest (Bambusa oldhamii) manifests a high degree of harmony that enhances the value of each constituent. A fish out of water exists (briefly) in disharmony with its environment, a systemic disharmony that is ultimately destructive of the fish's value. An invasive exotic species also exists in systemic disharmony with its environment, a disharmony ultimately destructive of the system's complexity. A new harmony may result from the ensuing system, but its value is less (at least initially) than that which preceded because its complexity is lower. The nested character of value in nature is a critical one, for without it there is little place for novelty as an element of value. Relative novelty cannot be adjudicated between two individuals, for no larger system exists over against which rarity or ubiquity can be determined. This has import for the issue of endangered species preservation. If one must decide between two organisms considered in isolation, one should choose the organism with greater value.17 That one organism is rare while the other ubiquitous has no bearing if one must maximize value in isolation from larger systems. Individuals have value, but species have value, too, as general types that contribute to the complexity of the larger system. This issue is of particular importance in the disagreement between ecologists and animal rights proponents over endangered species. The latter suggest that value (worth that warrants respect and an attribution of rights) can reside only in individual organisms that possess the relevant valuable characteristics, usually sentience or psycho-social integrity. Since value resides only in individuals, not species, to increase an individual's worth by virtue of its membership in a rare species is to engage in speciesism, the fundamental sin according to animal rights proponents. 18 The ecologista intuition that species rarity elevates

104

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

the value of an organism follows from the nesting of values in larger systems. Individuals of a rare species may contribute an essential ingredient to the harmony of the larger system. An organism or system of low internal and individual value (a plant, an insect, a salt flat, or an ice field) may possess high value in its relationship to the larger system, particularly if its novelty contributes to the complexity of the larger system. Living things possess value; they also serve as complex evaluational systems in their own right, interacting with their environment to discern and appropriate values embedded within the environment. The ability to discern and appropriate values is itself a part of the individual creature's value. Those that discern and appropriate best (and do so appropriately!) are the ones that the larger system values in the sense of conferring upon them a reproductive and survival advantage. The ecological matrix evaluates the evaluating behavior of individuals within the system. The foregoing provides a sense of the richness of Neville's thought for engaging in complex ecological analysis and hints at the opportunities for ecological ethics to turn unapologetically to nature in its search for norms. Identifying value in nature is only a first step toward ecological ethics. Turning the axiological analysis of organisms and systems into ecological ethics depends on the discernment of normative measures, and in Neville's thought normative measures develop out of the relationships between real harmonies, imagined alternate harmonies, and ideal harmonies. Real harmonies are the harmonies that exist in the haecceity of occasions - in nature as it is. Imagined alternate harmonies are different harmonies that could be instantiated. Ideal harmonies constitute the maximization of value among the imagined alternate harmonies. An ideal harmony constitutes a normative measure as the imagined alternate harmony that manifests maximal value.19 An ideal harmony is not an abstract or, as the term is sometime used, "idealized" harmony. It must be capable of instantiation as an alternate harmonization. It is in the challenging task of conceiving ideal harmonies against the backdrop of a nature redolent with values in constant flux that Neville's work in a philosophy of nature is likely to bear fruit from a theological and ecological perspective.20 As western culture has come to realize its disconnection from nature and the attendant ills that this disconnection has produced, it has been tempted to turn its back on institutions and practices that are alleged to have contributed to our ecological malaise. Unfortunately,

105

AXIOLOGY AND ECOLOGY

persistent analytical thinking is sometimes included among these rejected practices. Robert Neville's thought and insistence upon the axiological character of all thinking encourages a renewed engagement with the issue of a responsible human presence in the natural world.

NOTES 1

1903).

G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2 Serious doubts have been raised within the philosophical literature as to whether the naturalistic fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy. William Frankena closely analyzes Moore's argument and accuses Moore of using the charge of committing the naturalistic fallacy to establish that the fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy. If any fallacy is involved, it is the "definist" fallacy, i.e., "the process of confusing or identifying two properties, of defining one property by another, or of substituting one property for another"; see William K. Frankena, "The Naturalistic Fallacy," in Wilfrid Sellars and John Hospers, eds., Readings in Ethical Theory (New York: Apple ton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1939), 103-114, quotation from 109. 3 Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). 4 Arthur J. Dyck, "Moral Requiredness: Bridging the Gap Between 'Ought' and 'Is''," Journal of Religious Ethics 6:2 (1978): 293-318, and "Moral Requiredness: Bridging the Gap Between 'Ought' and 'Is' - Part II," Journal of Religious Ethics 9:1 (1981): 131-51. 5 Another way to describe the relationship is to say that, '"factual description' must be an abstract part of normative description, which is what interpretation is whenever it is descriptive"; Robert Cummings Neville, Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 64. 6 Ibid., 322. 7 Neville, Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 17. 8 Neville, Recovery of the Measure, 70. 9 Ibid., 323. 10 Neville, Reconstruction of Thinking, 81. 11 Neville's approach is quite consistent with that of environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston, III, who also constructs an ecological ethic based on a conception of value. Rolston's treatment avoids, for the most part, metaphysical and cosmological arguments, opting to treat value as emerging with living things. Life itself is a value, and the complexity with which life manifests itself creates gradations of value. Rolston's approach can properly be labeled ecocentric rather than biocentric, however, because Rolston recognizes that living things are embedded in their environment. Rolston considers value to be bio-systemic and anthropo-apical; that is, dispersed throughout the biotic world in individuals, species, and ecosystems. Humans have "the highest per capita intrinsic value of any life form supported by the system"; Rolston, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World

106

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 73. Whether there may be creatures of higher value in the cosmos is, of course, an open question - one that serves as grist for the science fiction mill. 12 John B. Cobb, Jr., and Charles Birch, The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 134. 13 Ibid., 152. 14 Ibid., 153. 15 Neville, Recovery of the Measure, 280. 16 This is particularly seen in the case of endosymbionts, or structural elements that are believed to have once lived independently but then became structurally subordinate to the larger organism. Chloroplasts in plants and mitochondria in cells are examples of endosymbionts, believed to have once been bacteria that formed a symbiotic relationship with other cellular organisms and eventually became incorporated into larger, more complex organisms. 17 Rarity vs. ubiquity is not the only relevant question in terms of endangered species. How well integrated a species is within a environmental niche may also play a role. A keystone species has greater value than a marginal species that is likely to go extinct even without human intervention one way or the other. 18 Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 245-46. 19 Neville, Reconstruction of Thinking, 82. 20 The conceptualization of ideal harmonies poses a fascinating challenge for ecological ethics from a Christian theological perspective. An interesting case in the imaginative construction of ideal harmonies of nature are the eschatological visions of Isaiah 11 and 65 and Revelation 21. That they are attempts at ideal harmonies (with variations between the accounts as to what constitutes the ideal) is obvious, but their status as normative measures is questionable. Some within the Christian theological tradition - Andrew Linzey, Christianity and the Rights ofAnimals (New York: Crossroad Books, 1991), 103-04, and Stephen Webb, Of God and Dogs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 183, are examples - hold these passages to be normative as the revelation of God's non-violent intent for his creation. The impossibility of their instantiation in this world is considered irrelevant to their normative status. It is not surprising that both Linzey and Webb have difficulty articulating an ethical orientation toward nature that goes beyond an admonishment to "let it be." Stanley Hauerwas finds the simplicity of vision in Isaiah 11 and 65 compelling, but uses the imagery only in the construction of a social ethic and, in limited fashion, to human presence in the world. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1983), xiii; and Stanley Hauerwas and John Berkman, "The Chief End of All Flesh," Theology Today 49 (1992): 196-208.

7

Jesus and Monotheism: Theological Transformations of Religious Philosophy

Kurt Anders Richardson

Knowing Neville This man of extraordinarily passionate piety and liberal theology, with roots in Methodism and American philosophy, engages his contemporaries through his presence and publications. Like his predecessor, Walter Muelder, Robert Cummings Neville has shaped Boston University School of Theology in profound ways, not only by his penetrating intellect but also by his humanity. We can only hope for him that his productivity and length of days will be as extensive as the great dean emeritus or as his fellow distinctively American philosophers whom Neville is often fond of holding up as exemplars of longevity that their craft uniquely promises. His standing within the American Academy of Religion and in the multiple colloquia of the Boston area is an illuminating profile, regardless of one's degree of agreement or disagreement with him. From his first book on God the Creator to his most recent on Jesus Christ,1 Neville's philosophy of religion cum theology - marked by its Tillichian undertones - continues to flow from his immensely fertile mind and heart. Persuaded that the history of human cognition is the ever evolving formation of value-laden symbols and their utility

108

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

in shaping human life and institutions, Neville has as rigorously as any of his contemporaries supplied us with an impressive oeuvre by which he would chart the most favorable course for this enterprise. Given an unpredictable world, its symbol systems represent the ever richer and complexifying attempts of human beings to negotiate the levels of their existence such that symbols convey rules of estimation and ritual practice by which living and communication can be richly ordered and directed. Like the God who discovers creativity in the creating and Jesus who discovers kindness in the surrender of selfgiving, we too are ever discovering each in our own process of symbolic self creation and inter-personal acts of kindness the effectiveness of the processes of symbolic generation and modification in the pursuits of survival and human flourishing. Neville is one of America's eminent philosophical theologians. Contemplating most deeply the American philosophical and religious experience on his own terms, he embodies streams of reflection that are at once Puritan, Methodist, transcendentalist, pragmatist, liberationist, and "orientalist" - by this last term, I am not intending to be pejorative in any way but to convey that deeply sympathetic adoption of certain Asian ways of reasoning and even styling of the self. But in all of this Neville is a quintessential American philosopher, one whose style and raison d'etre axe captured so whimsically in his Highroad around Modernism.2 This means that he embodies that innovative, engineering, fallibilist spirit, but in his case, witnessing a wilderness, and rather than imagining he can tame it, learning to live with it, feeling sustained by it, even finding God there perhaps more basically than anywhere. It is the experience of wilderness and the memory of the wilderness of the American frontier, even on its Eastern shores, that reminds Neville who in turn reminds us that all human thought and life emerges from this same wildness to gradually construct the fragile yet resilient structures of symbolic communication and religious value. As I think about this man, I am reminded of a type of early twentieth century American liberal Protestant at odds with a type of American conservative Protestant and how distant their world now seems. The all too telling sermon title of Harry Emerson Fosdick's, a Protestant battle cry from the early decades of that so desperately misnamed "Christian century," seemingly lies far behind us: "Shall the fundamentalists win?" And yet while that question perhaps is still posed as a little less triumphalist, it is even more poignant today as we contend with the strain of fundamentalisms right and

JESUS AND MONOTHESISM

109

left. Like Fosdick taking cues from William James, Neville has also constructed his own form of a mediating theology between complete abandonment of traditional themes in theology and complete abandon to traditionalist obscurantism. This does not mean that Neville claims to know anything about the being of God, but he does know that the religious symbol is indispensable to the valuation of all values. Finding his way through to the wilderness that has been his distinctly American pilgrimage, Neville taps into a mystical naturalism, drinking deeply from Thoreau and Emerson, but keeping semiotically Christian through the immigrant theology of Paul Tillich. But it is through Jesus that Neville hopes to answer the question about fundamentalism in theological inquiry he has designed for the pluralistic context of the American university. The Jesus of Faith and the Christ of History Neville knows that the modern theological tradition of bifurcating history and faith contains as much imaginative artifice as any popular myth. To consider the so-called "historicity" of the gospels as if they only partially achieve some factual historical norm in comparison to other books of other histories is to miss the point of these texts entirely. By inverting "history" and "faith" in Martin Kahler's well-known formula, 3 we can point out that the gospels bear a testimony of faith about the man Jesus as much as they bear a unique religious history of his identity as Christ. But to consider this inversion as appropriate interrupts the curious historicist practice of attempting "historical reconstruction" of the life of Jesus which routinely performs radical deconstruction of the gospel texts in favor of securing a few statements of fact about the Galilean Jew. What has become no longer possible is a historical narrative let alone a gospel narrative that we take as true, and supremely, as divine truth. I find Luke Timothy Johnson's characterization of historicist biblical studies performing tasks comparable to archaeological work a stunning analogy. His hermeneutical program, "imagining the world scripture imagines," gets at what the gospel narratives require of us at a primary level of our encounter with them. 4 One cannot help but wonder if there is something of a causal connection between the abysmal scriptural illiteracy of the American churches and historicist mangling of scripture. This was the painful conclusion of George Lindbeck two decades ago as he determined

110

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

to take leave of a naively buoyant but finally destructive theological perspective some were wont to call a "historicist faith." It is not just that the "factual" life of Jesus has been reduced to the barest of outlines that corresponds to no single section of the gospel narrative such that a "historical narrative" is impossible to reconstruct, but that the very notion of a faith that attends to and is somehow nurtured by such an oudine has proved to be religiously untenable. What had started as a passionate apologetic task known as "demythologization" to get at some believable core of historic and philosophical certainty has resulted in such a reduced and unstable historical core that one either chooses historicism - and conservatives do this too, simply enlarging the core to include "supernatural events" - or one follows the gospels on their own terms as seamless documents in the continual re-discovery of what their role as sacred scripture means and how they shape us religiously. But, the gospels in their entirety purport to be a kind of core: in the famous Johannine words: "But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name" (20:31 NRSV). The writer is acutely aware that immensely more could have been written about Jesus, but that the duty has been rendered in providing that core which is absolutely necessary for the faith that knows and follows Jesus in a short life-time. Fortunately there are signs of hope where the gospels are studied as the records of earliest Christian belief along with careful attention to the earliest post biblical writings as in Larry Hurtado's extensive study Lord Jesus Christ.0 Discerning readers of Scripture recognize that the integral texts of the gospels are as much histories of Christ as they are testimonies to faith in Jesus. Tradition is present from the beginning, first in terms of the history of the particular messianic Judaism of Jesus and his apostles and then in terms of a universalizing devotion to this Jesus of the gospels. Faith precedes history and the history of faith is the history of Jesus. What Neville has discerned out of the profound shaping of his soul in religious practice is a type of religious participation in the texts of the gospels in the entirety of their narrative shape and content. Demythologization is not so much undoable for him as simply too limited in its religious fruitfulness. As I have been intimating, the reason why there ever could have been a "historical Jesus" is because there was a prior "Jesus of faith". The whole reason why there was a "Christ of faith" is that there were disciples who believed he was the "Christ of history." Neville relates in his own radically reconstructive

JESUS AND MONOTHESISM

111

way to the gospels mytho-poetically as he plies his course to engage "Jesus Christ" as a whole religious entity rather than as almost two separate figures, i.e., one dynamic and human, the other iconic and divine. This leads him to his own religious participation in the "faith in Jesus" that is simultaneously "life in Christ." Scripture and tradition function for Neville as a history of interpretation that is normative and suggestive not only of a vital religious way of life but as embodying Christianity's core truth claims about the nature of a religious way of life and why that way of life is so compelling. To understand this requires investigation into his methods of religiously imaginative engagement with scripture and tradition. Neville understands that the first level of serious engagement with the gospels is contemplative in nature. Neville comes adoringly to their narratives knowing that enough exposure to them will begin to produce a structure of familiar orientation to them. Indeed, his search for Jesus is a kind of embodiment of the classic pietistic "friendship with Jesus." In order to attain this familiarity, one must enter into the scenery and the affect of the gospel portrayals and allow them to shape the mind and heart of faith. Indeed, the best of the tradition always embodies this practice so that reading becomes a "watching" of Jesus' relations in their relations to him. As this contemplative practice enriches itself, as it is enriched by the rich relations of Jesus with his disciples, and as it is led by tradition to appreciate that his disciples from every age have experienced rich relations with Jesus, the claim to have done so becomes a religious possibility and actuality for the modern contemplative. What is crucial to discern here is a kind of mystical progression to relationship with what Neville unabashedly calls the "living Christ." Relationship with the living Christ does not abrogate critical alertness. Critical alertness toward the gospels has its purpose mainly in demonstrating awareness of narratival and evidential limits of the text. It also is about exposing exaggerated claims for the text, while setting oneself free from historicist biases that have radically eviscerated the religious uses of the text. But it is because of the conspicuous pragmatist positivity in Neville that he asks of these narratives what they offer when they are allowed to set the terms of engagement believing that the reader has certain negotiable and nonnegotiable terms of engagement as well. He is not entirely consistent in this, e.g., although the Pietists often speak of Jesus as Friend, there is actually a strange asymmetry in the gospel of John where Jesus

112

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

calls his disciples "My friends," but does not invite them to call him their Friend - always "Teacher" or "Lord" - indeed, affirming Peter's naming him "Christ, Son of God" by personal revelation in Matthew's and Luke's gospels. In the end, Neville may fall short or even be wrong in his Christological formulations but at least he has been profoundly grappling with the text and its dictates so that his critical practice is an outgrowth of getting enmeshed with its narratives and symbols. But one may come to the gospels, after all, as a religious seeker, and whether she or he has an understanding of contemplative practice, "searching the scriptures" is already an inherently contemplative act. Indeed, one of Jesus' profoundest statements of Christological hermeneutics conveys this: 'You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf (John 5:39; indeed, it is noteworthy that the gospel writers credit Jesus as the originator of Christological exegesis of the Hebrew Bible; cf. Lk 24:25-48). Religious engagement, however, is the goal and the imaginative journey holds critical awareness and practice skillfully, at times attempting to discern evidential limits and at other times to discern dangerous interpretations both historically and in the contemporary environment of religious practice. Certainly there is a Ricouerian 'second naivete' at work here, but there is also far more. At some point in the contemplative exercises engagement with the "living Christ" becomes profoundly complex and personalized. The complexity is due to the integrative expansiveness of religious knowing and acting now not merely in conjunction with a religious tradition and its ritual practices but in relation with its religious Object / Subject: "Jesus has become my Friend and my Lord" - his God has become my God, His Spirit is now also mine. This is more than the adoption of a new set of linguistic and symbolic signs, although in the process of achieving this way of life one has and is developing a sophistication of their use. Rather, the signs become religious embodiment, or in the theological sense, "sanctification" to the critical and post-critical reader. The seeker that was sought has been found by these terms, they having engendered their intended effect of profound re-orientation or conversion to their Object / Subject. This conversion means that the scriptures have now become indispensable. This is due primarily to the fact that their symbols and semiotic networks are attached to redemptive and community building commands and rituals found nowhere else. Even in the grip of that unique class of memory we call tradition, scripture begs

JESUS AND MONOTHESISM

113

to be read as scripture through acts of intentional forgetfulness. But forgetting also has to do with the very nature of embodiment. Memory is not a natural law, nor a photographic instrument, but a construct of individual and social awareness. More importantly, a religious pathway is only partially mnemonic. It is hardly necessary to be reminded - since reminders are evidence of the fact that we are constitutionally suffers of memory decay. And yet memory loss is also essential to the religious path: "...this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil 3:13-14). Any study of traditional religious communities uncovers the tension between their unique vitality along with the density of collective memory - the latter of which can immobilize us from active engagement with the needs of embracing the new in the present. Intentional acts of forgetting are also religious practices that are necessary for the purpose of ridding ourselves of our own dangerous interpretations and, most of all, of exercising the repentance that accepts the pardon of past sins, as well as offering that pardon. Not only this, but constructively, the Christian path requires constant refreshment in the gospel since their narratives are ever stimulating fresh insights and linking themselves with the emergent events of one's own time and space. The presence of the living Christ in the churches and in the life of the believer leads to a constant renewal of life and thought through faith in the person ofJesus. In teaching Christology, I like to emphasize that Jesus is both the object and subject of our faith. We not only believe in Jesus as the Mediator of salvation, but we also believe like him who was a man of the Spirit practicing the life of faithful obedience. Because of the living Christ, the Jesus of history becomes the Jesus of faith. But this has always been the case. On account of the messianism of the earliest Christian communities and the aposdes, there was a determination to have the four biographies of the historical Jesus. But it is the history of Christological practice that makes the gospels possible. These texts are, therefore not given primarily for the function of making faith historiographical, but for the purpose of transposing Jesus upon one's own life and times - as the nineteenth century devotional hymn expresses the longing to walk with him, to talk with him, and to hear his voice. Believing "in" Jesus is simultaneously to believe "like" Jesus and thus "with" Jesus, in the spiritual path that is the Christian life. By this means the content of faith ultimately finds expression in what Jesus believed and knew about God.

114

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Monotheistic Pluralism If we gravitate to the central teachings attributed to Jesus by the gospels, particularly the Sermon on the Mount or the Upper Room Discourse, Jesus is constantly beckoning his disciples to learn his relationship with God as "Abba." Years ago Joachim Jeremias reflected upon the radicality of this form of intimate familiarity with God.6 Prior to and eventually beyond the contemporary suspicions of oppression surrounding this form of address for God, Pannenberg reminds us that this name was not intended to sexualize God but to familiarize God.7 Indeed, to know God in and through Jesus has the reciprocal effect of familiarizing the self with other human beings and in turn personalizing and humanizing humanity. When Jesus says to Philip, "if you have seen me you have seen Abba" (Jn 14:9), we can perceive both Jesus' identification with God and mediation of God which the gospel writer wishes to convey not only as a historical report but as kerygma for all future readers, indeed, for the universe of humanity. When we move to the epistles of the NT, the symbol that God is Abba entails a common humanity with implications for justice and the search for salvation in the face of radical cultural diversity. Neville's great emphasis upon friendship with Jesus is derived largely from the New Testament frameworks of the divine and human familiarization and ultimately reconciliation indicated by the Jesus of faith. The believer in the Jesus of faith, participating in the living relation with the Christ of the gospels, "hears" a call to what Robert Scharlemann described as the "way of following."8 In this way, the perennial tension between the One and the many is not resolved into a single substance or released into a chaos of disparate substances but is reconciled in an open ended set of relations. In order to do so, one "leaves one's nets" with which she or he had tried to capture reality and instead follows the reconciling word of this gospel of Jesus that this God will become familiar to all and that in turn humanity in all its diversity of personhood and culture will become familiar to itself. But fundamental to this path is an act of leaving, of self-criticism and self-correction in view of the way ofJesus. A great deal has been made of an emergent, self-critical, fallibilist world and the convergence of religious traditions. This world might make new religious syntheses not only possible but desirable. Under such conditions certain segments of the traditions of the world's religions, even obscure ones, become portable. This is one

JESUS AND MONOTHESISM

115

of Neville's points in Boston Confucianism.9 The problem is that only segments, e.g., wisdom sayings, become portable. But in the case of ritual and legal embodiments, the bounded locality of the major religions works profoundly against their true portability. Even larger immigrant communities find this to be the case unless they are able to all but ghettoize their religious ways of life. I would want to explore a different line in terms of Jesus Christ and a dissemination model over against a portability model. Religious wisdom and philosophy are portable but in the case of biblical model, the entire religion becomes functionally nomadic. The result is a dissemination of faith. Beginning with Abraham, the great father of Judeo/Christian/Islamic monotheism, we have an exemplar of lived nomadic spirituality: fully embodied religion yet as a kind of "resident alien."10 In this framework, the message of Jesus Christ in full scriptural translation and dissemination becomes formative of fully embodied religiousness in community in potentially any cultural context. Neville's portability model insufficiently accounts for the transformative power of scripture based religion as we find it in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is because Scripture is not a collection of wisdom sayings which can easily be imported and transposed into the intellectual and moral life of any reader or listening. Instead, Scripture provides for an entire way of life summed up in the life of the Object / Subject of faith before us. To follow the wisdom of Jesus is to create and to join with the community called by his name and to embrace his words as life-constituting. The wisdom ofJesus is not merely the wisdom which constrains and gives shape to the dictates of social duty and personal obligation. From the standpoint ofJudaism vis-à-vis the nations, the question of the truth and worship of God is not merely one of exclusive belief and practice but a hermeneutical practice of discerning tendencies of the same truth and worship globally. The worship of a "God of gods" quintessentially garners parental metaphors to itself in theological references to beings in heaven and earth as their one ultimate source. James Barr's Biblical Faith and Natural Theology comes to mind in this context where the very fabric of the scriptural narratives becomes a source of the hermeneutical process.11 Beginning with the beginning of things, creatio ex nihilo, the God of creation is constantly imparting testimonies of God's self through the religious sensibilities of all peoples. This is the basis of the rabbinical hermeneutic of universal religious and ethical truth known as the "noachite law" which along with the universalizing monotheism of the Hebrew prophets, is

116

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

picked up by Jesus' commissioning of his disciples to "make disciples of all nations" according to the Trinitarian monotheist identity of God (Mt 28:16-20; Lk 24:36-48). This line, often referred to as "general revelation," is picked up in the writings of the earliest Christian theologians, particularly Justin Martyr, Lactantius, and TertuUian and becomes a fundamental theme of theology with respect to human religiousness through Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, and the Reformers. Throughout their writings a common narrative identifying "righteous heathen" emerges often in the form of a list of ancient Gentile counterparts to the faithful witnesses of the Hebrew Bible.12 This practice is also undertaken in Islam through references in the Quran and a number of its leading medieval teachers. 13 Christian monotheism derives itself from key Old Testament texts, e.g., Ex 15:11, and New Testament passages such as Matthew 19:17, "And [Jesus] said to him, 'Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only One who is good. If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments'" - of course by this he meant God while also intimating his own divinity.14 What the apologists, the first Christian philosophers, were interested in was a heuristic by which a common monotheistic intuition could be detected in all religious contexts, coexisting, often in ways we might describe as syncretistic. With the appearance of Neville's project in Christian theology, beginning with his book on Jesus, he embodies his own approach to the two moments of general and particular revelation. He is prepared to reflect very straightforwardly on the Trinitarian Logos, incarnation, and atonement. However, with resurrection he breaks form when he suddenly distinguishes what "really happened" according to a "my best hypothesis" - which is a hallucinatory one based upon genuine grief and the persistence of faith in Jesus.15 This reference to what "really happened" is actually quite ironic since the point of Neville's theology is strictly to interpret the symbolic function of Christian beliefs about Jesus. He returns to this but then also struggles in his formulation: "the truth of such symbols of Jesus as the historical risen Christ."16 This completes the irony since now the "historical" can itself be a "symbol" irrespective of whether or not it signifies something that "really happened." Nevertheless, Neville actually installs the phrase, "[t]o make the historical risen Christ 'present'," 17 as apparently legitimate for some without a question as to whether the use of the term "historical" can really be justified in this sense.

JESUS AND MONOTHESISM

117

But Neville's approach has been a conscious resistance, in the face of relatively stable religious systems, to see past the particular religions in, say, a Hickian way, and to develop a critical theology of religion or religious philosophy. The earlier Neville however, who argues for a particular conception of the deity of the creatio ex nihilo that rivals other general conceptions of God is perhaps the best angle of approach here. If we combine Neville's interest with a single ultimate truth about God, which is actually about creation, and his interest in balancing the particular theological statements arising from within a particular religion together with the acknowledgment that this is being done by thinkers from multiple religious traditions, we can derive, among other things, a project under a working title of something like, "global critical monotheism."

Global Critical Monotheism What is crucial theologically and intellectually is that there are multiple monotheistic traditions, varieties of monotheisms. Indeed, over the past three centuries, virtually every major religious tradition expresses its own monotheistic impulse. Much is made of the dynamic nature of religions, that they are never static but are constantly modifying themselves in the successive generations of their exponents. One of the leading forces of modification in the modern world is their close proximity to one another through the massive migrations that have ever characterized human life on our globe. These phenomena can be variously interpreted and it is not surprising that numerous Christian theologians from Karl Rahner to H. Richard Niebuhr have offered compelling arguments for the ongoing enterprise of monotheistic reflection and interchange. Christian theology is "Trinitarian monotheist," meaning that its inherent critical principle is guided by Jesus' experience of God in prayer and prophecy, death and resurrection and most importantly, in the narratives that portray his identity as God incarnate. To be monotheistic, one is being theological and therefore insisting upon a different set of intellectual arrangements within the university - together with other forms of theological discourse. Since the influence of the work of John Milbank and the critical overturning of the false bifurcation between critical inquiry and religious reflection by the exposure of "secular" discourse as part of

118

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

a larger subset of religious reflections, the university community can begin healing itself of some of its worst fragmentations. 18 One of the ways it can do so is by the allowing its monotheistic traditions their responsible presence within the fields of discourse afforded by the ideal of pluralistic critical practice. By participating in the university as an intellectual community of multiple religious perspectives the comparative theological task can truly flourish. Of course this flourishing is already taking place in the gradual transformation of religious studies where next to a single theological approach or a secular social sciences approach, a multiple traditions approach is emerging. The so-called monotheistic faiths are being represented more the ever by intellectually rigorous, self-critical scholars who are beginning to engage in the common project of doing theology in a public context without resort to reductionistic judgments, i.e., secularist or religiously hegemonic. What university communities have been gradually realizing is that intellectual critical practice and religious commitment are not mutually exclusive values. Indeed, the university can become a unique and essential social location for constructing models of co-existence to replace the failed secularist model of public intellectual life. In some significant respects this is the type of model that has been fostered by the life and work of Robert Neville at Boston University School of Theology. The mutual commitments of the University to the pluralism of its Department of Religious and Theological Studies and of the United Methodist Church, the School of Theology's parent denomination, and to the university context have combined to foster an affiliation that has successfully experimented with late-modern theological education that is not antithetical to the embrace of religious commitment while embodying the values of critical, multicultural, and multi-religious reflection. This is not to say that I have always found its actual practice of theology to be particularly right about things having to do with the kind of Christian faith full embrace of the gospels would produce. But it has fostered an intellectual location where this embrace can take place. And now Neville's book on Jesus stimulates a whole new discussion of contemporary faith in Jesus that cannot help but be fruitful if allowed to flourish. If this trend continues, not only at BU but also as it is observable in many other universities, these communities can become microcosms of intellectually religious cohabitation, signs of the possibility of peaceable co-existence in the wider world. Intellectually religious cohabitation is no mean feat and certainly

JESUS AND MONOTHESISM

119

not a modest goal. As we consider the role of religion as both a bane and a blessing in the global realities of conflict and stabilization, there are precious few locations where representatives of the major religions can learn about the other, not only at critical but also at comparative theological levels. To develop theologically in one's own tradition in the presence of and even debating with others developing similarly out of their own traditions is a realizable goal too potentially beneficial to pass up. But a global critical monotheism must be attentive to particular religious issues of belief and doctrine beyond all of the immediate concerns with inter-religious conflict. This kind of intellectual project stems from the historic theological encounters and judgments of the traditions themselves. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, along with Hinduism, Buddhism, and other major Asian religions, all have vast literatures which reflect the awareness of the presence and rival claims of the other. Of course the first three here have a particular commonality, not only as monotheistic, but also as Abrahamic. And indeed, the interest in the monotheistic aspects of the others is rooted deeply in the scriptural beliefs of general revelation. Such a project recognizes the multiplicity of sources for monotheism, not only culturally, but religiously. As such it is a subset of comparative theology, but certainly one which ought to be pursued.

Theses toward Global Critical Monotheisms Byway of conclusion, I offer a set of theses toward a global critical monotheism expressed through the use of the phrase "theological monotheism." But the use of this phrase is only taxonomic, just like the term "religion" is. By theological monotheism, I mean whatever a particular religion is doing to interpret its tradition of the knowledge of God and also of the relation of God to human beings in all their religious diversity. Critically, we are concerned with aspects of legitimating and limitation in the global contexts of inter-religious encounter. 1) Theological monotheism has a multi-religious history and is not reducible to a single monotheism above or beyond the monotheisms that exist as expressions of particular religious traditions. 2) Theological monotheism would tend to dispense with the Enlightenment notion of an epiphenomenal "natural religion"

120

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

with the understanding that this dimension of "natural theology" has its own profound set of difficulties, not least of which is a religiously disembodied theology that purports to be "scientifically" or "philosophically" more true than the theologies it seeks to comprehend. 3) Theological monotheism on the part of any particular religious tradition becomes a way of recognizing similarity in difference and becomes a vehicle of familiarity and the renunciation of religiously motivated violence. 4) Theological monotheism recognizes that the monotheistic traditions exercise a theological practice of interpreting the other - traditions and their adherents - in terms of an inferential or partial relation to the one God whose truths are embodied in a particular tradition. 5) Theological monotheism from the Christian religious perspective is a practice that moderates the missionary impulse oriented to Jesus Christ on its own terms of voluntary adherence. Selfcritical awareness results in an ethic of inter-religious co-existence. 6) Theological monotheism acknowledges the modern religious/political tradition of allowing for conversion in the encounter with other traditions. In doing so it can stimulate constructive outcomes in the political evolution of constitutions of states and in the existence of particular religious communities within them.

NOTES 1

Robert Cummings Neville, God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), and Symbols ofJesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2 Robert Cummings Neville, The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 3 Cf. the influential publication from 1896, Martin Kahler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, trans. Carl E. Braaten (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). 4 Luke Timothy Johnson, "Imagining the World Scripture Imagines," Modern Theology 5 (1988): 165-80. 5 Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). 6 Cf. Joachim Jeremias, The Lord's Prayer, trans. John Reumann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964).

JESUS AND MONOTHESISM 7

121

See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus, God and Man, trans. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977). 8 Robert P. Scharlemann, The Reason of Following: Christology and the Ecstatic I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 9 Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the LateModern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). 10 The book, Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), gets at some of the sense I'm working with here. 11 James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 12 At an impressive level of reflection this practice continues in such recent works as Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); and John Peter Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1991). 13 E.g., Quran, 2:62; 4:136; 5:44, 46; 9:33; 34:28; 42:13; and Al-Ghazali, Ibn alv Arabi, Jalal ai-Din Ruini, and the great Sufi poets Attar, Rumi and Hafiz. 14 Cf. Mark S. Smith, The Origins ofBiblical Monotheism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 15 Neville, Symbols of Jesus, 166. 16 Ibid., 169. 17 Ibid. 18 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, (Cambridge, Mass.: B. Blackwell, 1990); and Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).

8

Refiner's Fire: Some Reflections on Neville, Postmodernism, and the Trends in Discourses on Islam

S. Nomarmi Haq

Considering Robert Cummings Neville at once a cultural and intellectual phenomenon, I see three characteristic attributes that define his being. The first is his formidable analytical rigor; the second, his uncompromising humanism; and the third, his scholarly prowess and social courage. To me, these three attributes manifest no fixed logical or hierarchical order; they are to be found existing in Neville's essence in some kind of an internal harmony, a harmony that is very pleasing indeed. I just used the word "essence," a word I have been taught to avoid when talking about historical phenomena, taught directly by formidable teachers such as A. I. Sabraand indirectly by grandteachers such as Karl Popper. But here, as I speak of Robert Neville, I speak not as a historian but as an admirer, of somebody who has inspired me, one who has helped me make sense of much that is happening in the contemporary intellectual world, and one who has shown me, and all present and future thinkers, possible ways of coping with and even reversing the moral and intellectual crises that certain fashionable academic trends of the day portend. This is not to say that I have always agreed with him, but it is to say that he has led the way, that he has provoked me, agitated me, rendered problematic

124

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

much that had been neat, simple, and comfortable. But back to "essence." Let us begin with the observation that despite Neville's powerful critique of postmodernism, a phenomenon he prefers to call "late modernism," he does espouse, so I see, many of the daughters of that phenomenon. In other words, he has saved the baby from being thrown away with the bathwater. Now one of the axes of the postmodernist attitude is the rejection of the historiography of "grand narratives" in favor of "local" ones. "All history is local" is the new adage; all history is situational, provisional, contingent, unique. This is a humiliating defeat of essentialism, and of its obscuring methodological agent, teleology. This postmodernist attitude, in its raw or extreme form, has numerous philosophical problems and conceptual lacunae. Left in its trendy formulations, it generates dangerous intellectual and moral consequences by removing all stable turf from underneath history, relativizing it without cognitive bridles, and thereby trivializing it. But this is not the place for a disquisition on this matter. Here I shall go no further than commenting that Neville's well-known comparativist posture is, among other things, an efficacious step for supplying some of the deficiencies of the standard postmodernist position in its unrefined state. He too rejects essentialist grand narratives, but he also brings wild postmodernism to the refiner's fire. And hardly anybody can be more sensitive to this than the scholar of Islam. For Islam has an overwhelming presence around us in three familiar embodiments: as a continuous flood of journalistic media coverage; as a subject of all kinds of happy and unhappy but selfassured analyses, just as bountiful in their flow, carried out by social scientists and political commentators; and in the form of what has been called classical "Islamology," that impressive body of studies bequeathed by the Orientalists' massive studies based rigorously on the philological examination of mediaeval Islamic texts. But in all these embodiments of ubiquitous Islam, the underlying operating principle has typically been that of essentialism. But more, at the same time and paradoxically, this essentialism has tended to lock Islam into a box of alien, in some cases dangerous, and marginalized specificities and particularities. In other words, all three presences of Islam hide underneath a "grand narrative," violating a fundamental postmodernist maxim. By moving across cultural boundaries, a comparativist approach promises to break out of this essentialist clamp and, in the case of Neville's program, it shatters open the box of paradox by relating

REFINER'S FIRE

125

"the local," "the specific," "the singular" and "the contingent" to some stable cognitive, objective, intelligible and, I dare say, universal core. Consequently, Neville promises to repair the methodological crudeness of the standard postmodernist creed and thereby makes possible the rehabilitation of Islam back into the larger human community. Culturally, then, his program with its cross-cultural communicative valence is a manifestation of what I called his uncompromising humanism. While the appellation "essentialism" may not always have been uttered, voices against the ideological stance it denotes are not new, nor is Neville a pioneer of the comparative method. The powerful work of Edward Said, Orientalism, for example, is now a familiar part of our intellectual landscape, a work that, by virtue of a scholarly consensus, constituted a major breakthrough. 1 Recall that Said demonstrated, inter alia, that both the "Occident" and the "Orient" are human constructs that saw their full formation at the time when European imperial ascendancy was reaching its zenith. We learn that these constructs, "Occident" and "Orient," arose in the European milieu out of what is called a process of "Othering" whereby the two entities were deemed essentially different, a binary opposition existing between them, between the two closed essences. The Orient was, Said tells us, "Orientalized," and the relationship between a dominant colonial Europe and a receding and fragmenting world of Islam, between Occident and Orient, was a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. All this is too familiar to require elaboration; as I said, these ideas and observations have in fact become part of the spirit of our contemporary age, this "late modern" age of ours. By rejecting essentialist histories, based as they are on the construction of an incommensurable "Other" that needs to be dominated, Said and his postmodernist followers did open up new vistas in Islamic studies. We saw some heartening results. An important turning point on this new path was A. I. Sabra's "Situating Arabic Science: Locality versus Essence,"2 in which the author not only argues, and argues strongly, in support of the contextualist thesis in scientific historiography ("All history is local"), but also points to the dangers of what he describes as the "stronger, reductionist version [of the thesis] that seems to misinterpret the local character of cognitive expression and behavior by appearing to deprive them of objective import." 3 Note here the community of ideas between Sabra and Neville: they are both concerned about the relativism that a severed localness, isolated

126

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

culture-bound specificities, might generate. This relativism thereby trivializes history (Sabra) and moral responsibility (Neville). They are both taking on fashionable postmodernist excesses. They are both being socially courageous with their scholarly prowess. They both speak of something stable that is not itself location bound: cognitive context for Sabra, objective moral norms for Neville. By making locality (as opposed to essence) the focus of his historiography of Arabic/Islamic intellectual tradition, and at the same time constructing a comparative perspective, Sabra was able to identify, bring into focus, and illuminate many historical processes and issues that would otherwise have remained obscure, closed, or unrecognizable. For example, he identifies three cultural-intellectual attitudes in ninth-century Baghdad whose intersection, he tells us, shaped the intellectual milieu of Islam. The three attitudes being Islamism, Arabism, and Hellenism. Then, he speaks of the humanism of Muslim sages; of a continuity between the Hellenistic tradition and Islamic culture; of the creation, by determined effort and deliberate choice of the actors, of the tradition of science and philosophy in Islam. Sabra also makes a very important comparativist observation: the European Renaissance, he writes, arose in part as a reaction to scholasticism; but in Islam events follow a reverse order, a "renaissance" came first and a kind of "scholasticism" followed. While all of this is the harvest of local, contexualist history, the most compelling instance is that of Sabra's identification of a fundamental feature of the historical process of inter-cultural transmission of knowledge, a feature he calls aspecting. He explains: "individuals in a given culture aspect another culture as they direct their gaze to the other from their own location. Aspecting...is conditioned both by the interest, aspirations, and aptitudes of the aspecting individuals and by the accessible aspects of the viewed culture...." 4 This means that the same cultural entity viewed from different locations will have different features. Thus, the classical Greek tradition as it happened in actual fact to come from Islam to Latin Christendom and then fed into the Renaissance would have been something else had it reached to the Europeans from a different locality. With far-reaching consequences for Islamic cultural studies as well for the studies of world culture, this feature of the historical process could not possibly have been visible in an essentialist framework. Sabra is not the only one breaking out of the mould of essentialism in Islamic studies - breaking out of the mould which explained Islam and Islamic culture in terms of the tendencies of the "Semitic/

REFINER'S FIRE

127

Arabic mind" or features of "Semitic/Arabic languages" or the Arab's "poverty of imagination" or the inherent characteristics of the "spirit of culture," and so on. 5 A relatively more recent example of this emancipation is that of Dimitri Gutas' Greek Thought, Arabic Culture which, quite ^/^surprisingly, quotes Edward Said on its very forehead: "Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic."' 5 This is a resounding declaration of a local, contextualist, comparativist attitude as against one that is essentialist, isolationist, constructing a grand narrative. The work of Gutas has yielded much fruit, particularly in shattering some of the views concerning Islam and Islamic intellectual history that had reigned as an unquestioned, takenfor-granted scholarly orthodoxy. And not unlike Neville, Gutas rehabilitates Islamic culture in the larger human community, and narrates the story of Islam at once in its local context and as part of the story of world civilization. The book I speak about is concerned with the massive Graeco-Arabic translation movement which began in Baghdad with the accession of the Abbasids to power in the middle of the eighth century. Unprecedented in world history, the scale of this activity was such that by the end of the tenth century it managed to render into Arabic "all non-literary and non-historical Greek books that were available throughout the Eastern Byzantine Empire and the Near East."7 The consequences of this phenomenon were equally massive: here we see the construction of an intellectual milieu that largely determined the march of the world culture towards what we call modernity. Look at the humanist declaration of Gutas: "the Graeco-Arabic translation movement...constitutes a truly epoch-making stage in the course of human history. It is equal in significance to, and belongs to the same narrative as, I would claim, that of Pericles' Athens, the Italian Renaissance, or the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and it deserves to be so recognized and embedded in our historical consciousness!^ But more, in breaking out of the essentialist-isolationistteleological-grand narrative mould, Gutas was able to break much new ground by questioning some blindly accepted and almost universally held assumptions concerning Islamic religious and intellectual history. Very pertinent for us, for example, is his impatience with the assumption of a unified and undifferentiated Islamic "orthodoxy" that was allegedly inimical to ancient (that is, Greek) sciences and thereby brought about the decline of intellectual and scientific activity in

128

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Islam. Gutas declares, and cogently so, that this assumption whose truth has hardly been called into question by Arabists/Islamicists since it was begotten by Ignaz Goldziher in 1915 is "completely unfounded." 9 In fact, we are told, the whole study of the translation movement has been "hampered and set back" by this unfounded assumption. Indeed, this whole issue of "orthodoxy" in Islam is still so misunderstood all over the place, so messed-up, so irresponsibly handled, that Gutas' study is no less than a milestone. "Orthodoxy," he writes, "is not something in Sunni Islam that is legislated by a centralized religious authority (as in the Orthodox and Catholic Christian Churches) - there are no such authorities; at most what one could claim is the prevalence of a certain religious approach at a specific time and in a specific locality."10 Note the anti-essentialist tenor of the author here. Further, "it is... methodologically unsound to isolate the positions of some group, party, or class as 'orthodox' or as representing either 'faith' or 'reason.'"11 Finally, a contextualist rejection: "the scattered reports [from the Abbasid times] of alleged enmity to the sciences of the ancients that Goldziher mentions are, without specification and contextualization, meaningless at best and gravely misleading at worst."12 In the same contextualist vein, Sabra too had pointed out that, in contrast to the scientists and philosophers of Latin Christendom, those of Islam were not members of religious orders; there were no religious orders. This much we know: there was no Church with institutionalized coercive power and authority; and there was no ordained body of priests to hammer out an official truth, a deviation from which would be "heresy." In what sense, then, can we talk about an Islamic "orthodoxy"? If I were to attempt a tentative typology of contemporary scholars, I shall place both Sabra and Gutas in Neville's camp in a general but very important sense. These three scholars have dug deep into the local soil, but they have at the same time moved horizontally across human cultures. They have all displayed an uncompromising humanism. They have all rejected essentialism and grand narratives of a teleological kind. And, at least in the case of Sabra and Neville, they have explicitly made a vertically upward movement to identify for their findings an objective anchorage of some kind. I consider all this, in effect, a refined postmodernism, an achievement in which Neville has an edge since he reflects over his own method, articulating a theory of theories. Of course, Sabra and Gutas are not the only scholars in the field

REFINER'S FIRE

129

of Islamic studies who happen to be in Neville's camp in the general sense. There are many other examples too. For instance, Ahmet Karamustafa springs to mind whose work in Islamic cartography, a lush piece of work in which he explicitly criticizes the reading of Islamic history backwards, is yet another breakthrough. 13 Here Karamustafa rejects the teleological tyranny of disciplinary boundaries: presenting contextual and local evidence and offering informed historical explanations, he establishes that Islamic cartography may belong more properly to the history of art and history of text, than to the history of geography or of surveying. To study a particular discipline in Islam, then, we may very well have to ask a totally different set of questions than the ones we ask if our object of study is a European discipline that goes by the same name. More recently, in discussing the Islam-Europe linkages, Karamustafa pointed out that "Europe" is a cultural and civilizational label, and that the concept of Europe was under construction during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.14 "The story of the emergence of Europe from within the bosom of Christendom is not one that can be told with reference to anachronistic conception of Europe retroactively imposed.... This is because the very concept of Europe was itself a product of the interaction between peoples on four continents...." 15 And, finally, again in the context of world culture and human history: "in the making of the Scientific Revolution, no other transcultural interaction was as transformative as that between the emerging Europe on the one hand and Mediterranean West Asian Islamic civilization on the other."16 So in Karamustafa too we see the process of relating the "local" to the "global," a scholarly process that moves both in the vertical as well as horizontal dimensions. To reiterate: this is, among other things, a cherishable humanistic gesture. And yet, despite all this scholarly activity of the Nevillean kind, the bulk of present-day discourses on Islam - as a culture, as a religion, as a political entity - remain essentialist-isolationist-teleological, hiding underneath the paradox of constructing a grand narrative by locking the investigative focus into specificities, particularities, and historical fragments that float about without an anchorage and context. What is most surprising, some of the scholarly figures of truly majestic proportions, under whose shadow several generations of Arabists-Islamicists have grown up, even these majestic personages have lent their voices to this creed. It seems to me that the new flood of discourses on Islam, what I called ubiquitous Islam, embodies a

130

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

reversal: it reverses the very intellectual milieu of our times, reversing all the learned trends of contemporary scholarly discourses. In fact it is a measure of the general weakness of the field of Islamic studies that the people of this creed not only get away with their reversals, they also sell their books in huge numbers. And all this also shows how contingent upon political winds happens to be the field of Islamic studies. Not so long ago, the veteran scholar Clifford Geertz wrote in the prestigious New York Review of Books an extensive and very elegant review essay on thirteen recent books on Islam.17 This is a large number of books in what remains a relatively small academic field. But the important thing to note is that many of these books, and by far the most popular ones among them, happen to be paradigm cases of classical grand récii, a picture painted on a huge canvas, written in an authoritative voice, and spanning the whole fifteen centuries of Islam, from the Apostle Muhammad to the great medieval Muslim sage Avicenna to the fourteenth-century social historian Ibn Khaldun to "a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating in alien domination." 18 What I refer to are the two works of Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror.19 Here we have grand narratives that sweep across Arabia to Saudi Arabia, from Constantinople to Istanbul, narratives in which the Muslim, in particular the Arab, is the Other, clashing with the industrialized West, locked in the particularities of his essence. It would be inappropriate for me to begin to review Professor Lewis' recent works. Here I shall restrict myself only to one observation and two remarks. The observation is that many an author of a relatively smaller stature has joined this counterhumanist/counter-modernist creed. For example, another grand narrative that is among the thirteen books Geertz wrote about is M. J. Akbar's The Shade of Swords.20 Note how terrifying the title is! Again, without having the competence, linguistic training, and erudition of a Bernard Lewis, Akbar gives an account of the whole history of Islam, starting with the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the problems in Kashmir in the twenty-first - this is a massive canvas indeed. Then, we have the example of an erudite scholar, who - unlike Akbar has a solid training in Islamic studies and has an impressive record of scholarship in the field, Lenn Goodman. He recently published his Islamic Humanism, dedicated it to Bernard Lewis, and painted

REFINER'S FIRE

131

a mural of universal proportions, sweeping from Islam's beginning to the day Goodman completed his manuscript. 21 In the 27-page Introduction to his work, one finds Muhammad the Prophet as well as the nineteenth-twentieth-century Muslim reformer Muhammad Abduh, the ninth-century Hellenized philosopher Farabi as well as the twentieth-century political activist Mawdudi, the tenth/eleventhcentury Avicenna as well as the dreaded twenty-first century Osama bin Laden! This is grand recti indeed. Let me quickly turn to my two remarks. First, it seems to me that scholars in general, whether they identify themselves as postmodernist or not, will grant me this much: that the categories of explanation we use for the medieval period cannot be applied as such to the modern period. That for a meaningful treatment of the modern Islamic world, we need new explanatory principles; in fact we need a whole new conceptual framework since over this long period of time the object of investigation, this thing called Islam, has changed, and the global ocean in which it floats has changed too. To assume that our conceptual equipment for the study of tenth century Baghdad is serviceable for the explanation of twentiethcentury Baghdad is a dubious assumption, and must be questioned. How so? One wonders. My second remark has to do with this question of Islam and modernity. I consider it to be one of the most painful ironies of our times that not only do we raise the question as to whether Islam is compatible with modernity, we must also speak of a clash between Islam and modernity. Let me make a big claim at once: Islam may well have been the very "culprit" that created modernity. We are fortunate that available to us is Casanova's thorough study of this whole issue of religion, modernity, and secularization.22 In fact, the process of societal modernization has been conceptualized by sociologists of religion as a process of secularization - that is, "a process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular sphere, primarily the state, the economy, and science from the religious sphere [namely, the sphere of the Church]...." 23 We note from this explication of Casanova that the concept of secularization presupposes the Church, an institution with its own inner hierarchy, and an institution possessing doctrinal authority that gave it actual powers of coercion and violence. Since there is no such institution in Islam, no institution from which the state needed to emancipate itself, we cannot without conceptual adjustments meaningfully speak about secularization in Islam.

132

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

But then, if we generalize the concept of secularization, and, following Casanova, do not equate it with the decline or privatization of religion, we may legitimately say this: that many of the fundamental features of the modern society are to be found either fully developed or in their embryonic form uniquely in Islamic culture. In this sense it is a secular culture. The development of a world civilization in which everyone participated; the cultivated continuity with the classical tradition; religious pluralism; freedom of the state and economy from religious coercion; and an uncompromising humanism: all these features do exist as defining characteristics in Islamic culture. We know, for example, that Sunni Islam recognized four legal schools at once, and six correct bodies of Hadith which all have probative and legislative force at the same time. All this happened long before the Protestant Reformation introduced religious pluralism and hastened the full emergence of modernity by undermining the very claims to unity, sanctity, catholicity, and apostolicity of the Church. 24 The seventeenth-century principle cuius regio eius religio which turned into a principle of religious tolerance in Europe was already institutionalized in Islam some seven centuries earlier in the Prophetic saying, "Difference of opinion is the sign of the health of my community." The claim I just made is a daring one and needs further elaboration, historical support, and conceptual analysis. I shall put this task aside for a fuller study. But what I do want to say is that the methodology of any such work would do well to seek inspiration from Robert Neville. And more, I would urge the authors of grand teleological narratives of the Other to read the works of this prolific philosopher, works which assume urgent importance at this juncture of discourses on Islam. Postmodernism refined by Neville's fire would be a good thing to espouse.

NOTES 1

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). A. I. Sabra, "Situating Arabic Science: Locality versus Essence," his 87 A (1996): 654-70. 3 Ibid., 655; emphasis added. 4 Ibid., 658; second italics added. 5 Cf. ibid., 656, n. 2. 6 Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th Centuries) (New York 2

REFINER'S FIRE

133

and London: Routledge, 1998). 7 Ibid., 1; emphasis in the original. 8 Ibid., 8; emphases added. 9 See Ignaz Goldziher, "Stellung der alten islamischen Orthodoxie zu den antiken Wissenschaften", Abhandlungen der Koniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Jahrgang 1915, Philosophisch-historische Klasse 8 (BerlinL Verlag Akademie, 1916). 10 Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 168; emphases added. 11 Ibid., 160. 12 Ibid., 169; emphasis added. 13 See Karamustafa's thoughtful "Introduction to Islamic Maps" in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3-11. 14 I refer to his paper "An Alternative Perspective: The Origins of Modern Science in the Interaction between Europe and Islam," read at Oklahoma University in April, 2003. 15 Ibid., 7. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Clifford Geertz, "Which Way to Mecca?" New York Review of Books 50:10 (12 June 2003): 27-30 (part 1); 50:11 (3July 2003): 36-39 (part 2). 18 Ibid., 28. 19 Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Perennial, 2003), and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003). 20 M. J. Akbar, The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2002). 21 Lenn E. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 22 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 23 Ibid., 19. 24 Cf. ibid., 21-23.

PART TWO

Asian Religious Traditions and Theologies

9

Neville Turns East

John H. Berthrong

Dean Neville tells the story about his turn to Eastern philosophy and religion in the following fashion. Early in his teaching career in the Department of Philosophy at Fordham University he was asked by Thomas Berry, his colleague in the Theology Department, what texts he was using in his course on the history of philosophy. Finding that Neville assumed philosophy was all Western, and had no texts from the Chinese or Indian philosophic traditions, Berry arranged for him to teach introductory courses in those two philosophic traditions. He also arranged for Neville to study Chinese and himself taught Neville rudimentary Sanskrit. Thus began Neville's turn east, stimulated by a "geologian," Berry's adopted moniker. It has been a fascinating intercultural odyssey as Neville has continued to learn more about various Asian philosophies and incorporated these findings into his growing philosophic and theological synthesis. Having been asked "to turn east" by Dr. Berry at the very beginning of his teaching career, Neville's subsequent explorations continued to take a number of twists and turns as he engaged many varieties of Asian theories and practices. For instance, at one point in his career Dean Neville even agreed to teach Sanskrit to an eager band of undergraduates. It is fair to say that during the first part of his career, he focused more on the Indie traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism than on the philosophies of East Asia. More recently Neville has directed his attention toward studies of Chinese

138

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

philosophy in general and with an ever-increasing appropriation of Confucianism in particular. I will return later to Neville's sustained attempt to grapple with and comment on the teachings of the Master Kong (Confucius; 551-479 BCE) and the Confucians who followed the lead of the first sage in promoting "this culture of ours," as the Confucians themselves would say.1 Along with his textual encounters with Asian philosophies and religions, he took up the practice of the ancient Chinese discipline of taiqi While honoring his illustrious taiqi teacher Sophia Delza, Neville edited a book by Delza about the theory and practice of taiqi published by the State University of New York Press in 1996. Furthermore, over the last two decades students in the Core Humanities Program of Boston University have watched Dean Neville demonstrate how the graceful and powerful motions of taiqi can be used to illustrate the teachings of Chinese Confucianism and Daoism in his introductory lectures on these traditions. While his own research in and teaching about various Asian traditions matured, Neville often invited to take part in interfaith encounters, the most important being those involved with BuddhistChristian and Confucian-Christian dialogue. I mention these vignettes from Dean Neville's life in teaching in order to demonstrate his long and serious engagement with the intellectual and spiritual traditions of Asia. Neville has always been an irenic scholar who realizes that the study of philosophy and religion is more than just the study of texts and the history of tradition, though he would be the first to argue that we need careful hermeneutical and historical studies in order to better understand the philosophies and religions of Asia. As a modern American pragmatist, Neville holds to the notion of the union of action and theory and for him religions and philosophies represent some of the persistent and dominant domains and contexts of ecumenical human experience. Rather like A. N. Whitehead, Neville believes that we need to understand these traditions rather than to ignore them or to explain them away by saying that they are not real religions or philosophies as defined by the common consent of modern Western philosophers and theologians. Dean Neville has also participated in the deliberations of the World Council of Churches as that international Christian council has sought to explain and interpret the ongoing religious pluralism of the world to its member churches as well as to suggest theological rationales for finding ways to increase respectful interaction between the diverse religions traditions of humankind. However fascinating the story of Neville's personal encounter and

NEVILLE TURNS EAST

139

engagement with the Asian traditions might be, any careful reader of his large corpus will know that this is not the way he would choose to present his turn to the east. Neville - almost always - eschews an over-reliance on personal narrative in crafting his philosophic and theological vision. He belongs to a long line of Western philosophers and theologians who stoutly affirm the role of theoretical and highly dialectical discourse in the human quest for a proper answer to questions of philosophic form and content. In Neville's dedication to dialectical and logical exposition of philosophic and theological themes and motifs he is a devotee of Plato's unforgettable rendering of Socrates' search for a universal definition of the good. Neville would never say that his interest in Asian philosophy or religion is merely based on the quirks or idiosyncratic life narrative of a particular intellectual determined by the teaching assignments of a young philosophy professor. There must, according to Neville, be cogent reasons why a turn to the east makes rational sense to a modern American philosopher-theologian in terms of the articulation of a speculative philosophic vision. It is fine if such a reasoned account for how we engage with the world in a scholarly fashion can, from time to time, use illustrations culled from the life history of a particular scholar, but any such narrative account must be crowned by a speculative theory that explains why such a personal engagement can be meaningful to the life of a modern American intellectual. For Neville, philosophy and theology are never reducible to personal biography although any decent speculative philosophy ought to make room for personal life within its broader limits. I mention Neville's aversion to personal details or illustrative biographical stories because it is an important clue to understanding the task that he has set for himself. Although as every one of his friends know from personal experience, his conversation never lacks insightful anecdotes drawn from his observation of the tapestry of human life, he is hesitant to use this kind of particular detail to deflect from his desire to focus on the larger dialectical architectonic of his speculative vision. This was made abundantly clear in a presentation at the Princeton Theological Seminary during the 2003 annual meeting of the American Theological Society. In an outline to his proposed four volume systematic theology, Neville purposefully contrasted his approach to philosophic or natural theology to the kind of narrative theology made famous by Stanley Hauerwas in With the Grain of the Universe? Some of Neville's friends, myself included, have from time to time argued with him about this dialectical

140

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

approach. While we all appreciate the rigor of his dialectical method of articulating speculative philosophy, it would still be a balm for the weary reader if there were more narrative materials, illustrative stories and metaphors scattered throughout his work - the most famous of pure theoretic expositions is the ninety-plus of pages initial dialectical argument that begins his first book, God the Creator (1968). But narrative discourse would not be Neville's style, even though he is a master historian of philosophy when he chooses to do so as is the case in The Highroad around Modernism (1992) and Religion in Late Modernity (2002). A perfect example of Neville's dual commitment to an ecumenical encounter with an expansive range of religious traditions is found in his various contributions to the three volumes of the Comparative Religions Ideas Project published as The Human Condition, Religious Truth and Ultimate Realities (2001). Neville's main contribution to the cooperative project was to offer a theory of how we can profitably, respectfully and insightfully frame a cross-cultural study of comparative religion at the beginning of a new millennium. True to form, Neville provided a running commentary on what a good theory for comparison ought to be while relying on the specialized studies of six other teams of scholars working on Chinese religion, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. What, then, is the philosophic reason that Neville would give for devoting so much time and effort to the study of diverse Asian traditions? The foremost reason, I contend, is that he resolutely defends such a quest for Asian wisdom as unavoidable for anyone working within the grand western tradition of speculative philosophy. Moreover, in his various works on the rise of modern western philosophy, he notes that the division of philosophy and theology into two entirely separate intellectual endeavors is a very new way of looking at the world. The separation of philosophy as a discipline independent of the great theological traditions of the west is a product of the rise of modern European philosophy in the seventeenth century (Descartes and Locke and all the other usual suspects) and its wonderful offspring, the Enlightenment. Unlike so many of the roving bands of post-modern public intellectuals, Neville is not given to the needless deconstruction or system bashing that seems to characterize the contemporary reaction to the perceived excesses of modernism and Enlightenment discourse. Neville also is eager to break out of the odd parochialism of much modern western philosophy wherein nothing beyond the scope of contemporary

NEVILLE TURNS EAST

141

philosophic work is considered pertinent to the current tasks of philosophy. Neville takes a different tack. Rather than joining in a full frontal attack on the modernist impulse that has shaped modern western cultures, he suggests (see especially The Highroad around Modernism for the details) that there is another way around modernism via the work of American pragmatic scholars such as Peirce that escapes the all too obvious problems of the modernist project but does not commit the philosopher or theologian to abandoning entirely the last four centuries of western philosophic achievements. Neville intends to interpret, even embrace, modernism with his commitment to the discipline of speculative philosophy. A major aspect of Neville's reconstructive program is to pay real attention to both the history of western philosophy and to the diverse intellectual and religious traditions of Asia. Neville is fully aware that such a commitment to speculative and comparative philosophy, indeed a grandly speculative metaphysics at the heart of a vast philosophic project, runs against the grain of much of contemporary philosophy and theology. To many critics and friends alike, Neville's speculative project seems either quaint, naive or just down right quixotic as it tilts against the gigantic windmill of the modernist rejection of philosophic system building. Neville actually takes on both mainline North American philosophies in analytic and linguist modes as well as post-modernists of all stripes because he steadfastly deems it impossible to do justice to philosophy without the articulation of some kind of speculative program. Again like Whitehead, Neville believes that any and all philosophers operate with a speculative system even if they do not always give it a public voice. Neville's claim is that philosophers and theologians would be better off and perhaps even more honest if they took the time to explain just how they operate and what their categorical schemes actually entail. Neville's turn to the East can be seen as a counter measure to the more common linguistic "turn" of modern Anglo-American philosophy, an about face that closes its eyes to anything save what is talked about in the contemporary EuroAmerican cultural sphere. Besides, Neville will argue that if you are interested in the wonderful language games of everyday life and its second order analysis by philosophers and theologians, then whyjust privilege English or French or German when more "philosophy" was published in Chinese before the seventeenth century that in the rest of the world put together? Isn't Chinese, both classical and modern,

142

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

a language too? Neville's plea to theologians, his other major audience, is just as tart. In a time when many Christian theologians (and Neville writes as a Christian theologian as well as a western philosopher) are growing more and more nervous about their relations with the diverse religions of humankind, he demands that they do not lose their nerve in honestly confronting the fact of religious pluralism by retreating into various forms of neo-orthodox rejection of the spiritual world behind the confines of the walls of the churches of the Christian movement. Neville argues that such backpedaling from the encounter with the world's religions is to shrink from the best of the Christian theological tradition. He contends that philosophy and theology are so closely related that they must be mutually nurtured through a persistent and intense dialogue. In fact, before philosophy and theology were separated at the birth of European modernity, no one in the West ever would have thought that philosophy and theology could or should be split apart - save for a few theologians such as Tertullian who asked the famous question about what Jerusalem has to do with Athens. Tertullian wanted to make the case that there is no necessary connection between the saving revelation of Jesus as the Christ and the vapid speculations of Athenian lovers of wisdom. Neville, in very good Christian theological company, responds by noting that Jerusalem and Athens have always had a great deal to do with each other right from the very first visit of St. Paul to Athens as recorded in the Christian New Testament. Of course, this does not mean that the relationship has always been easy, but then, what marriage has ever been a placid business? Decades ago Wilfred Cantwell Smith noted that our modern habit of adding the adjective "Christian" to the theologies of St. Thomas and Calvin would be shocking to those two towering theologians. This narrowing of religious experience would, according to Smith, have been a precipitous retreat from what real theology is about. For St. Thomas and Calvin theology is passionately concerned with all the works of God, and to say that all this includes are the specifics of the particular teachings of the church, would be a travesty of what theology really means. Theology is foremost the study of the works and wonders of God, and this must include whatever can be known from the host of witnesses from all humankind. Of course, there are and continue to be grave human errors in reporting about and interpreting God's relations with the world. St. Thomas sincerely believed that he was responding to, for instance, problems in Islamic

NEVILLE TURNS EAST

143

thought when he wrote about what he knew of Muslim philosophy and theology. Neville, likewise, defends the notion that any real theology must now take into account what we know of the world's religions even if this vastly complicates the task of the theologian working within a single tradition such as the Christian movement. But as Spinoza said long ago, whatever is worthwhile will be as difficult as it is rare. Whoever said that theology and philosophy were easy or even geographically circumscribed disciplines? The true theologian, the lover of the wisdom of God, must now simply recognize that the world is so much more religiously complicated than St. Thomas or Calvin ever dreamed of. Who could have known that the third and fourth largest religions in North America ca. 2003 would be Islam and Buddhism? Who would even have supposed that some serious demographers of religion would record that Wiccans and other neo-pagans are the seventh largest religious movement in America?3 According to Neville, such facts cannot be ignored and if a theologian really wants to keep the title of theologian, contemporary theologians had better find a way to think about other religious traditions, period. Moreover, the only way to do this according to Neville is to develop an adequate speculative theory about how to understand this modern buzzing complexity of religious revivals and arrivals in North America. Neville has helpfully collected many of his more important articles on the nature and range of comparative philosophy and theology first in The Tao and the Daimon and later in Behind the Masks of God. In Behind the Masks of God Neville makes it very clear that he is writing as an irenic Christian theologian, albeit one rooted in the particularities of the Wesleyan tradition. In fact, Neville begins his chapter on the definition of a proper program for theology with a quote from Charles Wesley: "Question: Christian Theologian, What is your parish? Answer: The world is my parish." Neville offers an immediate gloss on Wesley's question by affirming that "The work of Christian theology can be stated in a formula: to understand, to express, and critically to examine the truth of the gospel in the experience and language of all the world's people, and in reference to all natural and social contexts."4 Many of the essays that follow from his definition of the global task of theology and philosophy are fine examples of Neville's attempt to understand, express and critically examine the nature of the Christian gospel as one of God's revelations to humankind. Neville would argue that although we now have an obligation to take the other religions seriously, we begin in

144

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

our own place, time and religious community; we do not bring news from nowhere nor are we privy to God's view of the world. We do the best we can by beginning with our own context, with the expanded notion that our context is now global in scope as never before in human history. Neville agrees with W. C. Smith that the strict western modernist separation of philosophy from theology is idiosyncratic to the modern European intellectual world and makes appreciation of a great deal of Asian cultural discourse difficult.5 Not only does Asian "philosophy" not look like what modern philosophers do in their profession, it almost always has a religious component running alongside questions that do share a family resemblance to the kinds of issues that worry modern western philosophers. Here again Neville runs against the grain of "normal" contemporary philosophy. Neville switches between working as a speculative philosopher to his alter ego as a philosophic theologian with great ease. Over the last four decades Neville has published the results of his encounters with a great variety of Asian philosophic and religious traditions in books such as The Tao and the Daimon, Behind the Masks of God, The Highroad around Modernism and Religion in Late Modernity. Notwithstanding his interest in global comparative studies, Neville has focused more and more of his recent comparative energies on the Confucian tradition. In order to be more specific about how Neville "turns east" and what he finds there, we will now examine Boston Confucianism (2000) as a paradigmatic example of how Neville studies, explains and understands another philosophic and religious tradition. Confucianism is an interesting case because western scholars have always found it difficult to fit the teachings of Master Kong into the normal analytic categories of the western world. For instance, a great deal of time and ink has been split over the question of whether or not Confucianism is a religion or philosophy or simply a highly refined social ethics and imperial ideology for the Chinese state.6 Neville, following the lead of scholars such as Julia Ching, Tu Weiming and Rodney Taylor, adopts the following strategy for deciding whether or not Confucianism is a religion. If by a religion we strictly follow the example of "the people of the book", as the Muslims would say, then Confucianism does not appear to be a religion sensu stricto when compared to historical Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Be this as it may, Neville argues that there is certainly a "religious dimension" to the Confucian tradition that we miss at our own peril if we choose

NEVILLE TURNS EAST

145

to overlook such covert and overt religious sentiments that manifest themselves in diverse forms in the more than two-and-half millennia of the Confucian Way. Confucianism is a particularly good dialogue partner, Neville believes, because its originative formative historical phases derive from a culture essentially isolated from the other great civilizations of the Eurasian landmass. Although no part of Eurasia is hermetically sealed off from other parts of the landmass, China is about as far away from the cradles of classical, medieval and modern western philosophy and religion as we can find for the great human cultural developments of Confucian and Daoist traditions. In order to explain in greater detail his reflections on Confucianism, Neville published Boston Confucianism. The reception of this book by Chinese colleagues needs to be mentioned in passing. They clearly got the joke about there now being a new band of Confucians, namely a modest number of scholars living north and south of the Charles River in Boston. But Chinese scholars also realized that Neville was probing an important topic with the subtitle of Boston Confucianism, "portable tradition in the late-modern world." In summary, Neville was asking the question about the nature of how great cultural philosophic-religious traditions such as Confucianism become portable, that is, how do they move beyond the cradles of their origins into new cultures. Clearly this has already happened to the Confucian Way as it migrated from its ancestral Chinese home to take up creative residence in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. Now Confucianism appears to be traveling, along with all kinds of SONYs, Toyotas, Hyundais and countless Chinese-made shoes and clothes, to North America along with the burgeoning East Asian immigrant Diaspora. Neville notes that Chinese philosophy a n d / o r religion can thus mean two different things: first, it is what modern Chinese philosophers do qua contemporary research in modern philosophy and second, it is the appropriation of traditional Chinese forms of philosophy and or religion. In point of fact, as his studies of Confucianism have deepened over the decades, Neville has managed to be as much a maverick in Confucian studies as he has been in western philosophic and theological circles. For instance, while most modern New Confucians, which is the technical term now used to define contemporary Confucian philosophers, have tended to embrace Wang Yangming (1472-1529) as the best example to use for the revival of Confucian thought in the modern world, Neville has shown an increasing interest

146

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

in Xunzi (d. ca. 210 BCE) and Zhu Xi (1130-1200). In fact, Neville has become more and more committed to the refurbishment of the intellectual reputation of Xunzi, the great classical rival of Master Meng, the second sage after Master Kong himself. As is well known, the great Song revivalists, including Zhu Xi, selected Master Meng to be the legitimate heir of Master Kong; Xunzi, while recognized for his genius, was relegated to secondary status in the narrative of what the Song Confucians called "the transmission of the Way." Many modern New Confucians, such as Mou Zongsan (1909-1995), have continued the commitment to Master Meng as representing the pristine "mainline" of the Confucian Way.7 One of the cogent arguments Neville mounts in his study of the Confucian Way is that a modern Boston Confucian need not repristinate all the historical quarrels that have been the topic of Confucian discourse ever since Zhu Xi proposed his version of the transmission of the Dao. For instance, Neville believes it is not only possible but also highly beneficial for a Boston Confucian to embrace both Xunzi and Mengzi as major resources of the modern North American reappropriation of classical Chinese Confucian philosophy. Neville makes much the same point in his reflections on the work of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming; he does not believe that a modern philosopher need side with Wang against Zhu but that the better strategy is to employ the insights of both great NeoConfucians in order to present and commend Confucianism as an intrinsic building block for global comparative philosophy. It is at this point that Neville most clearly shows his "pre-modern" roots in refusing to separate philosophic and theological concerns. Neville's work shows a typical four-part progression characteristic of contemporary philosophy and theology in its guise as philosophic theology. First, he argues that we need to frame an accurate, adequate and comprehensive description of the material at hand - here is where careful attention to the historical and cultural circumstances of the philosophy and theology is crucial. Second, method becomes even more self-conscious when the scholar attempts to explain and analyze what has been accurately described. It is in this phase that the question of ernie or etic method arises. Do you let the text suggest its own method or do you apply an etic method to the analysis of the text (or event or object)? Third, the scholar then goes on to interpret the text in light of her or his hermeneutical understanding of the relationship of the ur-text to the text as understood and interpreted by the current reader. Here one needs to attend to questions of

NEVILLE TURNS EAST

147

range, adequacy, power of explanation, cogency and coherence of comparative method. The fourth stage often marks the transition to theology per se or from the role of the "objective" or "disinterested" scholar to the role of a theologian or public intellectual. The scholar here tries to state what is worthy or valuable in a religious or philosophic tradition and commends it to attention of the reader as something worth pondering in terms of current theory and praxis. Neville clearly takes this fourth step. For instance, he believes that reflection on Confucian thought can be of benefit for modern American philosophers and theologians. As an example, Neville makes the case for a careful study of Xunzi for anyone interested in the role of ritual in fostering human flourishing. It is clear that Neville has taken Confucian thought seriously. Beyond the formal reasons for this embedded in Neville's expansive speculative vision, why should this be the case? Why should a modern American intellectual want to find a place for Confucian thought within his own speculative philosophy, much less philosophic theology? The formal reason that Neville's system is open to any and all human discourse is not enough, or at least is only part of the answer. I believe that Neville, along with many other contemporary thinkers on both sides of the Pacific, is seeking to express a new and expansive cultural sensibility. The engine that drives this interest in the study of Asian traditions such as the Confucian Way is found in a profound shift in the view of God-world relations emerging with more and more clarity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Neville's most recent formulation of the question of how to frame an answer to the question of God-world relations focuses on the theme of transcendence. This kind of analysis follows one of Neville's suggestions for how to practice comparative philosophy, namely the method of motif analysis. In this case Neville searches for various Chinese motifs of what in the Western theological tradition is called transcendence. But what is interesting about his account of Chinese motifs of transcendence in Boston Confucianism (and earlier in Behind the Masks of God) is that these themes of transcendence, in both the classical and Neo-Confucian formulations, are inextricably linked to equally strong motifs of immanence. Neville is an astute enough student of contemporary New Confucian philosophy to know that one of the characteristic claims of the New Confucians concerning the religious dimension of Confucianism is that it is a form of immanent transcendence. According to modern thinkers such as Mou Zongsan, Tu Weiming, Zheng Zhongying, Julia Ching and Liu

148

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Shuxian, the Confucian religious sensibility has always presented a balanced view of immanence with transcendence and vice versa. Neville is even able to show, on his reading, that Neo-Confucianism has both a horizontal transcendence based on the classical motifs of concepts such as the yin-yang polarity and reflection on the moral imperatives of the Dao as the ideal for human flourishing and a vertical reading of the Dao based on what Neville calls the "ontological ground" reflected in the contrast of the of taiqi-wuqi or the Supreme Ultimate and the Non-Ultimate as expounded first by Zhou Dunyi and then codified by Zhu Xi's commentary on the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate. Although we cannot pause to pursue this point further, Neville's reading of the Wuqi-taiqi contrast is a tour deforce in comparative hermeneutical exegesis.8 In this regard Neville, acting as a philosophic theologian, is giving voice to a persistent Christian theological teaching about the meaning of the incarnation. Rather like Whitehead before him, Neville argues that Christianity needs to recover some sense of balance of the transcendent and the immanent and that the obvious place to find such a doctrine is in the proper interpretation of the incarnation. What is fascinating is that Neville links these strong Christian theological motifs with classic Song reformulations of speaking about the created and uncreated, the limit with the limitless, the mundane and the highest manifestations of the Dao. As Zhu Xi taught, although the ultimate principle of the Dao as the Supreme Ultimate is deemed to be one in its constituting role in the world, its manifestations are many - or are everywhere and always limitless as expressions of the profound generativity of the Dao. Neville is perhaps an even more daring theologian than he is a philosopher. There have been many Christian intellectuals who have sought to find a balance between the universal and particular, the divine and the human - and most of have had recourse to a doctrine of the incarnation to try to show how God relates intimately to the created order. But very few Christian theologians have attempted to show the soundness of such a religious sensibility by recourse to a presentation of classical and Neo-Confucian themes and motifs. Neville clearly believes that he can show that modern western sensibilities, as they migrate toward a more balanced view of the interconnection of the divine reality and the quotidian world, can make use of Confucian speculative thought as a form of philosophy that has always maintained a balance between immanence and transcendence without the logical problems so obvious when God is

149

NEVILLE TURNS EAST

considered as the completely transcendent Other. When we think about the history of western philosophy and theology, the parallels between Neville and Leibniz immediately come to mind. 9 Of course, this does not mean that there are exact parallels to be found in the development of their philosophic and theological systems. Yet both Leibniz and Neville work with Chinese materials in general and with Confucian materials in particular. Leibniz, relying on the information sent him by the Jesuit scholar-missionaries, wrote some of the most insightful interpretations of classical and Song Confucianism before the contemporary period. Leibniz held that recourse to Chinese philosophy was helpful not only in speculative philosophy but in theology as well. One of Leibniz's passions was to seek the ecumenical reconciliation of the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. Neville has also deployed his speculative philosophy in the service of philosophic theology. Moreover, Neville has tried to serve the church just as Leibniz did with an equally irenic spirit. Both men realized that human flourishing needed the services of philosophy and theology, and that both of these disciplines could profit immensely from the enrichment that comes about through a dialogue with Chinese philosophic and religious resources. In turning East, Neville has returned to the West with an expanded vision of the richness of speculative and comparative philosophy and philosophic theology. The turn has become part of a vast hermeneutic circle that includes a truly ecumenical vision that Leibniz would have approved of as a responsible goal for a public intellectual.

NOTES 1

For short histories of the development of the Confucian Way see John H. Berthrong, Transformations of the Confucian Way (Boulder, Colo.; Westview Press, 1998) and John H. Berthrong and Evelyn Nagai Berthrong, Confucianism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2000). 2 Hauerwas' Gifford lectures are a brilliant plea for narrative theology as opposed to natural or philosophic theology. See Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2001). 3 This information is contained in a short but informative article about how demographers try to track the number of religious adherents in the United States. See Naomi Schaefer, "God and the Demographers," Boston Sunday Globe, Sunday, 17 August 2003, Ideas and Book Section, D4.

150

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT 4

Robert Cummings Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 30. 5 For Smith's theory about such matters, see Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Belief and History (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1977) and Towards a World Theology: Faith and the History of Religion (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1981). 6 For a discussion of the religious dimension of Confucianism as well as an account of contemporary Confucian-Christian dialogue see John H. Berthrong, All under Heaven: Transforming Paradigms in Confucian-Christian Dialogue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 7 For accounts of the rise of the New Confucian movement and the thinkers involved in its development see Chung-ying Cheng and Nicholas Bunnin, eds., Contemporary Chinese Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2002), Umberto Bresciani, Reinventing Confucianism: The New Confucian Movement (Taipei, Taiwan: Taipei Institute for Ricci Studies, 2001), and John Makeham, ed., New Confucianism: A Critical Examination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 8 See Neville, Behind the Masks of God, 51-84, and Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 141-45 and 147-58. In many respects I agree with Neville's interpretation of the major themes and motifs of Neo-Confucian speculative thought in its daoxue (teaching of the Way) school from the Song on. However, I have always disagreed with Neville's specific formulation of a rather robust and remarkably orthodox Christian theism and have offered an alternative reading of these kinds of texts based on a naturalistic interpretation of Neo-Confucian texts in John H. Berthrong, Concerning Creativity: A Comparison ofChu Hsi, Whitehead, and Neville (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). The crux of the disagreement focuses on the fact that I defend a naturalistic cosmology as adequate whereas Neville strongly argues for the necessity of an equally strong ontology for a full interpretation of the cosmos. I make the case that (at least) Neo-Confucian literati such as Zhu Xi are best understood as axiological cosmologists without strong commitments to the notion of ontological transcendence that Neville deems necessary for speculative philosophy and theology. 9 For an informative study of Leibniz's Confucian connection see David E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1977).

10

Neville's Axiological Cosmology of Imaginative Synthesis: A Framework for Comparative Theology and Religion

Steve Odin

During my freshman year as an undergraduate student in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Purchase I took a variety of courses with the then newly hired Chairman, Professor Robert Cummings Neville, including a history of world philosophy (Western, Indian and Chinese), classes on Chinese philosophy and A. N. Whitehead's process metaphysics, and independent studies on Leibniz, Peirce and Dewey - a year which has shaped my entire academic career! Then I attended SUNY at Stony Brook, where Neville would also eventually teach and become director of my Ph.D. thesis. Later I taught as a Visiting Professor in the Boston University Department of Religion when Neville became Dean of the Boston University School of theology. Hence, I was there to observe the evolution of Neville's omniscopic mind throughout important stages of its development. Apart from ultimate salvation itself, one of Neville's aims has always been to embody the neo-Confucian ideal of the scholar-official, which might explain how he has been able to act as a full time administrator and teach classes while at the same time being a prolific author of multivariate original books in philosophy, religion and theology as well as east-west comparative thought and

152

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

interfaith dialogue. So here I can comment only on a few aspects of the many writings produced throughout Neville's career. One of the brilliant contributions Neville has made to philosophy and comparative religion is his axiological cosmology based on the notion of "imagination as experiential synthesis." For Whitehead, the ultimate metaphysical principle of "creativity" is an act of synthesis whereby the many are unified into a new one with its realization of beauty or aesthetic value quality. The primary role played by creativity, or creative synthesis, at the level of human perception has been developed by Neville precisely in terms of this axiological process cosmology of imaginative synthesis. In Reconstruction of Thinking, Neville writes: "Experience is distinguished by virtue of involving a synthesis of otherwise merely causal components.... The most elementary form of this is synthesis of the components into a field that serves as a background for focused attention." 1 He continues: The contrast between background field and foreground focus of attention is the elementary form of beauty. The gathering of otherwise merely causal components of human processes into imaginative experiential synthesis is thus a primary form of valuation. In fact it employs valuation in a primary sense to constitute the field of experience. 2

Neville's process theory of imaginative experiential synthesis, following Whitehead's complete reversal of the Kantian doctrine of synthesis (objectivity-into-subjectivity instead of Kant's subjectivityinto-objectivity), argues that each act of imaginative synthesis constitutes experience in the form of an objective world immediately present to a subject. Imaginative synthesis is the primordial value of gathering causal factors into the beauty of irreducible harmonic contrast between foreground focus and background field. The decision as to what is constituted as focus and what is field through each act of imaginative synthesis is the primary form of aesthetic valuation in perceptual experience. Neville's axiological cosmology further clarifies how images, or symbolic forms, produced by imagination, are normative for imaginative experiential synthesis, thereby functioning to order the antecedent multiplicity of causal components into the primordial beauty of harmonic contrast between foreground focus and background field:

NEVILLE'S AXIOLOGICAL COSMOLOGY

153

An image is the form by which imagination synthesizes its components into experience. It is the selection of components whose integrated presence allows the other components to be present in the synthesis, either as background or as focal elements. An image is thus normative for a particular synthesis.3 Now according to Neville's axiological cosmology, religion is primarily c o n c e r n e d with the symbolic images with which we construct experience t h r o u g h synthesis in imagination. Art, especially religious art, has an extraordinary cultural importance as the conveyor a n d inventor of those symbolic images by means of which world-construction occurs t h r o u g h imaginative experiential synthesis. Neville argues that meditation u p o n symbolic images from religious art can radically transform experience t h r o u g h novel acts of imaginative synthesis: "Consider this hypothesis: By r e p e a t e d rehearsals a n d meditation u p o n significant religious images, a person can bring these images to d o m i n a t e the basic structures in which the world appears." 4 As an example of how meditation u p o n symbolic images from religious art can reconstruct experience t h r o u g h creative synthesis in imagination, Neville specifically refers to the Tantric Buddhist praxis of contemplation u p o n m a n d a l a art: "An even m o r e striking illustration of this hypothesis is found in Tantric Buddhism. By meditation o n a mandala, a person forms experience wholly by the world-structures of the mandala." 5 T h e imagery functions within the process of imaginative synthesis as the "normative measure" by which the initial data are sorted into an occasion of experience having a foreground focus with narrowness a n d width, a n d a b a c k g r o u n d field with triviality a n d vagueness. T h e imagery functions essentially to o r d e r the experimental elements, distinguishing i m p o r t a n t foreground elements from trivial b a c k g r o u n d ones. This is o n e of the reasons religious imagery is religious, since it constitutes the i m p o r t a n t orders of experience itself: "The imagery may be that of divine figures such as B u d d h a a n d Jesus, or the inspiration of the exodus a n d covenant; it may also function in the place of the 'creation of the world'" 6 Neville's axiological cosmology can be related h e r e to his threefold taxonomy of spiritual perfection first worked out in Soldier, Sage and Saint.7 In this work, Neville clarifies how the religious images functioning as "normative measures" for the dynamic

154

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

process of imaginative experiential synthesis, whereby foreground and background elements are ordered into harmonic contrasts with maximum value, can be classified into three general categories, each defined by a spiritual "hero." First, the Soldier or spiritual warrior is one who perfects the will through egoless detached action (Moses and David, Arjuna and Krishna, Buddhist kung fu fighters and Zen samurai, or Jesuit Christian soldiers). Second, the Sage is one who perfects the mind of wisdom (Amos and Isaiah, Buddha and Bodhidharma, Augustine and Aquinas, Lao tzu and Confucious). Finally, the Saint is one who perfects the heart of devotion (rabbis of the To rah, Jesus, Ramakrishna, and the Sufi masters). Here I would like to indicate the significance that Neville's axiological cosmology of imaginative synthesis has for east-west comparative philosophy, religion, theology and psychology. The Jungian doctrine of the collective unconscious with its archetypal images appealed to scholars of comparative religion for its ability to explain how various god-images, mandalas and other symbols of wholeness function in the transformation of experience. However, Neville's categoreal scheme provides an alternate theory of religious imagery and imagination within the context of a systematic process metaphysics wherein human existence is described as a series of transitory, novel and aesthetic occasions of experience arising through acts of imaginative synthesis and gathering multiplicity into novel unity. In this framework, the images produced by the imagination function as normative measures for organizing each occasion into a background field for the foreground focus of attention. Further, the irreducible harmonic contrast between focus and field establishes the pattern for beauty, or aesthetic value. The doctrine of images in Neville's axiological cosmology of imaginative synthesis thus has great explanatory power for describing the transformation and reconstruction of human experience in terms of the hero's religious quest for salvation, especially in those archetypal heroic images of the soldier, sage and saint. I would also like to briefly comment on another of Neville's important contributions, namely, the development of Whiteheadian process philosophy reformulated in terms of an axiological process cosmology of imaginative synthesis, in relation to his own strikingly original Christian theology of creation ex nihilo. As Neville points out in Reconstruction of Thinking, whereas God creates out of nothingness by God's own volition, so human beings in the divine image create out of otherwise given materials, the antecedent multiplicity to be

NEVILLE'S AXIOLOGICAL COSMOLOGY

155

synthesized into novel unity.8 As will be seen in what follows, Neville holds that Whiteheadian process theology fails to recognize this higher ontological level of God's divine creation out of nothingness. The first rigorously argued internal critique of Whiteheadian process theology, which at the same time basically accepts the Whiteheadian cosmology and metaphysics, was Neville's Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology? Whitehead is known for his radically innovative process theology based on his notion of a dipolar God, with both a Primordial Nature that provides lures or harmonic value patterns organizing each occasion in its process of unifying the many into a new one, and a Consequent Nature that functions as a divine memory saving the beauty or aesthetic value quality realized by each perishing occasion. Although Neville adopts much of Whitehead's process cosmology based on occasions of experience arising through a creative synthesis of disjunctive multiplicity into conjunctive unity, he nonetheless rejects the notion of God expounded in Whitehead's process theology in favor of the more traditional Christian theological concept defined through the volitional act of creation ex nihilo. This doctrine of creation ex nihilo itself traces back to Neville's first book, God the Creator.10 Here, Neville articulates God as utterly transcendent and indeterminate apart from the relative nature God gives God-self as creator of the world. God creates ex nihilo every finite determination, actual or possible. God creates the novel determinations of an event's subjective form and all its phases of coming into being. Thus, God is intimately present to each and every creature as creator in the act of conferring determinate being, even in the subjectivity of the creature's self-constitution. God is therefore "undetachable" from his creation. But here Neville introduces a key distinction between the "ontological creativity" of God versus the "cosmological creativity" of arising and perishing events or actual occasions. For Neville, God represents the level of ontological creativity which creates both the one and the many, along with the "cosmological creativity" of events which correlates them. However, the latter is the only mode of creativity recognized by Whiteheadian process theology. Thus, Neville directly challenges Whitehead's separation of God from creativity at the ontological level, while still allowing for self-creativity at the cosmological level of analysis. Ultimately, Neville's theory involves an extension of Whitehead's ontological principle, wherein all creativity and synthesis calls for reference to a "decision," either that of events or God's primordial decision ex nihilo. Neville's doctrine of creatio

156

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

ex nihilo has functioned to establish an o n g o i n g debate that raises the dialogue to a new a n d h i g h e r level of critical discourse, while o p e n i n g u p a powerful alternative to the theism of Whiteheadian process theologians such as J o h n Cobb a n d David Griffin, o n the o n e side, a n d the naturalistic atheism of Donald Sherburne's d e c e n t e r e d process philosophy of W h i t e h e a d without God, o n the other. In o t h e r works such as Behind the Masks of God: An Essay in Comparative Theology, Neville relies o n his contrast between the "ontological creativity" of God versus the "cosmological creativity" of occasions to interpret various Asian religious m o d e s of t h o u g h t , especially the tradition of Chinese neo-Confucianism. Neville cites the neo-Confucian philosopher C h o u Tun-i, who proclaims: "The Ultimate of Non-being a n d also the Great Ultimate (T'ai-chi ) ! " n Neville goes o n to suggest a correlation of the cosmological a n d ontological levels of creativity to the Chinese neo-Confucianist categories of T'ai-chi or the Great Ultimate, a n d Wu-chi or the Ultimate of Non-being: Chou Tun-i in the eleventh century...developed an asymmetrical ontological grounding relation between the Ultimate of Non-being and the Great Ultimate. The juxtaposition of the Ultimate of Non-being with the Great Ultimate I take to be a basic statement of the asymmetry of ontological creation ex nihilo to the system of being.12 For Neville, while the neo-Confucian category of T'ai-chi or the Great Ultimate corresponds to Whitehead's Category of the Ultimate whereby Creativity synthesizes Many into O n e , b o t h of these representing the level of "cosmological creativity," Wu-chi or the Ultimate of Non-being corresponds to God's creation ex nihilo, b o t h of these representing the level of "ontological creativity." Elsewhere in Behind the Masks of God, Neville again resumes his critique of Whiteheadian process theology: "For Whitehead, the most basic cosmological category, which h e called the Category of the Ultimate, is that creativity operates so as to m a k e any many into a new integral one...." 1 3 H e continues: What Whitehead missed is the vertical ontological dimension of creativity that underlies and gives rise to the tao of process he named so well. Reality is not only process, but process which itself is contingent upon ontological creativity. Whitehead's failure with reference to the

NEVILLE'S AXIOLOGICAL COSMOLOGY

157

Western tradition is his abandonment of the insights of mystical transcendence, of the God beyond God, and his accommodation to the narrowly theistic tradition which sees God as a being among other beings, a poet tenderly leading us, as he said, but not a creator.14

However, here I would like to ask how Neville might respond to the doctrine of "two ultimates" in the tradition of Whiteheadian process theology developed by David Ray Griffin and John B. Cobb, Jr. For Cobb and Griffin, there are "two ultimates" in the religious pluralism and naturalistic theism of Whitehead's process theology: Creativity and God. As Griffin argues, whereas God is the "personal ultimate reality," Creativity is the "impersonal ultimate reality."15 Again, God is the "form-giving ultimate reality," and Creativity is the "formless ultimate reality."16 Griffin further argues that the two ultimates of process philosophy, Creativity and God, function to explain the two major types of religious experience, theistic and nontheistic.17 For instance, if one interprets Hinduism from this perspective, God as the personal, form-giving ultimate is equated with Saguna Brahman with attributes, represented by Ishvara, Krishna, or the personal deities of Hindu bhakti devotionalism, while Creativity, the formless impersonal ultimate is to be equated with Nirguna Brahman without attributes, the impersonal absolute realized through yogic contemplation in nondual Advaita Vedanta mysticism.18 Or as Cobb holds, when the pluralistic doctrine of two ultimates in Whiteheadian process theology is applied toward an interpretation of Shin or Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, God as the personal form-giving ultimate corresponds to to Sambhogakaya as represented by Amida Buddha, while Creativity as the formless impersonal ultimate corresponds to Dharmakaya identical with Sunyata or Emptiness.19 For Cobb, Amida or Sambhogakaya is not asymmetrically grounded in the Dharmakaya of Sunyata or Emptiness, since the two are equal in status, thus allowing for a genuinely pluralistic view that recognizes both the nontheistic religion of a formless impersonal ultimate and a theistic religion of a form-giving, personal ultimate, or as were were, the two Whiteheadian ultimates of Creativity and God. This Whiteheadian pluralistic doctrine of "two ultimates" which recognizes Creativity as corresponding to the impersonal formless ultimate by nontheistic religions and the world's great mystical traditions such as Nirguna Brahaman in Hinduism and Dharmakaya or Emptiness in Buddhism thus stands over against Neville's claim that Whiteheadian process

158

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

theology is committed to a narrow theism which neglects the mystical dimensions of religious transcendence. 20 Furthermore, as recently argued by Chung-ying Cheng, my colleague in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii, the pluralistic hypothesis of "two ultimates" in Whiteheadian process theology also clarifies the position of neo-Confucian cosmology in the tradition of Chinese philosophy. It should be remembered that for Neville, while the neo-Confucian category of T'ai-chi or the Great Ultimate corresponds to Whitehead's Category of the Ultimate whereby Creativity synthesizes Many into One, both of these representing the level of "cosmological creativity," Wu-chi or the Ultimate of Non-being corresponds to God's creation ex nihilo, both of these representing the level of "ontological creativity." However, in contrast to Neville's position, Cheng instead holds that from the perspective of two ultimates in the religious pluralism of Whiteheadian process theology, T'ai-chi or the Great Ultimate is God, and corresponding to Whitehead's Creativity or impersonal formless ultimate, Wu-chi is Emptiness.21 Now, I don't think for a moment that Neville has no answer for this, because I know better. But I would like to open up another opportunity for Neville to take up his challenge to process theology while further clarifying his own theological doctrine of God's divine creation ex nihilo.

NOTES 1

Robert Cummings Neville, Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 17. 2 Ibid., 18. 3 Ibid., 19. 4 Ibid., 261. 5 Ibid., 262. 6 Ibid., 263. 7 Robert Cummings Neville, Soldier, Sage and Saint (New York: Fordham University Press, 1978). 8 Neville, Reconstruction of Thinking, 232-33. 9 Robert Cummings Neville, Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980). 10 Robert Cummings Neville, God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

NEVILLE'S AXIOLOGICAL COSMOLOGY 11

159

Cited by Robert Cummings Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay Toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 56. 12 Ibid., 77. 13 Ibid., 59. 14 Ibid., 60. 15 David Ray Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 269. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 248. 18 Ibid., 274-75. 19 Cited by Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism, 274. 20 Neville, Behind the Masks of God, 60. 21 Cheng Chung-ying, "Toward an Integrative Religious Pluralism," paper delivered at the Conference on Whitehead and Religious Pluralism held at the Claremont School of Theology, 27 March 2003.

11

Pragmatism, Logical Vagueness, and the Art of Comparative Engagement

Warren G. Frisina

It was graduation day, 15 May 1976. I was holding a B.A. in philosophy and the expectation that in a year or so I would be going off to graduate school. With no idea where I was going or what I was interested in studying, I just knew that at some point I would spend more time reading the "great" philosophers who, for me, included Western thinkers from Plato to Whitehead. As we made our way around the campus on that warm spring day, I came across my teacher and advisor, a then very young, Robert C. Neville. He did his best to carry through the graduation ritual by congratulating both myself and my parents. Part of the ritual involves small talk about "what's next" and I dutifully reminded him that I hoped to go to graduate school to study philosophy. All of us were awash in the good feelings that stem from celebrating both an accomplishment and the potential implicit in the life of a 21 year old looking ahead to an open future. Toward the end of our encounter Neville leaned in and passed along some advice (also an important part of the ritual). He said (I'm paraphrasing here): "You know Warren, the study of philosophy is changing. It's no longer legitimate to read only Western philosophers. You ought to spend some time looking into non-Western traditions."

162

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

That he passed along such advice was no surprise. Rituals are rarely surprising. I knew he had interests in India and China, and I had even taken his introductory course that examined texts from both Western and non-Western traditions. But I hadn't followed up on that introduction, and my plans were much too amorphous to think concretely about what courses I would be taking once I got to graduate school. As I look back on that scene now (some 28 year later), there are things I can see which were not apparent at the time. As some Chinese might say, there were propensities (shi) in that situation that were beyond my ken. 1 Neville's comments were evidence of a shift occurring in the study of philosophy and theology. At the major U.S. and European graduate schools a new generation of scholars was unleashing an unprecedented collection of translations and historical studies that would do much to lift the shroud separating Chinese and Western intellectual discourses. Nevertheless, among American academics in 1976, the interest in Chinese philosophy and religion was still largely confined to specialists. Scholarship on China was mainly read by sinologists who had a professional interest in what their colleagues were producing. Most Western philosophers felt perfectly comfortable ignoring anything outside the long list of "footnotes to Plato." It is true that the 60's witnessed a period of popular interest in Eastern things. But if you went to graduate school in philosophy in the 1970's it was unlikely you would encounter anyone who had taken the time to pay serious attention to what lay behind the popular images of so-called Eastern mysticisms. This was perhaps less true in religion and theology programs whose graduates would have to teach "world religions" to undergraduates. But even there it was rare to find a theological thinker who felt compelled to engage with non-Western thought beyond brief encounters with the then current Heideggarian versions ofJapanese Buddhism. Unlike so many of his colleagues, Neville has built a career on the premise that Western philosophical and religious thought should no longer operate within a hermeneutically sealed environment that refuses to take seriously the claims of non-Western traditions. In the years since that graduation talk virtually all of his many books include discussion of how non-Western traditions (especially Chinese Confucianism and Taoism) have influenced his systematic philosophic projects.2 As a pragmatist Neville stays close to the original instincts of

THE ART OF COMPARATIVE ENGAGEMENT

163

Peirce and Dewey who both believed that their epistemological assertions would lead philosophers into new ways of talking about metaphysical issues. The key for Peirce, Dewey and Neville is their conviction that metaphysical speculation should leave behind the conceits of deductive logic and the pretense to absolutism. Instead, for these thinkers metaphysical theories are hypothetical generalizations that aim to hold together as many aspects of a philosophic vision as seem likely to help in sorting through contemporary problems. Along with all of the major pragmatista Neville describes knowledge as a process of "interpretive abstraction." To understand what that means it helps to be reminded of the basic elements of a pragmatic semiotics. Classical American pragmatists typically view organisms as dynamic systems that sustain themselves by acting in ways that anticipate changes in an ever-changing environment. This anticipation is possible because organisms treat each thing they encounter as a sign pointing beyond itself toward some yet to be determined future. An antelope grazing calmly in an open field suddenly races headlong toward the forest after catching the faintest hint of a lion's scent on the evening breeze. The scent (sign) signifies flight. Antelopes don't choose whether or how to interpret scents. That's just what antelopes do. From this pragmatic point of view all organisms live in and through their own versions of this signification process. We swim in a sea of signs. We survive and at times flourish by virtue of our capacity to interpret them well. Everything in an organic system functions as a sign for everything else. All signs (which is to say all things) point beyond themselves in any given moment and toward some indeterminate future. Although it is easy to see that some organisms have vastly more sophisticated anticipatory powers than others, 3 the basic structure of the interpretive process remains consistent up and down the chain, from single celled organisms up through human beings. This means that a pragmatic semiotics posits a fully naturalistic understanding of the human mind. Neville emphasizes four points about pragmatic semiotics. The first is that interpretation is a kind of action. As we saw with the antelope, a sign is first and foremost a signal to act. In simple organisms the signification process points away from danger and toward whatever will satisfy its needs. Amoebas flee sulfuric acid and head directly for anything that might be food. Though no one could argue sensibly that amoebas carry mental representations of their imminent prospects it does seem fair to say that their actions bespeak

164

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

a capacity to interpret simple signs as either inimical or beneficial. The second point to note is that a pragmatic semiotics is also an axiological theory. Organic entities, by definition, have needs and pursue whatever will satisfy those needs. Therefore, the whole interpretive process is structured around an organism's values. Value is not imposed from outside. It is built into virtually every aspect of the system. All values are real and all actions are expressions of those values. The third point Neville emphasizes about pragmatic semiotics is the way interpretations are always abstractions. Organisms take up signs in accordance with their own ever-developing system of values (needs). In order to interpret well, an organism must be capable of attending to those aspects of its environment that are important and ignoring those aspects that are not. The lion's scent stimulates the antelope to act while competing scents (say from nearby rabbits, mice, etc.) are ignored. Since all interpretation is guided by the pursuit of some value, every interpretation involves selective attention. A good abstraction lifts up what is important relative to some value while ignoring what is not. Neville's fourth point is that our interpretive abstractions can also be characterized as theories. When an organism interprets a sign its actions are literally theories about the future. Looking back to the antelope one more time, it is easy to see how its flight into the forest entails a theory that something dangerous is about to happen and that fleeing is one way to minimize that danger. The advantage of describing interpretive abstractions as theories is that it makes it easier for us to see how signs and our interpretative actions are all part of a complex semiotic system. By combining and coordinating different theories organisms expand the accuracy and sophistication of their interpretive prowess making it more likely that they will mesh with a world that is constantly changing. In sum, then, Neville's pragmatic epistemology leads to a nonrepresentational (action driven), axiological (value laden), perspectival (e.g., abstractive), theory of knowledge. With these claims in mind the rationale for comparative philosophy shifts a bit. Instead of asking, How is it possible to bridge the cognitive gap between different cultures? Neville would have us ask the more pragmatic question: How do individuals who are living through significantly different theories engage one another constructively around contemporary problems? In order to answer this question Neville needs to explain how theories relate to one another. This brings us to Neville's

THE ART OF COMPARATIVE ENGAGEMENT

165

"theory of theories" and his use of the Peircean notion of "logical vagueness." According to Neville, Peirce's concept of logical vagueness helps to explain how we better calibrate our actions within an ever-changing world. To understand why this would be the case readers first must keep in mind Neville's point that all theories are abstractive. They interpret some aspect of a sign/theory from some particular point of view relative to some specific values or goals. In short, all interpretation involves selective attention. This means that it is possible to rank various theories according to the degree of abstractness they employ. A good theory about friendship, for example, is more abstract than the theories we maintain about individual friends. Our interpretation of what we mean by friendship abstracts from the details of particular friends and orients us properly to those things that are common to all of the forms that friendship might take. Following Peirce, Neville distinguishes two kinds of abstraction. A general abstraction is one whose objects are recognizable. Marx's theories regarding economic production are abstract in this general way. Their abstractness is evident in the extent to which they force us to see things through the lens of economic and political power while ignoring as irrelevant a great deal of other information. At the same time, the kind of abstractness Marx's theories exhibit is "general" since it applies directly to all humans regardless of their circumstances. General abstractions have important uses, but they come with a cost. They tend to reduce a class of things to some shared characteristic rather than establishing a perspective from which to encounter them in their own contexts. "When people are told that the reality in their nuanced experience is supposed to be nothing more than illustrations of some set of categories, they rightly protest that the integrity of their localized experience would be brutalized...." 4 Neville is making a subtle point here that is extraordinarily important for comparative philosophy. When comparative philosophy relies on general abstractions it runs the risk of yanking vivid discursive traditions out of the contexts in which they make sense and reducing them to a generic set of characteristics that they share with other traditions. This reductionism almost always involves doing violence to their original sensibilities because it tends to give the theory priority over the lived experience. The theory tells people what they are experiencing and as a result hides or masks whatever it is not designed to note. Examples of such general theories are legion in the social sciences

166

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

where people are often told something to the effect of, 'Your feelings about X are really about Y." Logically vague theories, according to Neville, differ from general ones in three crucial ways. First, they operate on a level of abstraction which is neutral with respect to the more concrete theories that they are capable of comprehending. One theory is logically vague relative to another when it interprets some aspect of the world from a perspective that the more concrete theory does not deal with directly. Whitehead's metaphysical cosmology, for example, is more abstract than the mid-level abstractions of Freudian psychology. Freudian psychology doesn't address or contradict the sort of issues that Whitehead's cosmology is designed to address. This means that a Whiteheadian process cosmology could, with sufficient intermediate explanatory theories, be specified in ways that would be compatible with psychoanalysis. The second way that logically vague theories differ from general theories is in their status as hypotheses. On Neville's view, a logically vague theory is a hypothesis to be refined by further inquiry, rather than a category to be imposed from above. Any attempt to link Whiteheadian cosmology with Freudian psychoanalysis is likely to have as much impact on our understanding of the cosmology as it has on our understanding of psychoanalysis.5 Thus, logically vague theories/hypotheses gain their power by setting a context that reveals the particularities of lived experience and allows those particularities to play back up the system. Instead of reducing things to a lowest common denominator the way general abstractions do, logically vague theories create a perspective from which to learn more about concrete realities and the theories/hypotheses we use to interpret them. The third way logically vague theories differ from general ones is in their capacity to comprehend competing claims among the more concrete theories. On this point Neville says, "notice the logical peculiarity of vague systems, such as Aristotle's substance theory and Whitehead's process philosophy: They can comprehend mutually incompatible theories at intermediate levels. They apply to both Freud and Skinner."6 This capacity to comprehend mutually incompatible theories is key. General theories aim mainly at a proper categorization. Each category posits a set of common characteristics. The job is done when the things that share those characteristics are properly catalogued. The power of logically vague theories, by contrast, stems from the way they make it possible to investigate and engage conflicting theories around the things that a general theory

THE ART OF COMPARATIVE ENGAGEMENT

167

merely collects. In sum then, logically vague theories serve as abstract, hypothetical starting points that are designed to initiate new lines of inquiry by establishing an interpretive perspective from which to view competing claims. A general theory like Marxism has completed its work when it places psychoanalysis and behaviorism in preconceived categories that reveal the ways both are "really" manifestations of economic/power relationships. When Marxist theory is applied in this way the local rationales for each discourse (e.g., therapeutic effectiveness, consistency with recent scientific discoveries) are trumped by the all-powerful assumptions of the general theory. A logically vague theory/hypothesis like Whiteheadian process philosophy, by contrast, does not make any assertions regarding what psychoanalysis and behaviorism are "really about." Instead, it posits a standpoint that abstracts from their level of discourse and allows us to see more precisely where they agree, disagree or overlap. It is also open to the possibility that information discovered in our analysis of psychoanalysis and behaviorism could play back up the system and modify our understanding of Whiteheadian cosmology.7 This Peircean theory that all of our theories can be ranked in a hierarchy of vagueness, goes to the heart of Neville's comparative methodology. Our success at discussing mathematical topics across cultural boundaries "suggests that where the terms are abstract enough, we can prescind from the relativities of cultural experience." 8 When it comes to comparative philosophy, however, the trick is finding precisely the right balance between logical vagueness and concreteness. On the one hand, theories that are too far removed from the concrete problems of life won't address issues that philosophers and religious thinkers are interested in pursuing. On the other hand, cross-cultural conversations that are overly concrete often founder on the rocks of cultural differences. Neville's goal is to conjure in us a three-dimensional image of semiotic systems that relate to one another on multiple levels. Some relatively concrete theories are nested inside more abstract logically vague theories like Chinese dolls. Other theoretical systems operate on the same level of abstraction where they might conflict, overlap, or be irrelevant to one another. For example, a theory of the nature and purpose of baseball may be logically vague with respect to any specific conflicts among the teams. Yankee and Red Sox fans live in semiotic sub-systems that are nested inside this logically vague theory of baseball. Their interpretive systems conflict directly over the

168

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

relative merits of both teams, overlap in their hatred of the Braves, and are largely irrelevant to theories about pork belly futures. According to Neville, the art of comparative philosophic and religious thought involves bringing different theoretical systems into critical engagement with one another. Neville argues that metaphysics is ultimately the type of theoretical abstraction that prescinds sufficiently from enough of the details of life to gain genuine comprehensiveness, but not so many as to render it unable to contribute to our efforts to sort through our thoroughly human conflicts and questions. 9 Metaphysical theories can be rendered logically vague with respect to more concrete theories and so can comprehend even incompatible abstractions.10 Some readers might be wondering whether Neville's theory of theories implies that all comparative philosophers must be metaphysicians in order to do their jobs. I suspect the answer is no and yes. No, it is probably not necessary that everyone who wants to undertake comparative philosophy be explicitly engaged in the art of metaphysics. But yes, it is true that from Neville's perspective, fruitful comparative reflection becomes possible when two different and perhaps conflicting systems are viewed from inside some broader, more comprehensive hypothesis. The broader metaphysical context need not be the thing that the comparativist attends to. But it must be there if the two systems of thought are to be related to one another. For Neville the "climb and dive" of metaphysical thinking is the way we gain a more detailed «wdcontextualized understanding of our world.11 Logically vague theories may be less distinct relative to more concrete theories. But it is also true we gain distinct information about the world by adopting a more macroscopic perspective. All theories reveal and conceal. According to Neville, the trick to gaining a deeper understanding of our world is not to give ultimate priority to vagueness itself, but rather to become more skilled at moving up and down the ladder of abstraction. In the recent book, Boston Confucianism (2000), Neville puts into practice the comparative methodology I've just outlined. A quick look at his discussion of Confucian spirituality will illustrate the way the "climb and dive" technique enables Neville to situate his understanding of Confucian spirituality in a way that is open to critical engagement with other forms of spirituality. Neville opens his discussion of Confucian spirituality with a critical review of the now standard question: Is Confucianism a religion or is it a philosophy of life? From Neville's perspective there are at least

THE ART OF COMPARATIVE ENGAGEMENT

169

two reasons why this standard debate will never be all that productive. First, as we have seen, a general category like "religion" is unlikely to capture the concrete reality of actual religious practices. Instead, it does little more than highlight generic practices that resemble one another in multiple traditions. Religious practitioners quite naturally chafe when told that their living, breathing tradition is best summed up in this reductive manner. The second problem with the question is the way it stymies genuine inquiry instead of fostering it. Asking whether Confucianism is a religion does nothing to motivate thinkers to engage one another around contemporary problems since the answer to the question is a simple yes or no, depending on how the category is structured and Confucianism is described. In this case categorization has become its own end. Instead of asking whether Confucianism is a religion Neville urges us to ask questions like: What are the ways that Confucian practice might reinforce or support practices in other traditions? Where do these practices differ? Are there points where Confucianism branches into areas not covered by other traditions? What are the essential elements of Confucianism and what are the ones that it has acquired by its relations with other traditions? To move into this more productive form of inquiry, Neville posits as his working hypothesis the thesis that religion is the way people relate to what they take to be ultimate via ritual practices, cognitive practices and spiritual practices.12 For Neville, subsuming Confucianism under this hypothetical description of religious practices is the beginning rather than the end of inquiry. Real progress can only be made by examining how each tradition handles things like ritual practices, cognitive practices and spiritual practices. As his inquiry proceeds this working hypothesis regarding religion can be refined to accommodate details that emerge from the discussion of Confucianism and other traditions. Instead of allowing the preexisting theory to determine what gets to count as religion, Neville posits a reciprocal process that allows the data uncovered in direct examination of traditions to modify the way the logically vague hypothesis is characterized. Turning then to the topic of Confucian spirituality, Neville begins by positing yet another logically vague working hypothesis. He proposes that spirituality be considered the deliberate effort to improve the human process of engaging ultimate reality truthfully by means of practices

170

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

that shape the engagement with signs or religious symbols, that discern improved religious symbols for this purpose, that increase competence in the use of the symbols for engagement, and that foster the transformations of souls derivative from the engaging of ultimate reality with the symbols.13 This overarching hypothesis contains a variety of sub-hypotheses, each of which must b e tested against the actual practices of Confucian a n d o t h e r traditions. These sub-hypotheses include theories addressing what we m e a n by self, ultimate reality, truth, symbols in general, a n d religious symbols in particular. O u r earlier analysis of Neville's pragmatic theory of signs along with his theory of theories should orient most readers to many of the basic issues b r o u g h t u p by each of these sub-hypotheses. Neville proposes that the way to test each subhypothesis is by examining w h e t h e r it is capable of being specified in ways that are compatible with actual religious practices. It is easy to illustrate Neville's strategy by considering j u s t o n e of the sub-hypotheses. What Neville means by "a self that actually engages ultimate reality" can b e specified in a variety of directions. To be a d e q u a t e as a logically vague hypothesis, his theory of spirituality must b e capable of a c c o m m o d a t i n g t h e relational conception of the self outlined in the Doctrine ofthe Mean which "stresses the structural integration of principle o r daoas resident in the perspective of one's body with t h e persons, institutions, a n d natural surroundings that constitute the ten t h o u s a n d things to which the m e a n relates." 14 Of course, in addition to a c c o m m o d a t i n g the Confucian relational u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the self, Neville's hypothesis a b o u t spirituality must also b e capable of a c c o m m o d a t i n g many others including the Aristotelian conception that each self contains a "substantial core" as well as the Buddhist no-self doctrine. In sum then, Neville approaches t h e analysis of Confucian spirituality in particular a n d comparative philosophy in general by suggesting that we should always b e moving in three separate directions simultaneously. H e tells us to h e a d up t h e ladder of abstraction to sketch o u t a variety of logically vague theories that set a b r o a d context for interpreting Confucian practice. These include metaphysical theories regarding being, truth, the n a t u r e of the self, what we m e a n by transformation, etc. Neville also says we must h e a d down the ladder of abstraction to gather detailed information regarding actual Confucian practices a n d the implications they have

THE ART OF COMPARATIVE ENGAGEMENT

171

for our overarching theories. If it turns out that Confucian practices cannot be seen as specifications of our logically vague hypotheses, that would be evidence that the abstract theories are inadequate in some way and ought to be modified. The third direction Neville asks us to move is laterally. We must also look from Confucian practices to the actual practices of other traditions (e.g., Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, philosophical, secular) operating at the same level of abstraction. Doing so will provide us with additional information about the overarching theory's adequacy. A logically vague theory that is compatible with many different religious practices is stronger than one that is consistent with just one or two. Moreover, by looking across other abstractions, we sharpen our understanding of where the practices overlap; we surface the ways the traditions might contradict one another; and, we discover things that are unique to each tradition. Readers are to be forgiven if they think this summary of Neville's methodology makes comparative philosophical and religious inquiry seem very complex. It is! As a systematic philosopher Neville is demanding. He insists we move in all three directions simultaneously, whenever we try to navigate the distance between one culture and another. The degree of complexity means that even though Neville is a self-described systematic philosopher, he insists that his efforts at comparative philosophy are necessarily ad hoc. In an effort to avoid totalizing language, Neville approaches the task of comparative philosophy one problem or question at a time. A quick review of the topics in Boston Confucianism, for example, will reveal that Neville approaches Confucianism via a series of careful analyses of different motifs. Each chapter is added to the former, but there is no attempt to draw it all together into a single coherent vision. Sheer complexity, and pragmatic epistemology counsel comparative philosophers to adopt an attitude of humility when faced with the tasks before us. Humility, however, is not the same as hopelessness. Neville's theories are built on the optimistic assumption that there is nothing magical about the interpretive process. To get from one culture to another we need cultivate only the power of abstraction and a sympathetic ear. The abstractions are necessary to create a vantage point from which to surmount the historical and cultural differences that separate us. The sympathetic ear is needed so that we remain capable of learning from others new ways of seeing ourselves and the world.

172

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Acknowledgments Special thanks go to the Neo-Confucian Seminar group at Columbia University where parts of this paper were first presented. The comments and questions that were raised at that session led to several important improvements in this paper's argument and structure. Thanks also go to Kevin Schilbrack who read and commented upon a different version that was presented to the Highlands Institute for American Philosophical and Religious Thought.

NOTES 1

Francois Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995). 2 Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the LateModern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) ; Normative Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Behind the Masks of God: An Essay toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Recovery of the Measure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); The Puritan Smile (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); The Tao and theDaimon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982); Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981); Soldier, Sage, Saint (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978). 3 At the highest level of interpretive sophistication known to humankind there are long-time spouses and life partners who can tell by the way a door opens or an article of clothing has been hung in the closet precisely what the evening's conversation will bring. 4 Neville, The Highroad around Modernism, 146. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 160. 7 Warren Frisina, "Metaphysics and Comparative Philosophy," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 9:3 (1995): 189-207, esp. 197. 8 Robert Cummings Neville, "On the Relation of Christian to Other Philosophies," in Alistair Kee and Eugene T. Long, eds., Being and Truth: Essays in Honor of John Macquarrie (London: SCM Press, 1986), 276-92, quote from 281. 9 In "On the Relation of Christian to Other Philosophies," 283, Neville writes: I propose that the question of the comparative truth of philosophical and religious claims be addressed by relating the context in which the claim is made to the potentially universal abstract level of metaphysics. In particular, I recommend that we treat assertions of all types less abstract than metaphysics as specifications of metaphysics, as ways of making a metaphysical system applicable to a concrete context. This will not affect the truth of the assertions which must be justified by whatever is appropriate to their context. Nor will it affect the truth of the metaphysical system. What the relation of the assertion to metaphysics

THE ART OF COMPARATIVE ENGAGEMENT

173

will do, however, is to provide a commensurating map by which various assertions, various philosophies, various articulated experiences, can be brought into juxtaposition. It would be possible then to tell whether the assertions are in agreement, contradiction, overlap, whether they express different perspectives on the same phenomena, and so forth. The result of this is that we can then accept the contextual relativity of truth claims, and even of experience without inferring that they are therefore subjective. Their truth depends on context, and their context can be related to other contexts. 10

Frisina, "Metaphysics a n d Comparative Philosophy," 197. Neville, Behind the Masks of God, 158-63. 12 "Religion can b e defined h e r e , provisionally, as t h e (1) ritual life; (2) mythic, cosmological, a n d philosophic conceptions; a n d (3) spiritual practices, b o t h c o r p o r a t e a n d individual, by m e a n s of which p e o p l e relate to what they take to b e ultimate" (Neville, Boston Confucianism, 61). Neville is clearly following Tillich in this definition, b u t adds his own special twist by b r i n g i n g t h e focus o n ritual, cognitive a n d spiritual practices. 13 Ibid., 64-65. 11

14

Ibid., 70.

12

Immortality

Livia Kohn

We try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of our existence, to trap moments before they evancesce, to untangle the confusion of the past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing. - Isabel Allende, Portrait in Sepia

Immortality is counter factual. Nothing exists or lasts forever. Things decay, affairs decline, trees wither, people die. Immortality is a fantasy, born from a mixture of awareness and denial - the awareness that things change and decline and move into different states, coupled with the denial that any form of decay or destruction would ever happen to me. Immortality is a rejection of history and of evolution, a wish for things - or at least some things - to stay the same, a feeling of permanence, of lasting stability in one form or another. Despite ample evidence to the contrary and the frequent confrontation with the facts of change and transformation, immortality has been and still is a strong theme in human culture. Transcending categories, it lies both in the realm of ultimate reality and forms an essential part of the human condition. It is

176

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

envisioned variously and pursued with many different means: there is cultural immortality, achieved through the creation of lasting works of architecture, art, literature, or philosophy; reproductive immortality through the procreation of heirs and family lineages; physical immortality by extending the life of this body for prolonged periods and even eternity; biological immortality through cloning and the continuation of one's own being in another body; energetic immortality by seeing oneself as a combination of energies that flow along and change but will in and of themselves exist forever; mystical immortality in the understanding that one's self and body are part of the universe and, once fully at one with it, will never die; and divine immortality, the realization that one is ultimately not a body, family, culture, or energetic flow but an immortal soul, part of the divinity that creates and rules all, and as such indestructible and forever. Immortality, besides being unreal, is thus a culturally defined phenomenon, closely linked with the understanding of each individual's self and personhood. No two immortalities are ever exactly the same, even though people may subscribe to highly similar patterns. Immortality is not just for a long time, it is forever. It is essentially without compromise, although there are degrees of development towards it. Longevity, for example, is a clear step in the direction of physical immortality: one lives for an extended span and attains old age while yet remaining full of vigor. Similarly, creativity is part of cultural immortality in that only by being creative - and ideally remaining so for a long time - can one attain the cultural impact needed. Similarly prosperity is a stepping stone towards reproductive or biological immortality, creating the means by which one can raise a large and successful family a n d / o r procure the medical procedures needed for cloning. Similarly, spirituality and a sense of connection to the cosmos or the deity form a prerequisite for mystical or divine immortality. Immortality, then, is present latently in these various characteristics of human life and culture, yet it is none of them. It is not something easily achieved or obviously gained, nothing given despite the fact that the denial of our own death, the impossibility to think of ourselves as being not, is so entrenched that immortality may even be seen as an inherent human fantasy and part of the human condition. Immortality is unthinkable. It may be felt as a dire wish, a need for permanence, but it cannot be properly imagined - thinking of ourselves as being forever turns out to be just as impossible as thinking of ourselves as being not. What we can think of is being

IMMORTALITY

177

around in one form or another for an extended period, even for a very long time. Instead of living eighty years, we can think of living to 120, the biological limit of the human life span and, according to some cultures, our original birthright. We can think of ourselves as having numerous descendants who flourish over the centuries; we can even imagine joining the deity in a heavenly realm for an extensive stay . . . but eternity? Never ending? Without change or death? To imagine the truly changeless, even if it is only our own self that does not change towards decay, is quite beyond our imagination, and what part of it we can imagine quickly turns scary and threatening. What if I am around for several hundred years? What would I do with myself? What if my body is frozen now and I wake up in a century? How can I adjust to the new culture? What if indeed my ideas and works are the standard forever - forever? Wouldn't that impede progress? What if my soul, the light of the deity, rests in eternity? Rest? As in "sleep"? Or what would it/I be doing? Is that soul still me? What kind of identity is there in the long, no, the eternal run? Can I as I truly survive and if so, wouldn't it be a curse? Human visions of immortality have explored all these different venues, and immortality when imagined with all consequence has tended to be frightening rather than encouraging or comforting. Imagination has created people who have returned from the dead and cannot die. They are immortals but did not want this state and find their new position horrible, seeing death as a merciful end to things. Well-known examples are the zombies of Voodoo and the vampires of Eastern Europe and popular fiction. But there are others such as, for example, Ann Rice's eternal pharao in The Mummy, Richard BenSapir's revived gladiator in The Far Arena, and George Bernard Shaw's Fifth Earl of Hauberk in After Many a Summer. None of them are happy people. The mummy Ramses II is desperate to revive his beloved Cleopatra on whom the sacred elixir works only partially; the gladiator cannot adjust to the twentieth century; and the Fifth Earl while living to over 200 has regressed to an ape: "His legs, thickly covered with a coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy... He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands, he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf." All this does not even begin to tell of the confusion and difficulty the people around these immortals experience, confronted with

178

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

someone who is not subjected to the same limitations and does not share the same perspectives, living literally in a different world. Thus zombies and vampires, ghosts and specters, and all other creatures that manage to break the mortal mold, are hated and feared as both superhuman and less than human. They have to be put to death violently and with force, not only to ensure their peace in death but also to restore the equilibrium among the living - the limited living, that is. Is immortality, then, impossible? Should we just free ourselves from the fantasy and be done with it? Give up and live as happily as possible for the limited time we have? Certainly not, the immortalists answer, a group of twentieth-century scientists who believe that old age is a disease to be cured and that human beings with the help of genetic engineering and medical techniques can live for several hundred years and even forever. The immortalist movement began in the 1960s with Wilson Ettinger, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan who was injured in World War II. Hospitalized for three years, he had ample opportunity to confront his death and decided that he wanted to live forever, then set out to find the means to do so. He wrote The Prospect of Immortality to outline his vision, thereby beginning a cultural trend that is still flourishing. Today, after Ettinger's passing, this trend is most prominently represented by Alan Harrington, author of The Immortalist. The immortalists' argument against the naturalness of old age and death grows from the continuous increase in life expectancy over the past millennia. After all, in ancient Greece people on average only lived for twenty-two years, and even a hundred years ago the median life expectancy was forty-six, as opposed to the eighties in industrialized countries today. Of course, these numbers reflect a high infant mortality rate in earlier centuries, and individuals even in traditional cultures made it to sixty, seventy, or eighty. But this does not deny the fact that today people live longer, stay young into older years, and that the fastest growing segment of the population in the industrialized world are the centenarians - Queen Elisabeth II, who writes a personal note to every one of her subjects who celebrates his or her hundredth birthday, only wrote about 300 cards a year just twenty years ago. Now she, or rather her staff, have to send out several thousand annually, and the numbers are rising - leading, potentially, to the demise of the practice. Immortalists, bolstered by these statistics, embrace the idea that there is an inbuilt clock of aging in every person. They strive

IMMORTALITY

179

to discover its location and mechanism, then work to slow it down or stop it altogether. The recent mapping of the human genome has given them much support, as have studies on human growth hormones, the effect of very low calorie diets on mice and men, and the increasing health benefits of work-outs in western society. Immortalists hope to see everyone attain a very long life and eventually grow into immortality. They argue that survival is a key feature of nature, that the death of cells is very slow and can and should be slowed down even more. They take the scare out of immortality by making it a universal and general feature. No longer are immortals freaks who are different and alien and threatening, but our entire society grows into advanced old age, centenarian living, and eventually the state of no-death. Immortalists see this as a very positive development, indeed. After all, with people living longer and remaining youthful and active, wouldn't the problems of the planet and our society stand a much better chance of solution, considering that people will be around long enough to see the disastrous impact of present-day decisions? Wouldn't there be more balanced moral values, since people living for long periods would have to realize that doing things that are good for oneself had better also benefit others? Wouldn't people take less risks and move with more caution, since they would have so much more life to lose? And wouldn't we all have so much more fun, so much more freedom, and a great deal less urgency to get things done? Not so fast, say opponents of the immortality program. They warn that extending human life into unknown dimensions is tampering with nature and can have many unexpected side-effects; that long life and immortality are good only as long as one has youth and vigor. After all, didn't Tithonus, a prince of Troy in Greek myth, have his wish for immortality granted by the goddess Aurora but forgot to ask for youth and vigor? And see what happened to him! He vegetated forever as an old man until he was eventually rescued by being transformed into a grasshopper and allowed to die. Then, again, what would people do with all the time they have on their hands. Even today people get bored by age forty and barely make it to seventy, let alone 170. More of the same, every year, the next year, and on for many more years - why bother? And, of course, this thing about the reduction of urgency. It's bad enough today if you want to get some work done tomorrow. What if your plumber or computer man lived to 200 and had absolutely no

180

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

reason to work today - mariana forever? No more repairs? No more progress? And the idea of more caution: aren't we strangulated by safety regulations already? Living even longer would make people overprotective to the point where they would only venture out wearing padded clothes and face masks! These attitude changes aside, a longer-lived population, as we are already starting to experience, at least in the short run means a drastic increase in population. More pollution, diminishing resources, less social security money, retirement benefits stretched to the limit. Except, of course, that retirement wouldn't happen at sixty-five or seventy any more, people would work far into their eighties and nineties - taking jobs away from younger folks who, too, expect to have very long and fruitful careers. The latter, come to think of it, could be eased by creating a whole new life cycle: be young and in education for the first sixty years (attend college for ten or twenty years instead of four), go to work for the next sixty, and spend another sixty in retirement - or any number of years: eighty, a hundred, two hundred. Society would change. With so much time to live, people would not have one or two families, but - given the divorce rate - three or four, adding enormous complexity to relationships and family structures. In the longer run, birth control would become essential, and new arrivals on the planet would have to be strictly limited, bringing society into a state of managed care, as described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with its official predestinators and already practiced in Communist China where couples have to have a permit to get pregnant. At the other end of life, with people not dying naturally anymore, exit strategies would need to be developed and suicide education provided. After all, it is always possible that someone, even presented with the opportunity to go on forever, might not want to and needs a way out. Or that society, following the model of some prehistoric groups described in myths and tales, makes the decision for them: you've been around long enough, time to make room. Whether it's an automatic death sentence at a certain age or a form of euthanasia by sifting out weaker and less productive specimens, death would have to be controlled - or, in the case of true immortality, birth would have to be prohibited. Immortalists are not scared by these scenarios. They claim that consciousness will adjust to the new realities and develop new standards. People will grow older while remaining healthier, they will work longer years and be more productive, and methods of replacing

IMMORTALITY

181

body parts, cloning oneself, and deep-freezing the body until science is ready for the new you will happen anyway as research goes on. We are on the fast track to immortality, and nothing will stop us. A completely different take on the immortality issue is found among religious seekers who pursue mystical or divine immortality. As is well known, human beings have the capability to experience an altered state of consciousness that puts them in a position beyond their limited selves and in direct contact with the underlying power of the cosmos, be it conceived of as an ongoing energetic flow such as the Dao, or an unchanging deity such as God or Brahman. The so-called mystical experience is ineffable and defies expression in common terms; it has a noetic quality, giving the person a firm sense of knowing the truth and the acquisition of new wisdom; it is shortlived and cannot be sustained for long; it is passive in that it cannot be actively induced and all one can do is make oneself prone; it provides a sense of oneness, of being united with everything in the universe and with its creator; it is timeless in that the experiencer feels that he or she has reached an eternal now beyond space and time; and it creates a feeling that the personal self, ego, or identity is unreal, that there is a true self that is deeper and wider and more divine in nature. Through this kind of mystical or altered-self experience the person gains the firm knowledge that his or her true self, envisioned as a spirit entity or an immoral soul, will always live on. It might remain as part of the deity, it might be an astral phenomenon, it might come to rest in the nonexistence of nirvana, it might merge with the One, or it might continue along its journey through different realms by being reborn in this world or another. Different levels of spirit existence are commonly known. As described by the mystic Martinus and recorded in Nils-Olof Jacobsen's Life without Death? (1974), the most basic is the astral or first sphere, just one level up from the human, where the soul or spirit first goes after the death of body. This realm can be previewed in dreams and consciously accessed with the help of spiritual practices. It has some unhappy dead in it, such as ghosts and demons who still try to contact and influence the human world by appearing as spooks and poltergeists. Most people access this realm for a limited time in dreams and after death, moving on from there either to be reborn or attain higher levels. The astral realm is emotionally charged. Neither absurd nor threatening, it forms a bridge between the physical and spiritual levels of reality, a first step towards a life that is free from the

182

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

body and moves more along the lines of mind and spirit. Beyond the astral is the second or mental sphere where reality is much more fluid and open to change, where the mind has predominance and denizens can create their own environment by mere thought or desire - a power also found among advanced spiritual practitioners on the physical plane but which takes that much more effort and more time while still embodied. The main characteristic of the mental sphere is the ubiquity of a balanced mind and a strong search for knowledge, both practical and theoretical. The only emotion left here is love joined by compassion. Above this is what mystics call the causal level, a state of being that is entirely intuitive, where knowledge comes easily, in nonlinear patterns and large chunks, where diagrams and symbols and mysterious scripts predominate over linear thought and the written word. Knowledge is imprinted immediately on the pure mind, then analyzed and understood; there is total apperception without the need to translate anything into linear forms. On the human plane, this level is manifest in spontaneous insights and intuitions. One may have a certain amount of information on the details of a question or problem, then get a flash of insight from what appears to be a higher level in a moment of relaxation. Suddenly the sky opens, all is clear, and one has the feeling of true knowledge and universal vision in a brief moment that is like a mystical experience. The mind is projected for a moment into the causal level. Entering an altered state of consciousness, the person experiences a suspension of subjective time and gains insights into the workings of the cosmos. Immortality in this mystic or divine vision takes place on all these levels. It can be accessed through spiritual practice in this life and forms the main area of existence after the body has fallen away. The higher realms are the true home of the spirit or the soul, immortal entities from the beginning that are only on a temporary excursion in the embodied life. Immortality in this form is our birthright, inalienable, never to be lost - although it, too, can turn into a curse when the immortal soul is condemned to an eternity of suffering in the depth of hell. The conviction of being originally an immortal soul creates a strong incentive for spiritual development and people who firmly believe in it tend to become more altruistic and exhibit less urgency. They see all manifest existence as only temporary and not ultimately real, yet often strive to make the world a better place for the attainment of cosmic vision. A good example of what the world looks like from the spirit

IMMORTALITY

183

immortality perspective is found in Deepak Chopra's The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1994). His first law is the "Law of Pure Potentiality," which means that our essential nature is the pure consciousness of the universe, infinite and unbounded, invincible and eternal. We are nothing but the embodiment of true spirit and as such "immune to criticism, unfearful of any challenge, and beneath no one." Being one with this inner truth, people will be free from guilt, fear, insecurity, and easily fulfill their desires. To activate the spirit within, moreover, people should follow the other laws which emphasize giving, karmic awareness, naturalness, detachment, and letting-go, and seek a purpose in life that is in line with their unique talents and favored activities. He claims that by living a life in accordance with the laws and by realizing the true immortal nature of ourselves, we can be successful beyond our wildest dreams and will be rich and famous and happy throughout. The immortality of the spirit manifests equally in an immortality through achievement, posterity, and lasting impact on the world. While this sounds delightful and seems to offer a wonderful way of being immortal in this world, there are several problems with this vision. One is that to find one's true self or immortal spirit, a strong inner focus is necessary, gained through the practice of silence and meditation. Long periods of introspection are required which may not only be difficult to organize in our busy lives but may also present challenges of their own that may be hard to overcome. Another problem is the question of when and where I have finally found my "true self." Is it that fearless and radical entity that proposes to lead the world into the next millennium? Or is it that withdrawing, quiet part of me that just wishes to sit in a cave and meditate? The world is full of spiritual seekers who find a divine mission and proceed to create cults or other organizations that do more harm than good - all in the name of divine truth and the reality of their immortal self. At the same time, a large number of people who just sit and contemplate their inner beauty will make the functioning of society that much more difficult. An immortal society, moreover, along this model would consist entirely of spirit entities interacting with other spirit entities, each according to his or her own sense of cosmic potentiality and through expression of his or her own talents. Maybe this is the way to an ideal world, maybe not. A yet different form of immortality could be called post-mortem immortality. It is both physical and spiritual and involves both the belief in an original immortal state and the need for personal effort.

184

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

This is the immortality found in Daoism. Here immortals are of two kinds: either uncreated or created, born from pure celestial energies or transformed from a human base. Celestial immortals include the pure gods of the Dao, who stand beyond nature at the root of existence and represent the heavens and scriptures of the religion. Transformed immortals, on the other hand, are human beings who, either by taking a cinnabar elixir or through a variety of practices, including diets, breathing, gymnastics, sexual techniques, and meditations, have found access to the realm of the Dao and succeeded in transforming themselves completely. In either case, immortals are part of the pure level of the Dao at the root of creation and beyond the yin-yang division of the world. Standing alone and beyond the mutuality of human relationships, they are physical beings but of a more subtle nature than ordinary people. No longer yin or yang, immortals even in their physicality are beyond either, having bodies of ultimate yang energy that makes up the root of all other energies and is part of the cosmic origins. To transcend to this level, human beings - who consist of a lucky mix of yin and yang - have to undergo long periods of physical and meditational practices to transform to increasingly purer levels of yang and eventually go beyond all. After having created a new, transcendent type of body, they pass through death, the gateway to the otherworld, experiencing it as the falling-away of their human form, shedding the body like the skin of a cicada to allow the free flight of the immortal entity within. Even after having reached the otherworld as a being of pure yang, however, efforts do not cease. Rather, immortals in the Daoist cosmos have to work, serve as officials in an extensive otherworldly administration that imitates the civil service on earth. The successfully transformed Daoist immortal is accordingly given a position in the celestial hierarchy which monitors people's good and bad deeds and adds or subtracts days from their life spans as rewards and punishments. Unless well connected to the leaders of the supernatural realm, a beginning immortal will first serve in the so-called Six Palaces of Fengdu, hell-type places where the ordinary dead are managed and punished for their sins. The palaces have picturesque names, such as Palace of Infamy and Death, Palace of the Destruction of Faith, and Palace of the Seven Ancestral Misdeeds. Their immortal officers hold low rank and work hard to gain a firm foothold on the bureaucratic ladder that will lead to the higher realms through

IMMORTALITY

185

centuries of dedicated service. Moving up through the ranks, immortals may come to serve in the higher levels of the supernatural administration. These consist of three offices: - an office on the left managing people who have committed yang transgressions, such as killing, theft of religious valuables, unwarranted leakage of sacred texts, as well as cursing and swearing; - an office on the right ruling over those committing yin transgressions, which include harboring schemes, disobedience, planning to harm others, and never remembering the Dao; - a central office governing all those who transgress because of doubt and duplicity; sins include lack of reverence and faith in heavenly perfection, desecration of heavenly treasures, thoughts of removing the scriptures, or of defiling perfected writings. Each of these offices controls a big staff, including managers, secretaries, divine guards, bailiffs, runners, and other office personnel. In addition, they also extend their supervision to earth, where in all nine prefectures and centered in the grottoes of the five sacred mountains, a vast supernatural staff resides, typically including 120 officials, 1,200 bailiffs, and 50,000 troops. All these supernatural administrators are immortals who supervise the living and the dead, keeping them in the rebirth cycle for thousands of kalpas while periodically renewing their punishments of pain and torture. After serving for a goodly time in these various administrative offices, the Daoist immortal may ascend to the higher reaches of the Dao, the realm of the planets and the Dipper, where everyone lives forever in celestial bliss and whose administration resides in the so-called Southern Palace. Here he or she enjoys the company of the senior deities of the religion, joins the uncreated, pure immortals of the Dao, and relaxes in heavenly splendor, dressing in pure, oscillating energies, partaking of immortal fruit, and reciting immortal poems. This state, then, neither boring nor laborious, neither physical nor spiritual, neither of this world nor entirely separate from it, is the ideal state of being, a permanence that is yet deeply imbued by change, a physicality that is yet strongly energetic and spiritual, an individuality that is yet closely connected to other beings and the Dao. But does one have to go through millennia of administrative drudgery to get there? Not necessarily. Reaching for the higher

186

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

states, would-be-immortals on the human plane have devised certain shortcuts, making use of the administrative system in their favor. Realizing that immortality is essentially a bureaucratic act, they found ways to simply have their name removed from the registers of the dead in the Six Palaces and entered into the ledgers of life in the Southern Palace. Religious ritual is key to this effort. It allows adepts to engage in direct contact with the otherworldly powers and implore them to make the necessary bureaucratic changes. Here is an example of a suitable prayer: Oh, Yang Brightness of Mystery Pivot, Spirit Soul and Spirit of the Heavenly Pivot! Oh, Nine Lords of Highest Mystery Merge and transform into one single spirit! Cut off my route to death at the Gate of Demons, Open my registers of life in the Southern Palace! Let my spirit souls be free from the three bad rebirths, Let me come to life again as an immortal! (Tianguan sandu, "Three Ways of Going beyond the Heavenly Pass")

The religious practice that goes with an incantation like this is twofold: a visualization of the divine representatives of the Dao and an ecstatic excursion to the heavenly abodes. Visualization typically begins with a period of purification (bathing, abstention, fasting) and takes place in a so-called quiet chamber where the adept burns incense, bows to the ten directions, claps his teeth to indicate his readiness for contact with the divine, and loosens his clothing to settle on a meditation cushion before a small altar table. Then he visualizes either the seven gods of the Dipper stars, the Jade Emperor with his entourage, or Lord Lao surrounded by the four sacred animals - tigers and dragons formed by starry constellations. The gods descend to hover above the adept and offer protection, join him to raise him to a celestial level. They may also communicate with him, describe for him the delights of heaven, the ranks and orders of the immortals, or again take him along to visit the celestial realm. Visits to the otherworld often start with a tour around the far reaches of the earth to move on to an imitation of the planets' movements, especially of the sun and the moon, in an effort to make one's body into a replica of the universe and gain control over its rhythm. Once perfectly aligned, adepts reach out to visit the higher spheres of the planets and superior heavens to eventually approach the central axis of the world at the Dipper. Here they establish

IMMORTALITY

187

themselves in the quiet center of the Dao, around which everything else revolves, thus becoming one with the root of creation. On their way, moreover, they encounter numerous gods and immortals, from whom they learn the secrets of the Dao and receive instructions for further attainment. By ecstatically traveling through the cosmos, adepts thus turn themselves increasingly into denizens of the otherworld, often finding their heavenly life more rewarding and more real than their existence on earth. Eventually they shed their mortal coil to accept an official post among immortals, preferably on the higher rungs of the divine administration. They work hard for their immortality, both on earth and after death, yet they are assured of their success since they have the seed of the pure Dao within them, a passport to the immortal life that is granted to everyone by nature of their very being. They enjoy the physicality of embodiment in a setting that is yet completely beyond the heavy materiality of earth; they relish the power of pure spirit, the ability to think and create objects and situations at will. They do not pass up anything in either this world or the other, wanting it all and keeping it all - forever. Among all immortal fantasies, the Daoist is the most radical and the most colorful, encompassing the heaviest mythological detail. It is also the most versatile in that it allows for differing levels of physicality and pure spirit, and joins spheres of work and service with realms of empowerment and relaxation. Yet in its essence it is like the other visions of immortality: the complete coincidence of ultimate transcendence with human embodiment or, to express it more mundanely, the attempt to eat one's cake and have it too. Among all religious phenomena, immortality is intensely fascinating because of its inherent absurdity and yet pervasive power in human life, not only among religions but also other sectors of the world. The desire to remain alive and active in one form or another, to enjoy the pleasures of existence while avoiding its pitfalls and losses, is pervasive and universal. It forms an essential component of the human condition and leads to different visions of ultimate reality beyond decay, demise, and destruction. Whether pursued in the physical body, as a divine spirit, or in a mythical otherworld, immortality is a ubiquitous human desire that has led to some of the most edifying and most gruesome visions of humanity, bringing out extremes in people and leading societies to some amazing achievements. All that despite its inherent absurdity and counterfactual nature - or is it maybe because of it?

13

The Economy of Cosmic Power: A Vision for a Daoist Theology of Religion

James Miller

One of Robert Cummings Neville's lasting achievements, apart from presenting a new and novel argument for the existence of God and participating in the resurrection of Charles Sanders Pierce, has been the dogged persistence with which he has pursued the study of religion in order to divine the truth about ultimate reality. Such truth is disclosed in the complex cultural codes by which people engage in religious practice, but is not completely exhausted or explained by such symbolic constructs. For Neville, this superabundance of meaning cannot be explained by reference to an infinitely deep web of cultural significations endlessly referring to each other in a mystical, Derridean, jewel-net of Indra, but rather points toward the power of ultimate reality which those cultural conventions engage. Religious cultures are thus not to be seen solely as diverse systems of meaning and identity - though they are that too - but also as cultural institutions for human engagement with ultimate reality. The study of Daoism benefits from this Nevillean approach to religion because Daoism takes as its foundation not the mythical narrative of some sky-dwelling persona, but the natural power of transformation that lies within our bodies, our environment and the stars in the sky, and which ultimately enfolds us in a transcendent matrix of cosmic creativity known as Dao. Although Daoism did

190

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

develop complex mythologies, particularly surrounding the figures of Laozi, Lu Dongbin or Zhang Sanfeng, these immortal figures and deities are not seen as the foundation of the universe nor as the foundation of Daoism. Rather Daoist religion fundamentally takes place in reference to a non-personal unitary creative power that is understood as transcending its various temporal and spatial instantiations. For this reason, Daoist studies finds itself in somewhat of a different space than many religious traditions where myths of gods who found the world take center stage. Such religious traditions can readily be interpreted as complex cultural entities where ritual action takes place in reference to mythic narratives that form the shared identity of the religious group. But in Daoism the meaning of a ritual action, such as a particular hand gesture given by a Daoist nun, may not be readily explainable by reference to any cultural or mythic context. Such a gesture is rather to be interpreted in accordance with the systems of vital power (qi) that pervade the body, and how that particular gesture stimulates the flow of qi in a particular way. Such rituals, Daoists claim, are not efficacious because they refer to the complex symbolic structures of Chinese mythic consciousness, but rather because they stimulate specific physiological or energetic conditions within the body. One result of this phenomenon is that the study of Daoism finds itself somewhat marginalized in the academy precisely because this aspect of Daoist ritual resists the usual sinological or religious studies attempts to interpret Chinese religion in terms of Chinese culture and history. All this is not to discount the many ways in which Daoist religion functions in ways that are extremely well understood by traditional approaches to the study of religion and sinology. Rather it is to suggest that such explanations do not readily explain this natural claim made by Daoist practitioners. Such a claim is not founded upon the particularities of Chinese culture but on the universality of the human condition, and in particular the universal framework for experience provided by the human body.1 It might be argued that all claims about the naturalness of some reality are in themselves cultural claims,2 but the Daoist claim to naturalness is grounded in the universal lived experience of the human body and is particularly difficult to discount in purely cultural terms. Although Daoist interpretations of such experiences are articulated in reference to a sophisticated cultural view of the body, such cultural interpretations are not the same as the implicit claim of the naturalness and universality of its

THE ECONOMY OF COSMIC POWER

191

underlying principles. Moreover, this is a different claim than the Christian claim that Jesus will save you from the fires of hell, because that claim is grounded chiefly in faith, that is, in an expectation of some future event;3 but the Daoist claim is grounded in the present reality of transformation. This particular feature of the Daoist experience suggests a new theory of religions, not in a grand sense, but in the Nevillean sense of a new way of looking at this aspect of religious data that is able to account for the natural claims made by Daoists in natural, that is, metaphysical terms. 4 But before explaining this theoria, it is worthwhile to review a similar problem encountered by Emile Durkheim in his conclusion to the Elementary Forms of Religious Life. There Durkheim wants to know why religion persists as a social fact. His explanation is that individuals seek to locate themselves in a social, i.e., religious, situation in order to be better able to live life: the faithful person "who has communed with his god is not simply a man who sees new truths that the unbeliever knows not; he is a man who is stronger"5 As the translator notes, the French original for this phrase is "qui pent davantage" (original emphasis). To the religious person who is "more able," real power is imparted. Durkheim's theory is that this real power is located collectively in society and is represented in the web of symbols or collective representations that constitutes such a society. The problem with Durkheim's theory is that a symbol or an idea cannot of itself add power to human life: "As rich in emotive power as an idea may be, it cannot add anything to our natural vitality; it can only release emotive forces that are already within us, neither creating nor increasing them." 6 Note also that, in another context, Durkheim rejects the animistic explanation of religion because he does not believe that a religion founded on the idea of an imaginary soul could perdure as religions obviously have done. 7 If religions have persisted, there must be some real power that they place at the disposal of their adherents, otherwise people should not continue to practice religion. For Durkheim, the source of this vital power is society itself, the "objective, universal, and eternal cause of those sui generis sensations of which religious experience is made." 8 But Durkheim famously defines society as the "idea it has of itself,"9 a definition that renders his explanation of the experience of religious power implausible: how can an idea impart an actual power that is more persistent than a mere emotional reaction? My argument is that a fruitful strategy for explaining the power of

192

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Daoist rituals lies not in understanding them as social-cultural signs, but as transactions within an economy of cosmic power. To investigate this aspect of Daoism, therefore, is to investigate the nature of the relationship between an individual and the cosmic field of power that forms his or her cosmological context. Such a relationship may be denominated as an economy of cosmic power formed by the transactions between a person and the cosmic environment. This cosmic environment within which such transactions take place is formed by horizons of what is ultimately important for that person. Just as there is a wide diversity of people and cultures in the world, so there is a wide diversity of "fields" that inform, structure and delimit what is important for people. This is the basis for the diversity of religious expressions in the world. But the common structure of human life also places certain limits on this diversity: all of us have bodies, and all of us die. These two common features, embodiment and mortality, describe what is universally and ultimately important for human beings, and together form the cosmic-environmental matrix that births the particular identities of human beings, and which structures and limits our existential location in spatial terms (the body) and in temporal terms (birth-death). These two axes, the spatial axis of the body-environment, and the temporal matrix of lifetime, together constitute the ontogenetic matrix of each individual life. In Chinese terms, this ontogenetic matrix is known as the Dao. This ontogenetic matrix is universal in that it informs and enfolds all life. But it is also diverse in that each person's dao, the structures of their environment and time, is unique. Daodejing chapter 25 offers a terse outline of how human beings are situated within the spatio-temporal matrix of the Dao. Humans model earth. Earth models Heaven. Heaven models dao. Dao models its own nature. (Author's trans.) This text denotes the structure of relations that obtains between human beings and their environing cosmic context. Firstly, "humans model earth." This refers to the cosmological structuring of spatial, physical location: humans are biological beings whose life is limited and enabled by their being embodied. Human life is contingent upon the life processes of the earth, its ecology and environment. Next, "earth models heaven." This denotes the temporal structuring

THE ECONOMY OF COSMIC POWER

193

of all biological life. The heavens mark and control our destiny, understood chiefly as the time of our birth and death. We look to the sun and the stars to mark the seasons and the years that circumscribe all biological life. With these two elements in place, the "spatial" configuring of the body and the "temporal" configuring of time and death, we have a picture of the universal pattern of a cosmological matrix ("heaven follows dad') that configures the two ultimately important axes of human life. The Way is thus the process of transformation within which all biological life functions and which orders the heavenly, temporal destiny of human beings. Finally the text notes that "Dao models its own nature." This suggests firstly that the Dao transcends all the phenomena within the world - that the Dao takes nothing as its model except itself. It also denotes the recursive nature of the Daoist cosmos whereby the unitary, transcendent Dao is microcosmically and hologrammatically reproduced in the particular daos of each life-matrix. Each microb o reproduces the macro-Dao, taking it (self) as its own nature. This recursion is also explained in Daodejing chapter 42: Dao engenders one, one engenders two, two engenders three, three engenders the ten thousand living things. Note that the one does not divide (Jen) into the two but gives birth (sheng) to the two. At each point in this cosmogonie movement a recursive act takes place. Dao stands for the principle of recursive generativi ty that produces the one. The one then takes up into itself this principle and produces two. The two then takes up into itself the one and produces the three, and so on. At each stage there appears to be more than there was before.10 In this Daoist scheme, however, this recursive process is not to be taken as the moment of creation that stands at the beginning of time, but as the principle of creativity inherent in every moment of time. The macro-Dao, as the principle of recursion, unites all that has gone before together with the possibility of all future creativity into itself as a foundational cosmic structure that constitutes a diversity of dynamic fields of potentiality, the micro-daos that are constantly self-so (ziran). The dynamics of religious transaction depend on the possibility of the negotiation of the status of the body within its own cosmic field (dao). In Daoist religion, this negotiation took place in two modes, one

194

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

in reference chiefly to the heavens and one in reference chiefly to the earth. The purpose of negotiating with heaven was to alter one's temporal destiny, either by extending the years of one's life, or by attaining some transcendent state after death. Daoist texts, prayers and incantations, constantly refer to the desire of Daoist adepts to extend their lifespan or to undergo some sort of temporal transfiguration. Such a material desire might seem religiously childish, like a child asking Santa Claus for a new toy. Yet the Daoist tradition forces scholars with insistent regularity to confront this "cosmic secularity" of religion. When Daoist adepts recite prayers from the Scripture of the Yellow Court while engaging in the visualization of deities in the body, their goal is that "my person will not wither."11 This is not the same as praying that one will be delivered into the realm of eternal paradise after the "end" of secular time, but rather a prayer that the cosmic structures that shape the times of one's life and death be altered within the secular world. Highly complex cultural forms emerged within the Daoist tradition that sought to negotiate the framework of life and death by appeal to a vast array of celestial beings who were the cultural embodiment of the natural power of the heavens, that is, of time. These rituals of salvation can be interpreted in terms of the cultural realities of China's imperial court, but the underlying theology of negotiating with time can best be explained by appeal to the underlying cosmological principles. The second mode of negotiation or religious transaction concerns the Daoist's physical body in its immediate environment. The nature of this meditation is both physiological as well as psychological, aiming to transfigure the vital power that flows through the body into an everrefined, more subtle form of qi This type of meditation can in theory be carried out anywhere, but Daoists sought to situate themselves in environments, notably caves or grottos, which seem to be particularly conducive to Daoist meditation. Unlike many religions where ritual space is portable and humanly constructed (which is certainly true of many Daoist rituals), some Daoist practices seem best to be served by a "natural sacred space," that is a particular environmental location that is of cosmological benefit to human beings. Most frequently these spaces take the form of mountain caves. The Chinese word for such caverns or grottoes (dong) can be interpreted by reference to a close homonym meaning communication ( tong). Caves thus function as spaces where the individual is able to have communicative access to the hidden realms of the cosmos, to the deeper recesses of cosmic power and creativity. Such caves do not seem to be chosen primarily

THE ECONOMY OF COSMIC POWER

195

because of their particular cultural meaning or the history associated with them, but because of the quality of space or environment that they afford to the Daoist practitioner. One scholar has written that they seem to be living and breathing features of the natural landscape that closely mirror the Daoist vision of human physiology: Despite a singular solidity, their physical permeability in terms of air- and water-flow reflects the inner workings of the human body. Blood equals water; air equals breath. Spermatic liquids form pools; walls constitute shapes like inner organs or viscera. Their resident, left windowless and in an enclosed void, experiences the dignity of complete independence and autarky.12 Such caves thus form the living matrix or womb within which the adept can engage in the cultivation of her body in hologrammatic, recursive relationship to its dao. It is also important to note that many forms of Daoist cultivation should not, strictly speaking, be referred to as s^cultivation. The correct Daoist term is xiudao - cultivation of one's dao. Daoists are not New-Age self-obsessed, self-referential postmodern Westerners. They are engaged in the cultivation of transcendent potential within their cosmic context, their dao. These forms of cosmic harmony are not purely cultural harmonies, nor are they purely transcendental fantasies, but are concretely implicated in natural principles of physiology, geography and astronomy. 13 Can this theoria of Daoist religion be applied also to the study of non-Daoist religions? The cosmic materiality of religion is in fact a firm basis for engaging in comparative theology because it rests not on the cultural diversity of religious symbol systems but on the experience of anthropocosmic embodiment. This comparative framework differs significantly from the comparative theology hitherto undertaken, which has notably focussed on the mythic, literary or symbolic output of religions. It also differs from strictly materialist or reductive approaches that ignore the power of religious rituals to inscribe human bodies in the ultimate reality of their cosmic matrix. The starting point for such a comparative theology must be the nature of the body itself as a field of cosmic transaction. Clearly one might envision many possibilities for comparatively engaging those pagan and indigenous traditions where religious power is transacted in reference to specific environmental locales. But adopting this perspective is a surprisingly fruitful way of examining

196

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

the Christian tradition, because in classical Christian theology it is the resurrection ofJesus' physical body that is of cosmic significance, and it was important for Christian theologians to understand the characteristics of the resurrection body obtained by Jesus Christ. This question might seem odd to those whose vision of Christian religion is primarily spiritual. But from the perspective of the theory of the economy of cosmic power which I am advocating here (that the body be conceived as the field of cosmic transaction), the precise nature of the reconfigured resurrection body is a vital question for comparative theology. According to Augustine, the problem with human bodies lies chiefly in their heaviness and corruption, 14 which prevent the body from becoming a suitable vehicle for the resurrection. If the body can be transfigured so as to eliminate these two hindrances (mass and passibility) then it can be a suitable vehicle for rising to eternal life. The question of how a body can be reduced in weight and corruptibility is thus an intriguing question for Christian theologians who, like Augustine, are wedded to the material reality of the resurrection. The question of mass is treated in chapter eleven of de civ. Dei 22.15 Augustine is concerned here with the Neo-Platonic ranking of Aristotle's four elements (earth, water, air and heavens) from heaviest to lightest. To this ranking Augustine steals a clue from his Manichaean past, adding "soul" as a fifth ("quintessential") element lighter than all the above, and also noting that this lightest of elements has been trapped in the "heaviness" of matter. This also recalls the Manichaean notion that the lightest of the elements of light are contained in the densest elements of earth, and that the lightest elements of mind are contained in the densest elements of body. For Augustine, the resurrection of the body and its physical ascension into heaven, then, requires adjusting the ratio of soul and body, light and heavy elements, so that the resurrected body is capable of rising through the air {de civ. Dei 22:11). The most perplexing conundrum about the passibility of the body, however, was the question of a cannibal who has eaten the flesh of someone else's body. How can the physical mass of the victim's body be sorted out? "Shall this return to the man whose flesh it first was, or to him whose flesh it afterwards became?" {de civ. Dei 22:12). The answer to this and a host of related questions is provided in chapter twenty:

THE ECONOMY OF COSMIC POWER

197

From all that we have thus considered, and discussed with such poor ability as we can command, we gather this conclusion, that in the resurrection of the flesh the body shall be of that size which it either had attained or should have attained in the flower of its youth, and shall enjoy the beauty that arises from preserving symmetry and proportion in all its members. And it is reasonable to suppose that, for the preservation of this beauty, any part of the body's substance, which, if placed in one spot, would produce a deformity, shall be distributed through the whole of it, so that neither any part, nor the symmetry of the whole, may be lost, but only the general stature of the body somewhat increased by the distribution in all the parts of that which, in one place, would have been unsightly. Or if it is contended that each will rise with the same stature as that of the body he died in, we shall not obstinately dispute this, provided only there be no deformity, no infirmity, no languor, no corruption, nothing of any kind which would ill become that kingdom in which the children of the resurrection and of the promise shall be equal to the angels of God, if not in body and age, at least in happiness. (de civ. Dei 22:20) Augustine is saying that the n a t u r e of the resurrected body is that of the ordinary body, b u t transformed into the o p t i m u m perfection it r e a c h e d or o u g h t to have reached in its earthly life. T h u s the image of Christ to which Christians are to be conformed is n o t simply to be u n d e r s t o o d as intellectual or spiritual perfection, b u t as the natural, moral a n d aesthetic perfection of the flesh. This point is m a d e clear in de civ. Dei 19, which claims that blemishes that detract from beauty will be removed in the resurrection, b u t that blemishes such as the wounds of Christ, which are evidence of the moral beauty of the body, will remain. 1 6 Although Augustine never speaks of Jesus as having a perfect physical form, the implication of his discussion of the resurrection body is that perfection is somehow m o r e compatible with or m o r e indicative of the divine n a t u r e , a n d that this perfection is an attribute that can be predicated of physical bodies. Augustine notes that the "perfect" age for a body is 30 years (de civ. Dei 22.15), a n d it is doubtless far from a coincidence that this is the age at which Jesus achieved his resurrection body. This a p p r o a c h to Augustinian theology stands in contrast to the majority of readings which treat Augustine primarily in terms of

198

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

human psychology and salvation history. But although the drama of fall and redemption for Augustine is chiefly to be understood as a historical drama affecting uniquely the human species, this does not mean that it does not have natural or environmental dimensions precisely because, in the Christian scheme, the creation of Adam is the culmination of the cosmic work of creation and Jesus Christ is understood as the unique incarnation of God. If the victory that Jesus' death is supposed to have won is simply a moral - in the sense of spiritual -victory then the resurrection of the body would have no meaning. Augustine's preoccupation with the question of morality must be grounded in the incontrovertible fact that the moral freedom that Jesus won for Christians was won not by his preaching but by the cosmic-body transactions of his incarnation, death and resurrection. The cosmic transfiguring of the body through Jesus' incarnation and resurrection is the only true foundation for the moral perfection that so intoxicated Augustine. The Christian tradition has perhaps tended to avoid such overtly materialist or cosmological readings of its tradition, and the study of religions has generally colluded with this theological tendency in concentrating on the symbolic aspect of myth and ritual. But this distinction between a theoretical, cultural spirit and a practical, material world, a distinction that is institutionalized in our universities, is surely unhelpful. Construing the relations between spirits and environments and between symbols and cosmos is surely a necessary theological task for the twenty-first century.

NOTES 1

See James Miller, "Envisioning the Daoist Body in the Economy of Cosmic Power," Daedalus 130:4 (2001): 265-82. 2 See Michael LaFargue, "'Nature' as Part of Human Culture in Daoism" in N.J. Girardot, James Miller and Liu Xiaogan, eds., Daoism and Ecology: Ways within a Cosmic Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2001), 45-60. 3 Even modern existential interpretations of the Christian faith must defer the full ontological reality of the Christian's existential choice to the time of the apocalypse. This secular frustration is no doubt one reason for the plethora of materialist liberation theologies that emerged in the twentieth century and for their subsequent condemnation by more orthodox Christian theologians. 4 Robert Cummings Neville, Normative Cultures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 5 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields

THE ECONOMY OF COSMIC POWER

199

(NewYork: The Free Press, 1995), 419. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 45-67. 8 Ibid., 421. 9 Ibid., 425. 10 This cosmogony can be contrasted with the Neo-Platonic cosmogony in which the One becomes the Many by an effervescence of differentiation. In such a scheme creation is fundamentally the creation of negations in an existing Oneness (that because of its being One is indistinguishable from Nothing). Conversely the ascent to the One proceeds by the negation of negations, that is, by negating differentiations in order to approximate more nearly the primordial fullness of the one. 11 Huangting neijingjing 10:5; see James Miller, "The Economy of Cosmic Power: A Theory of Religious Transaction and a Comparative Study of Shangqing Daoism and the Christian Religion of Augustine of Hippo," (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2000), 175. 12 Thomas Hahn, "Daoist Sacred Sites," in Livia Kohn, ed., Daoism Handbook (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), 683-708, quotation from 695. 13 For a discussion of these three, see James Miller, "Daoism and Nature," in Helaine Selin, ed., Nature Across Cultures: Non-Western Views of Nature and Environment (The Hague: Kluwer Academic Press, 2003), 393-410. 14 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1.24.24. 15 All references to de civ. Dei are to Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1984). 16 Cf. the many stories in the Zhuangzi of sages whose physical appearance is deformed.

14

Mary, Mother of Mylapore: Symbolic Engagement as an Interreligious Transaction

Francis X. Clooney, SJ.

In Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement,1 Robert Neville explores how symbols mediate the realities at the core of religious traditions, thus rendering them apprehensible, imaginable, and accessible to the lives of individual believers and believing communities. Such symbols are not signs standing between the observer and the reality to be known, nor are they merely impoverished versions of those realities. Doctrinal formulations do not necessarily improve upon symbols by stipulating meanings for them. Rather, symbols constitute the necessary medium by which people apprehend, appropriate, and live the religious realities and truths in which they believe. Theology does not produce the best symbols of God, but discovers them already operative in the life of the community, then follows and reflects upon them. It catches up with living symbols and finds words by which to make conceptual sense of their effective power. By the study of symbols, we are positioned to become better theologians, and better able to understand the rich and complex ways in which believers understand and practice their faith. All of this Neville states with clarity and philosophical sophistication at the beginning of the book. His description of symbol

202

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

here in part rehearses points that have occupied Neville in earlier works such as The Truth of Broken Symbols.2 The substance of Symbols of Jesus is therefore given over to the application of the theory to an understanding of Jesus Christ. Neville introduces some key symbols of Jesus: Lamb of God, Cosmic Christ, Trinitarian Person, historical Jesus and the Incarnate Word, Friend, and Savior. In addition, opening and closing chapters are dedicated to two related symbols, God as Father, and God the Holy Spirit. Such symbols communicate and represent Jesus Christ and are the foundation for his effective presence in the Christian community. Understanding them and their Christian usage, in word and art, offers a richer way to understand Jesus as the person at the center of the Christian faith. On this basis, attention may subsequently be paid to the theological and doctrinal expressions of these symbolized and lived truths. Since pluralism is also a lively concern for Neville in much of his writing, Symbols of Jesus addresses this issue as well. Chapter 5, "The historical Jesus and the Incarnate Word," is most relevant regarding pluralism. Within that chapter, and particularly in the section entitled "Existential Location: Jesus Christ and Cultural Pluralism," Neville explores the tension between the local and localized power of religious symbols and the broad, varied terrain of religious pluralism. Today people live on their own familiar blocks, yet have increasingly diverse neighbors; they are attached to their own symbols, yet notice more and more how their neighbors live by other, also powerful symbols. He emphasizes the enormous variety within Christian communities themselves, in "old" Christian cultures and also in the newly emerging Christian majorities of the "south." In turn, this internal Christian diversity is accompanied by a complex interaction between Christians and people of other religious traditions in our pluralistic societies. Neville offers wise suggestions for Christians on how pluralism is to be acknowledged, understood and responded to. But he strikes me as curiously reticent as to how his understanding of symbols pays off in the pluralistic context where traditions continually position themselves, in symbols and not just theologies, in relation to other traditions acting similarly. It is striking to note, for instance, that "symbol" and related terms occur hardly at all in the section on "Jesus Christ and Cultural Pluralism." Nonetheless, Neville's work gives us the incentive and resources to understand how symbols work in pluralistic environs. The skill with which communities shape and reshape their symbols and symbolic expressions of their faith is often

MARY, MOTHER OF MYLAPORE

203

far more inventive and mature than the theologies composed in response to pluralism. In the following pages I suggest that Neville's project can be strengthened precisely on its own terms, by a more vigorous study of the power and function of symbols as media of exchange in a religiously pluralistic context. To show this, I explore one instance in which Neville's approach can be fruitfully explored and extended in the interreligious context. To his admittedly select and partial list, I add another symbol of Jesus, "Jesus, son of Mary." While the doctrine and symbols connected with Jesus, son of Mary, and Mary, Mother of God, have a long history and frequency in the West, here I move directly to explore the use of these symbols in an interreligious context, specifically the HinduChristian. Even more specifically, I introduce a single text, the Mataracamman Antati - "The Linked Verses for the Queen (araci) among Women ( matar), the Divine Woman ( ammari) " - a nineteenth century Tamil Indian Christian hymn of 100 verses composed by M. Appacami Mutaliyar.3 My goal is to shed some light on how and why the "son of Mary" symbolism was used in the south Indian Christian context in constructing a new symbolic representation of Jesus, possibly because other symbols were deemed ineffective. In this way, I hope also to underline the value of Neville's theory and to show another dimension of its effectiveness in a pluralistic context. The hymn introduces Mary and her son Jesus into the south Indian Hindu context and argues their centrality to that culture. Mary is presented as mother and queen in Mylapore, an old center of orthodoxy lying within present day Chennai. The town is taken as representative of Hindu orthodoxy and culture in part, I suspect, because it is also near the old Catholic community of San Thome, the competing religious center for which Mutaliyar may be supposed to speak, although San Thome is never mentioned. As she is mother and queen, perhaps she is a divine presence too, even if "divine woman" (ammari), prominent in the hymn's title, never appears in the verses. The claim that Mary presides in Mylapore draws the traditions and culture of that town into a new context where Mary is a luminous, vital presence - as a mother who also brings along her son, and the Biblical narrative of God's ancient deeds in Israel and in the life of Christ, a narrative of which Mylapore is to become a part. The first verses give a feel for the whole: You bear your jewel, the highest one, jewel of my eye, the creator, preserver, destroyer of the echoing sea and

204

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

earth, the underworld and the pure, bright, jeweled world beyond, you wear the sky^ewel sun as your garment: graciously grant my wish to sing in praise of your feet, O queen among women in great Mylapore. (1) The queen among women in Mylapore surrounded by matavi groves, Mary, the great mother whose dwelling touches the moon: if I praise her feet adorned by great ascetics in this world, then with eyes like unfading kuvalai flowers that fine fragrant one will glance upon me. (2) The virgin in Mylapore where fragrant lotuses bloom in broad pools, mother of our highest beloved one dwelling in the mind lotus of the twelve faithful companions who say, "This is the fellowship of faith and friendship" she is the wise one in the highest realm: true realization will come to you if you think upon her lovely feet. (3)

As in these verses, throughout the hymn Mary is described in laudatory and pointed terms. In verse 1, perhaps echoing the Book of Revelation, she is garbed in the sun, and elsewhere she is often portrayed as crushing the serpent. She is the ruler of Mylapore, and against her there is no competing power. Sovereign, she carries a radiantjewel, her son who fulfils all the divine functions regarding the world - creating, preserving, destroying - and yet is more intimately the jewel gleaming in the poet's eye. In verse 2, she appears like a beautiful flower in Mylapore, even as her domain also reaches into the heavens. Transcendent, the goal toward which ascetics strive, she is always accessible, her feet on the earth, approachable to all those who will take refuge there. Here and throughout, the poet praises the efficacious power of her beautiful glance. In verse 3, we find a Mylapore lush with natural beauty, for Mary is the truly beautiful one making her new abode a place of beauty, vitality, wisdom, and culture. Mary, mother to the transcendent God flourishing in the mind lotuses of the twelve disciples, is herself the wise one who gives

MARY, MOTHER OF MYLAPORE

205

life and light to devotees today. Wisdom is abundant and available for those taking refuge at her feet. T h e process reaches from the beginning until the time in which the poet is writing, since it was aposdes with Jesus in their minds, minds illumined by Mary, who were able to bring the Gospel to places like Mylapore. Ultimately, Mary is herself wisdom embodied, a wisdom accessible to all desiring it. Occasional verses state m o r e boldly the competition between this new wisdom a n d e n l i g h t e n m e n t a n d the old store of H i n d u wisdom. For instance, h e r presence destroys the H i n d u sacred texts: She is the rich one in Mylapore full of wealth, alari trees, paddy fields, the gentle one wearing the bright sun as a garment, the bright one destroying by her strong weapons the lying sacred texts they call true, the lovely daughter of the eternal one that does the three-fold work: O inner mind, know all this. (79) T h e p o e t reminds Mary of the spiritual h u n g e r of the people of Mylapore, who are starving because they h a d b e e n relying o n false rather t h a n true sustenance: O lovely picture, mother, for the five thousand crying in hunger your son multiplied the five loaves his devout disciples gave; we've gained the sure and never bitter way that fits the sacred text he gave, we've not loved the evil sacred text those blind, base ones in Mylapore teach us. (94) As h e r son fed the crowds then, now she is the o n e to feed people in Mylapore who are h u n g r y for real food. Mary's i m p o r t a n c e is r o o t e d entirely in God a n d in the i m p o r t a n c e of God's plan a n d in the activity of Christ h e r son. T h e hymn never suggests that she can be u n d e r s t o o d apart from the Trinitarian God. In fact, she is a b e a r e r of the mystery of the Trinity, of the descending Second Person: "She is the t h r o n e where sits the threefold infinite reality, a fine g a r d e n . . . " (60), a n d "She is the t h r o n e for the infinite threefold reality, a fine g a r d e n . . . " (67). Primacy is readily afforded to God a n d God's work in Jesus, who is acknowledged as the agent of

206

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

all God's saving acts. He is the God who gave the Ten Commandments (27, 53), helped Joshua win the battle of Jericho by stopping the sun (61), enabled Samson to defeat his enemies (81), and saved Jonah, even while himself dying at the hands of others (92). Jesus established the Church (66), "walked on the wide sea that surrounds the land" (15), and he invited the good thief into paradise (30). "His body is food pleasing to eat, his blood sweet to drink" (76), he "opened the blind man's eyes by the blood and water flowing from his side" (51), and he gave sight to the blind (88). Though focused intensely on Mary, the theology of the Mataracamman Antati remains conceptually orthodox. Mary is not a self-reliant goddess; Mary's son is the center of attention and the real source of salvation. But on the level of symbol, the basic Christological symbol, "Jesus, son of Mary" is regularly being transmuted into the related symbol, "Mary, mother ofJesus." The theology is probably stable, but on the symbolic level there is a real shift, that matters greatly, even if it is difficult to state doctrinally. Jesus, once introduced, is positioned as Mary's son; in turn, that positioning becomes the basis for discourse about Mary herself. Jesus is established as the son of Mary, and so too God is Mary's son; on that basis, the hymn devotes much of its attention and energy to her. The focus on Mary, mother of Jesus - and not simply Jesus, son of Mary - gives a point of entry for Christianity into Mylapore. Perhaps the poet has decided that Mary is the more vivid personality in the Indian context, and hence the better symbol of the faith. Consider, then, the full version of several of the verses cited above. Jesus is lord and the revealed one who establishes the Church, but his mother is the one for us to know: "Peter is foremost in the scripture," said the ruler and lord whom she bore as her son in the stable, in the night, in front of the great ascetic; she is the queen of Mylapore, our mother, our life, the place radiant with true, splendid realization wider than the ocean. (66) He is able to walk on the water, but his mother is the one who is lovely for eyes today, here and now, flourishing in the listener's neighborhood:

MARY, MOTHER OF MYLAPORE

207

The woman shines in Mylapore where kuvalai flowers bloom in the pools, her ears like soft leaves, her lovely face a broad lotus, slender as a flower stem, the mother of the one who walked on the wide sea that surrounds the earth, everywhere on the shore fresh conches gather to mark her. (15) H e offers his body a n d blood to eat, b u t as she cradles h i m in h e r arms, she is the o n e who truly confers wisdom: "My body is food sweet to eat, my blood the juice of the vine," says the lord whom the pure, sweet one holds in her radiant arms; O poisoned, puny heart, if you meditate daily on her holy name, what dejection can occur here in Mylapore? (76) T h e hymn recounts Mary's great deeds, events obscure to us b u t r e m e m b e r e d locally in Mutaliyar's Christian community (and perhaps too in its Portuguese ancestry) : So that James could see it due to his devotion she showed her rare form in a splendid, tall pillar, she is free of the sin of the spouse of most famous Adam, she is the unfading flower of Mylapore where the cool moon rises over houses, even beyond the clouds. (36) The boy wearing her charm fell into the sea and was going to die, but to the delight of his pleading mother the virgin protected the child, as she had trampled to death the demon snake; she is the queen of Mylapore where bees swarm and sing sweetly in gardens that reach the clouds, she is the jewel of our eye. (43) By a great lighting bolt two youths were killed that time, but the third, O pure one, honored you by your rosary

208

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

and so by your glance you protected him, O immaculate, flourishing grace, spotless one wearing the sun as your radiant garment, queen among women in Mylapore bounded by rivers, our great love. (97) Ultimately, she n o t only cradles the savior in h e r arms, b u t makes salvation accessible: In Mylapore where conches and lotuses abound in pools, the virgin Mary holds in her arms the rare, unique, pure one who opened the blind man's eyes by the blood and water flowing from his side, just as she had destroyed the snake by her powerful, pure, holy, radiant feet when people reach them, the world stands in awe. (51) To end the fault that came by a woman, she appeared as a flawed woman and so tricked sin, great Mary of Mylapore amidst lovely, ordered fields: those who meditate on her true, radiant feet with love and pray the auspicious prayer in fifty-three beads rise to the heavenly place. (99) T h e cumulative effect of the verses is to position Jesus as a foundation for full-hearted devotion to Mary, who turns o u t to be the proximate a n d effective mediator of the graces o n e needs. In all of this, Jesus is h e r son, she is still known as God's m o t h e r ; in a most glorious a n d lofty way, Jesus is a kind of supportive symbol pointing to her. As a result, the m o t h e r of Jesus is the o n e able to grant the desired goal to those taking refuge at h e r feet. T h e emphasis o n Jesus as Mary's son, a n d t h e n o n Mary, m o t h e r of Jesus, is an effective strategy in part because the symbol of Mary is aligned with symbols already powerful in the culture. She is portrayed as a w o m a n (matar), a q u e e n (araci), a n d (at least in the hymn's title) a divine woman (ammari). N o n e of this is entirely new in Mylapore; goddesses, as powerful, life giving, undying, i n d e p e n d e n t women, already matter in the south Indian culture, a n d they are m o r e accessible t h a n the gods with w h o m they are related. This brief essay is n o t the place for a consideration of the Tamil symbolization of goddesses, b u t it is worth citing several verses from

MARY, MOTHER OF MYLAPORE

209

the Apirami Antati, an eighteenth century Tamil H i n d u hymn also of 100 verses, in the same style, a n d evocative of many of the same images that later found their way into the Mataracamman Antati. This Tamil goddess hymn, t h o u g h theologically distant from the Marian tradition, symbolically stands very close to it: Jewel dazzling my inmost mind, lovely one dwelling in the fine three cities, Your delicate waist is burdened by breasts like jeweled caskets, O Ampikai, and still You make ambrosia from the poison drunk by Siva, wearer of the topknot; beautiful lady standing so elegantly in the lotus, inner space, Your feet are on my head. (5) Beautiful lady, helpmate to my father, You come and destroy the ties binding me, You are deep red, You stand on Mahisa's head, You are the inner space, the dark one, ever virgin, in Your hand, the skull of the forest texts' lord, in my thoughts, Your lotus feet. (8) With our father looking on, reflecting, by Your great mercy Your great breasts grew larger than golden hills with milk for the crying child; there were garlands too, and in Your bright hands a bow and arrows, and Your teeth gleamed like new palm buds: come, O mother, stand right here, before me. (9) Giving wealth giving learning giving a mind that never wearies giving divine form giving friends with no deceit in their hearts giving every good thing giving abundance to those said to love Her, Apirami with flowered anklets all this by the glance of Her eyes. (69) In every direction I see

210

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Her net and goad, cool fresh blossoms where bees swarm, five cane arrows, the holy body of the lady of the three cities who ends all grief, Her slender waist, girdle, the kumkum on Her breasts, the pearl necklace on Her bosom. (85)4 The relationship of Apirami and Siva is surely not the same as that of Mary and Jesus, but the conclusion is similar in the two hymns: "she" may be theologically positioned in relation to "him," but it is her presence that really gives life, beauty, and wisdom. Mutaliyar surely intended the Mataracamman Antati to be read along with hymns like the Apirami Antati His goal is to replace such hymns with his, but in the process symbols such as those of Mary and Apirami - with the accompanying images, metrical patterns, stylized markers of divinity and devotion - are placed together, changed and enriched by their juxtaposition. Against the familiar background of Hindu praise of goddesses, the symbol of Mary is both something recognizable and local, but then, upon reflection, startlingly new, because it turns out that she is also the mother of Jesus, a newcomer to India. The Mataracamman Antati thus exemplifies the transit of a symbol (supported by dependent symbols) from one religious culture to another, as symbols jostle, compete, and coalesce in the minds and hearts of religious people. The Mataracamman Antati constructs a plausible basis for the Christian community's existential location in south India where, by Mutaliyar's judgment, the available symbols ofJesus seemed likely to be ineffective unless hinged to a more powerful and locally resonant symbol - Mary, mother of Jesus. Mary resonates powerfully with the goddess traditions of Tamil Nadu, popular, living symbols in the culture. "Mary, mother of the divine son" is a less potent symbol than "Jesus, son of Mary who is near, giving you life." While the brahmins of Mylapore would have been perplexed by the ideas, words and symbols related to "God's son" - including, I presume, the symbols of lamb, cosmic Christ, Christ, second person of the Trinity, historical person and word, friend, savior - they already knew something of the divine Mother, her beauty, the graciousness of her glance, the safe refuge one obtains at her feet. Now they are told that her true name is Mary, and that she has a son. The new yet old symbol (Mary) has arrived, the argument goes, into this old yet new setting (Mylapore),

MARY, MOTHER OF MYLAPORE

211

and now becomes the dominant symbol allowing other old and new symbols to coalesce more fruitfully. Religious symbols may be our hope in a time when pluralism abounds and theology seems feeble. Symbols like those highlighted by Neville are linked to theological positions, but not dependent on any single set of positions. The symbols have lives of their own, and flourish anew and differently in a pluralistic environment and in environs, such as south India, where Christianity, though with ancient roots, remains new and exotic. That Mary and not Jesus is the person most fruitfully symbolized confirms (as Neville predicts) that effective symbols are not merely the product of correct theological positions, but have often moved ahead quickly, leaving theology to catch up. Theology, perhaps especially comparative theology, then has to spend its time catching up with the openings and possibilities created by the vitality and excesses of symbols that actually work. The rule is simple: in a pluralistic environment, attend to the symbols; notice which flourish, where and for whom; then theologize in relation to them, learning the possibilities they offer. I also admit that thus far there seems to have been no good theologizing trying to catch up with the Mataracamman Antati. Despite the hymn's many virtues, at this writing I have yet to find a Tamil Christian who knows anything about it. Perhaps the symbolism in the hymn, however well visualized and powerfully proposed, did not adequately hold the imaginations of either Christians or Hindus. Or perhaps no theologian has been willing to give priority to the symbol over the doctrine, in order to write from the Mataracamman Antatis insight into Mary as the radiant mother whose presence makes Mylapore lovely, whose feet are the place of sure refuge, and whose son is Jesus, God. Perhaps it is only now that we can begin to write theologies able to keep up with the actual religious lives and actual symbolic imagination of Indian Christians (though of course it is Indian Christians themselves, and not I, who can make such a judgment). In any case, we can be grateful to Neville on several counts. He reminds theologians writing for the churches to pay attention to the symbols that give life to the faith and make the mysteries of God imaginable for us; and he shows comparative theologians, writing for the churches but also mindful of the infinite and in effect irreducible diversity of the world God has given us, how to follow the symbols, to imagine their creative interaction, and to keep our thinking and writing focused on the play of symbols so wonderfully apparent in a

212

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

world our theologies have yet to comprehend.

NOTES 1

Robert Cummings Neville, Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 2 Robert Cummings Neville, The Truth ofBroken Symbols (Albany,: State University of New York Press, 1996). 3 The hymn was published by St. Joseph Press, Madras, in 1888, with a prose paraphrase of each verse by A. Jnanaprakasa Mutaliyar. At this writing I have no basis to place the hymn earlier than that date, nor any information about Mutaliyar himself. Since the hymn shows intimate familiarity with Tamil and Hindu modes of expression, one might guess that he was a convert to Catholicism. To my knowledge, the hymn has never been studied, much less translated, by modern scholars. I offer a full translation of the 100 verses, with some analysis, in my Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary: Six Hymns in Praise of Her (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The translations offered here are my own. 4 My translation. The Apirami Antati is available in numerous popular editions but, to my knowledge, there are no English translations.

15

Toward a Christian Advaita: Sankara, Tillich, and Neville in Dialogue

John J. Thatamanil

It would be of little value for me that "the Word was made flesh" for man in Christ as a person distinct from me unless he was also made flesh in me personally so that I too might be Gods son. - Eckhart l

Ours is a time of passing. Traditional notions of subjectivity and of the divine are under assault. Above all there is a new openness to what resists definition. We are more willing to embrace fluidity, and we have qualms about rigid conceptions of order in which each thing has its own place.2 Categorical tidiness is regarded as a dubious virtue, at worst a surpassing hubris. This turn of events is, on the whole, fortunate for Christian theology. Christian thinking, and indeed Christian mythos, is from its inception messy. Incarnation disrupts that starkest of boundaries, the one separating the human from the divine, even as it also undoes the separation between the Jew and the Gentile. Truth be told, Christian thinking set out in rather short order to clean up, to order, to arrange: "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the differences of the natures being by no means removed because of the union...." 3 This impulse

214

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

to order was not and need not be hubristic. Theology must take up the important business of thinking a tension constitutive of Christian reflection: how to avoid merely collapsing the divine into the human and yet truly bespeak the meaning of divine intimacy as disclosed by incarnation? Despite much celebration of fluidity and hybridity, ours is a time too much enamored of the totaliter aliter but this time around in French - tout autre.4 In the name of preserving the mystery of the divine, the God who is otherwise than being is proclaimed. Such efforts are compelling but one fears that they risk setting forth yet again a merely "contrastive" account of divine transcendence, one that imagines the divine solely as other. 5 What then of the mystery of divine intimacy? Can we again think about God as nearer to us than we are to ourselves without fashioning an idol unworthy of reverence? These queries are more than a preliminary exercise on the way to a metaphysics of divine being. Any but the most forensic of theologies understands that the quest to think divine intimacy is fundamentally soteriological in intent. Thinking immanence is rooted in the ancient conviction that God saves not by declaring my acceptability while remaining safely removed. I am saved, that is to say healed, when God gives Godself to me, when I am taken into the divine life and thereby deified. With Meister Eckhart, Christian theology must refuse to think of divine intimacy as an exceptional event of the distant past. The demand and resources for such thinking come not only from the internal logic of Christian traditions but also from encounters with other traditions that affirm the importance of nondualism. Particularly intriguing are the resonances between Paul Tillich's theology of God as being-itself and the Advaita Vedanta defense of the Upanisadic proposition that one is in truth Brahman, also understood as being-itself (sat). The promise of Tillich's theology has been extended by the contemporary theologian who has best taken up Tillich's mandate for a Christian theology formulated in conversation with the history of religion, Robert Cummings Neville. Neville's theology offers a compelling account of the transcendence and presence of God, one in which neither element undercuts the other. In what follows, I show how Neville advances a conversation between Tillich and Sankara by dissolving substantialist commitments that linger in theologies of both thinkers. While Neville has worked out his theology primarily

215

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ADVAITA

in conversation with Confucian thinkers, Joseph Bracken has rightly observed that Neville's work contains nondualistic elements also found in Sankara's theology.6 Following up on Bracken's suggestion, I will argue herein that Neville's theology offers resources for a distinctively Christian nondualism, a Christian Advaita. I At the heart of Sankara's Advaita is a commitment to the revealed truth found in the Upanisadic affirmation that one's true self, atman, is identical to the ultimate reality, namely Brahman. Sankara's motivation for affirming nonduality is not ontological but soteriological. He insists that identity must not be defined solely by mundane factors such as age, stage of life, and caste. To take these features of self as definitive or exhaustive of what one is leaves one captive within the wheel of transmigration. Such ignorance (avidya) is the root cause that leads persons to be unreflectively bound to action driven by desire (raga) and aversion (dvesa).1 If one takes oneself to be finite without remainder, then anything that promises to complete or threaten that finite self impels persons into action, the fruits of which perpetuate transmigration. The only possible solution for fundamental ignorance is knowledge (jnana) that one is, from the point of view of ultimate truth, Brahman. For Sankara, such knowledge is gained from scripture (sruti) alone; it can be known neither by appeal to independent rational inquiry nor experience. 8 Scripture is neither irrational nor inconsistent with experience. Indeed, sruti can demonstrate that although Brahman cannot be experienced, it is the very ground for the possibility of experience as the light of consciousness that shines in the mind. Sankara argues that although states of consciousness vary, consciousness itself does not. It is the constant, unchanging, substratum for all states of experience (U 1.15.15-18, 143-44). This commitment to discriminating between flux and stability, between change and the unchanging, is a key feature of Sankara's theology. The same strategy is employed to argue that Brahman is the unchanging world ground that undergirds the conventional world of change. The world of change is taken to need a substratum even as an unreal mirage cannot exist independently of the desert on which it is projected. Equally famous is Sankara's use of the ropesnake analogy in which a passerby mistakes a rope for a snake. Here

216

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

too, the rope represents the unchanging substratum onto which is projected the imagined snake. A careless application of these analogies to the Brahman-world relationship is dangerous. Sankara's theology may be mistaken for a subjective idealism, which it most assuredly is not as can be seen from his vigorous arguments against Buddhist idealists.9 Against these opponents, the theologian takes great pains to affirm the extramental status of the world of experience. Sankara employs such analogies for two reasons: to affirm the absolute ontological priority of Brahman over the world and to assert the world's total dependence for its being on Brahman, an asymmetrical dependence that does not condition Brahman. The world cannot exist apart from Brahman, but Brahman is in no way affected by the world's dependence on it. Therefore, Brahman cannot be the cause of the world because then Brahman would undergo transformation in becoming the world's cause. For Sankara, by definition only the changelessly everlasting is ultimately real; anything that suffers change is by nature inconstant and so ultimately unreal. 10 Given these commitments, it is unsurprising that Brahman's function as ground for the world is imagined by appeal to images drawn from illusory experiences in which the screen for projections is entirely unaffected by the projections themselves. At stake here is a key soteriological point that has ontological and anthropological consequences. Sankara intends to establish beyond question that liberation (moksha) is not a state or a condition that can be produced by action. If we may use a Lutheran vocabulary, liberation comes through hearing the words of scripture and not by works (karma). The words of scripture serve to teach that the self is always already liberated because liberation is the self's ownmost nature. The self just is Brahman. To suggest that Brahman has undergone real transformation is to suggest that something must be done to effect a reversal so that Brahman can return to its original state. When liberation is conceived as an inversion of such a process, liberation becomes a thing to be accomplished, a product of ritual action and so no longer eternal. To the contrary, Sankara insists that liberation, understood as "the negation of conventional activity," is not, "confined to a certain state (avastha)...for the identity of the Self and Brahman stated in T h o u thou art', is not contingent on any particular state" (BSBh 2.1.14, 328). Sankara's soteriology requires persons to come to see what is always already the case: over and above one's conventional identity, one is eternally Brahman. But at what price is this soteriological gain purchased? Does

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ADVAITA

217

Sankara gain the self (atman) at the cost of the whole world? Such charges amount to a partial misreading of Sankara's fundamental intention: he does reject a naive realism that takes the world to be independently real apart from Brahman, but he also rejects any subjective idealism that regards the world as illusory in every sense. That said, the results of Sankara's strategy are nevertheless problematic. As Lance Nelson has demonstrated, although Sankara's theology is intended to be a strict nondualism, what actually obtains is a curious sort of dualism between the changing but unreal world of experience and the changeless and absolute reality of Brahman. 11 The conventional world is not absolutely unreal as are the horns of a hare but is unreal in the sense that it comes to be and passes away. Sankara's theology qualifies as a nondualism but only by appeal to a very rigorous definition of "real." By this definition, the world is not real in the way Brahman is. What obtains is an irresolvable duality between the transitory world of conventional experience and an unchanging Brahman that is the world's unconditioned ground. One is left to wonder whether Sankara's soteriological goal, the nonduality of self and Brahman, can be preserved without giving rise to the unsatisfactory duality that persists within his system. Can this pearl of great price be had without defining away the world of change? The distinctive gift offered by Sankara's nondualism is what I call an "apophatic anthropology" in which the self is recognized at bottom to be the irreducible mystery of Brahman. Knowledge of oneself as mystery relativizes conventional identities formerly taken to be absolute. Learning from scripture that we are more and not less than we think we are gives us the gift of detachment, a detachment that allows us to care for others as the liberated teacher does, namely without motive, "without a why." There is nothing we must do. Compassion becomes our natural mode of being toward others. All this is possible for those who know that their true being rests in and is Brahman. Moreover, although Sankara does not draw this conclusion himself, his nondualism can undergird a comportment of reverential respect for others that does not require that we posit a fundamental Levinasian gap between self and other. Reverence is preserved not by way of "otherness" but by way of the recognition of the inassimilable mystery of both self and other, a mystery that is not other than the mystery of the Infinite. The abiding presence of mystery in Sankara's theology can

218

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

also serve as a resource for reconsidering the relationship between transcendence and immanence. It may seem contradictory to speak of transcendence at all within the frame of a nondualist theology, but Sankara's theology yields two distinctive senses in which Brahman is transcendent. For Sankara, although Brahman is one's true self, that true self transcends the mind and so exceeds what can be known. Because Brahman is itself the ground for the possibility of knowledge, it is immediately present in every knowing act and so need not itself be known. Moreover, what is immediately present as the ground for the possibility of knowledge cannot itself be known.12 All that we say about Brahman is contingent on Brahman as understood by its association with conventional realities. Sankara even goes so far as to say that Brahman is, "ultimately beyond the scope of the concept and word 'Self."13 What liberates is knowledge that one is Brahman whereas what Brahman is remains ineffable. To know Brahman as the self suffices for liberation because it removes the mistaken notion that one is merely a finite transmigrator. However, one should not thereby presume that one has come to know Brahman exhaustively. Sankara rigorously maintains the noetic transcendence of Brahman. What one is remains fundamentally and simultaneously other to cognition even though it most certainly is not an other. The second and problematic sense of transcendence regards Brahman as the unchanging world ground that transcends the changing world. Here, Brahman does become an other, a selfsubsistent reality that is not the world. Nondualism is itself threatened and saved only by definition. This secondary, reified sense of transcendence must be regarded fundamentally as problem rather than gift, not least because of the way in which such nondualism devalues the worth of bodies and nature. Moreover, this second kind of transcendence cannot be a resource for any distinctively Christian nondualist theology for such theology must be rooted in St. Paul's affirmation, "no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me." Only a theology that gives an account of God who interecedes in us "with sighs too deep for words" can be the ground for any Christian Advaita, or a Christian nondualism. 14 Nondualistic moments in Christian tradition have always been essentially performative in character. Here, Reiner Schurmann's account of Meister Eckhart's theology puts the point rightly. The identity between self and God is not that of "a substantial 'suppositum' but of event...." 15 Eckhart puts it well: "Acting and becoming are one, God and I are one in operation: he acts and I

219

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ADVAITA

become." 16 Within the framework of Sankara's theology, the liberated person is urged to understand that the true self does not act even when the material body does. A clear awareness "I do not act" is required for eliminating agency (kartrtva) and the resulting karmic consequences. Within a Christian frame, a nondual theology must yield a dynamic theological anthropology that can distinguish between acting that is shallow and grounded in the private motives of the egoistic self and acting that is at once one's own as well as God's. This difference is what drives us to ask whether Tillich's notion of theology can provide resources for a dynamic nondualism unavailable within traditional Advaita.

II Like Sankara, Tillich's God is no stranger that one might or might not happen to meet. Advaitins would heartily concur with Tillich's judgment that "man discovers himself when he discovers God; he discovers something that is identical with himself although it transcends him infinitely, something from which he is estranged, but from which he never was and never can be separated."17 Advaitins would also readily agree with Tillich that ultimate reality must be understood as being-itself, rather than a being, even the highest of beings.18 Tillich's proximity to Sankara's nondualism is most evident in Tillich's treatment of a term central to his own theology, namely participation. There are important differences between Tillich's theology of participation and Sankara's theology of nonduality, but those differences might be exaggerated if what Tillich means by participation is overlooked. Tillich insists that participation does not refer to an external relation between two entities related only contingently. He is aware that the language of participation, "can have the unfortunate logical implication that there is something alongside God in which he participates from the outside." Tillich points out that such a relation is impossible because "the divine participation creates that in which it participates" (ST 1.245). Creatio ex nihilo, for Tillich, far from implying a fundamental duality between an uncaused creator and a world emerging out of absolute nothingness, means just that God's creativity is utterly unconditioned by any raw material with which God must work. As Tillich puts it,

220

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

"the doctrine of creation affirms that God is the creative ground of everything in every moment. In this sense there is no creaturely independence from which an external relation between God and the creature could be derived..." (ST 1.271). Tillich's rejection of an ontic god taken together with his dismissal of the notion that the relation between being-itself and beings is external presents one consequential sense in which dualism is overcome. Within Tillich's ontology, there can be no numerical relation between God and creature, between being-itself and beings. Despite all talk of "separation" and "distance" in Tillich's system, one must not overlook the defining ontological commitment out of which Tillich operates. What then are the meanings of transcendence in Tillich's theology? And why do spatial metaphors continue to play a prominent role in Tillich's thinking despite his refusal of dualism? As in Sankara's theology, there are two distinct accounts of transcendence, one of which is salutary and the other problematic. In the first, transcendence is understood as "qualitative depth," and in the second, transcendence is understood as the "substantial separation" between creature and creator necessary for freedom. By "transcendence understood as qualitative depth," I refer to Tillich's deep appropriation of the apophatic mystical tradition in which God is understood as fecund inexhaustible source and unfathomable abyss. In the symbolic language of tradition, transcendence in this sense refers to "the unapproachable character of God," to God's character as "essentially holy" (S7T.271). This qualitative account does not entail a reified transcendence. Tillich does stipulate that when God is understood as unapproachable, God "cannot become an object of knowledge or a partner in action" {ST 1.271). But Tillich also insists that to deny the possibility of a proper relation with God is not to posit a distant God. On the contrary, Tillich allows for a "relation" with God so long as it is understood as one in which God as "the thou embraces the ego and consequently the entire relation. If it were otherwise, if the ego-thou relation with God was proper rather than symbolic, the ego could withdraw from the relation. But there is no place to which man can withdraw from the divine thou, because it includes the ego and is nearer to the ego than the ego to itself (S7T.271). We may summarize this qualitative account of transcendence by stipulating that, for Tillich, the holy other is not Wholly Other.19 This account of qualitative transcendence is compatible

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ADVAITA

221

with Sankara's sense of the mystery of Brahman, a mystery that is transcendent just because it is immanent and absolutely immanent because it is radically transcendent. Thus far, both thinkers agree that ultimate reality exceeds us but not because it is an other. Thus, the possibility of imagining a Christian nondualism that approximates Sankara's remains open. Tillich's second account of transcendence, however, markedly distinguishes his system from Sankara's own. Here transcendence is taken to be the "distance" between God and creature that makes freedom possible. Strictly speaking, transcendence here just is the creature's freedom to "turn away from the essential unity with the ground of its being" (ST 1.255). For Tillich, freedom is not one component of the human being. Human being just is "finite freedom" and to exist as finite freedom is necessarily to stand out of the divine ground. "Man does exist, and his existence is different from his essence. Man and the rest of reality are not only 'inside' the process of the divine life but also 'outside' it. Man has left the ground in order to 'stand upon' himself, to actualize what he essentially is, in order to be finite freedom' (5TI.255). Were creatures "kept within" the divine life, they would not be free. But once creatures actualize freedom, they are subject to estrangement. Here we arrive at the most contentious and problematic feature of Tillich's system, namely the point at which, "the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of the fall join" (S7T.255).20 Tillich does not attempt to gloss over this difficulty; on the contrary, he boldly accepts the terms of the problem. He states without hesitation: "Fully developed creatureliness is fallen creatureliness. The creature has actualized its freedom in so far as it is outside the creative ground of the divine life. Tnside' and 'outside' are spatial symbols, but what they say is not spatial. They refer to something qualitative rather than quantitative. To be outside the divine life means to stand in actualized freedom, in an existence which is no longer united with essence" (STI.255). The price Tillich pays for creaturely freedom is extraordinarily high. Creaturely participation in the divine life in a religiously deep sense is "preliminary, fragmentary, and changeable with respect to persons who receive revelatory truth and saving power" because creatures outstand the divine life (ST 1.146). Tillich's account of the ecstatic does give an account of a dynamic reunion between God and self, but ecstatic experience appears to be transitory and episodic. The result is a soteriology that makes any strong notion of

222

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

sanctification or deification virtually impossible. Human beings do experience the divine unambiguously but always only fragmentarily. Tillich's system appears to be plagued by a constitutive contradiction regarding the possibility and nature of freedom. On the one hand, Tillich seems faithful to the Pauline conviction that genuine human freedom and flourishing is possible only when one is a slave of Christ; only union gives rise to genuine freedom. In this authentically biblical trajectory, human freedom does not stand in a relation of inverse correlation with divine proximity. Rather, the more complete the union with the divine, the freer the creature is. This is what Tillich means by theonomy. On the other hand, Tillich maintains that human freedom requires substantial separation between the creature and the creator. In this scenario, human beings can only be what they essentially are, namely finite freedom, through a process of differentiation and separation. The tragic consequence of this separation is that creation and fallenness are partially identified. Distance from the divine both grants and threatens human freedom. Tillich is willing to pay this steep theological price because he believes that only separation can give rise to an ontology in which God and the creature can be free for and against each other. The alternative, in Tillich's mind, is an inadequate naturalism in which, "the term 'God' becomes interchangeable with the term 'universe' and therefore is semantically superfluous" (STII.7). Tillich's departure from dualism is by no means complete. A recalcitrant dualism persists in his system as in Sankara's, a dualism that makes human estrangement inevitable by positing a gap between beings and being-itself as a prerequisite for freedom. Sankara's quest for nondualism is compromised by his conviction that Brahman's unchanging aseity can only be preserved if the ultimate is radically distinguished from the world which it grounds. Tillich seeks to guard not so much God's aseity as human freedom. This motive leads him to assert that creatures must be substantially independent over against the divine.

Ill Is it possible to imagine a nondualism in which creatures are wholly within the divine life and yet also free? Is it possible to generate a theology in which "transcendence" is had neither by

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ADVAITA

223

appeal to a reified absolute n o r a separation between creature a n d creator? Robert Cummings Neville's theology does j u s t this. In Neville's version of creatio ex nihilo, God is u n d e r s t o o d first a n d foremost as a dynamic, eternal creativity that gives rise to creatures that are themselves free events within the divine life.21 T h e world to which creativity gives rise c a n n o t exist apart from the creativity that eternally makes the world to be. T h e world has n o ontologically i n d e p e n d e n t status over against divine creativity. Thus, the being of the world can be distinguished from the act of creativity b u t it can in n o way be separate. Moreover, because this creativity is eternal a n d n o t an act of the finished past, it would be quite accurate to say that the being of the world j u s t is being-itself u n d e r s t o o d as creativity. God is utterly present to the world, a n d the world i m m a n e n t in God. Crucially, Neville's strong emphasis o n divine i m m a n e n c e does n o t u n d e r c u t creaturely freedom. Contrary to Tillich, Neville regards freedom as a cosmological matter that does n o t require ontological i n d e p e n d e n c e . O n the contrary, Neville argues for, "a two authors theory" of freedom in which every h u m a n activity is ontologically divine a n d cosmologically h u m a n . That! can act at all is d u e to divine creativity. What I make of myself in so acting is my doing. Neville insists that this distinction o u g h t n o t to be u n d e r s t o o d as a division of labor. In a sense, there are two authors of every decisive moment, God and the creature in the moment itself. The spontaneous creativity in the moment is part of the larger singular creative act by which God creates the whole world.... At the same time...that spontaneity is the event's own self-definition.... The creativity by which we define ourselves and by means of which we take responsibility for what we do and are is the same creativity that is part of the larger divine creative act of which the whole world is a product.... There is no conflict between divine creation and human freedom unless the creator is seen as an external agent who might force certain options upon a person. 22 Neville's talk of "two authors" must be h a n d l e d with care because h e rejects the idea that divine creativity is agential in character. At any rate, the u p s h o t of this line of reasoning is that o n e does n o t have to suppose that the exercise of creaturely freedom requires an ontological distance between creature a n d creator. God, u n d e r s t o o d

224

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

as ontological creativity, is neither a coercive super-agent nor a substance of which persons are mere modes. Consequently, Neville avoids what Tillich cannot: any point of identification between creaturely existence and estrangement. This permits Neville to maintain what Tillich finally cannot: "there is no necessity in creation that people sin. Rather, the fact of sin is simply empirical."23 Tillich stipulates that sin is not logically necessary but his system does make estrangement ontologically inevitable. The ramifications of Neville's accomplishment are many. First, Neville has provided an ontological framework which makes it possible for Christian theologians to articulate a rich vision of human possibilities wherein religious life is understood as more than an oscillation between courage and despair, between ecstatic union and estranged separation. One can imagine a doctrine of sanctification that is richer than what Tillich was able or perhaps wanted to offer. In such an account, the religious task is to become what one already is, a part of the divine life. That is to say, Neville's ontology offers substantial resources for those wishing to articulate a contemporary account of deification. Second, Neville moves Christian theology closer to forms of nondualism akin to Sankara's own. For both Sankara and for Neville diminished human possibilities, avidyaand sin, are experientially and cosmologically real but not ontologically so. That we act in ignorant and sinful ways and structure our institutions in destructive ways is recognized; that we fundamentally are ignorant and sinful is denied. Neville's account accords with Sankara's claim that human beings can transcend the penury that inevitably follows from a narrow and impoverished sense of self by realizing the plenitude to which one belongs. It must be acknowledged that although a Christian nondualism can be derived from Neville's theology, this goal does not command his energies. Neville's Confucian commitments draw him instead to the work of repairing the broken world. Care for broken rituals and institutions is of primary concern in Neville's life as scholar-official. For him, the world is internal to the life of God, but this only means that the healing of the world is also a healing of the brokenness of divine life. That we are part of the divine life is not so much a comfort as it is a call to action. Sankara's Advaita, on the other hand, calls us to a liberating knowledge that our being rests in the being of Brahman. He teaches us that wise and compassionate action for the well being of the

225

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ADVAITA

world is possible only when we gain a b r o a d e r perspective that yields greater d e t a c h m e n t . T h e work of world repair will inevitably go awry if we fail to recognize that o u r very being is mystery. Neville comes very n e a r to Sankara when h e maintains that, We construct representations that limit our world unduly, representations that perhaps deny the larger divine world or that justify a small, selfish attitude.... Precisely because of these representations of the selfish world by which we impose our estrangement from the sweep of eternal creation, we can be both sinful and parts of the divine, ignorant and yet Brahman, struggling under the Bodhisattva's vow and yet fully Buddha... .24 Sankara would n o d o u b t r e m i n d Neville that o u r distorted constructions are n o t ontologically fundamental. Neville would agree. But Neville would also add, "Although we enjoy the fullness a n d freedom of the divine, if we think that we are b o u n d to sin, if we act in accordance with that b o n d a g e , a n d if we teach others that this is the way of the world, t h e n we are in fact estranged." 2 5 This recognition of o u r tensive double status as b r o k e n a n d yet also divine is a p r o f o u n d contribution from Neville for the future of any Christian Advaita. More fundamental still is the h o p e that by virtue of o u r belonging to the divine life, that brokenness can be repaired as we move into the fullness of deification.

NOTES * In order to minimize expenses, no diacritical marks are used in this essay. Sanskrit scholars do not need them, and those who do not know Sanskrit will not benefit from their reproduction here. 1 Meister Eckhart The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 167. 2 The most compelling recent example of theology's embrace of the fluid is Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003). 3 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1978), 340. 4 Here I am in deep accord with Catherine Keller's rejection of Lévinas's defense of "the absolute gap which transcendence implies" (Face of the Deep, 279). 5 The critique of a merely contrastive account of transcendence is well developed

226

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

in William Placher's, The Domestication of Transcendence. How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 111-12. Placher borrows the term "contrastive" from Kathryn Tanner who stipulates that an account of transcendence is contrastive if it is taken to negate immanence. Such an account, in Placher's words, "makes divine transcendence and involvement in the world into a zero-sum game: the more involved or immanent, the less transcendent, and vice versa" (111). 6 Joseph Bracken, "Infinity and the Logic of Non-Dualism," Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin 11 (1998): 39-44. 7 For a condensed and accessible treatment by Sankara of these themes, see his Upadesasahasri 1.1.3-7 in Sengaku Mayeda, ed., A Thousand Teachings: The Upadesasahasri of Sankara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 103. Hereafter, the text will be cited as follows: U 1.1.3-7, 103. 8 On scripture as a valid way of knowing Brahman for Sankara, see Anantanand Rambachan, Accomplishing the Accomplished: The Vedas as a Source of Valid Knowledge in Sankara (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991). 9 Sankara insists against Buddhist idealists that, "a thing seen in the waking state, a pillar for instance, is not sublated in any state" (Brahma Sutra Bhasya 2.2.29). See Swami Gambhirananda, trans., The Brahma Sutra Bhasya of Sri Sankaracarya (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1993), 423. Hereafter, the text will be cited as follows: BSBh 2.2.29, 423. 10 Sankara, Taittiriya Upanisad Bhasya 2.1.1. See Swami Gambhirandanda, trans., Eight Upanisads with the Commentary of Sankaracarya, Vol. I (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1991), 308-09. 11 Lance Nelson, "The Dualism of Nondualism: Advaita Vedanta and the Irrelevance of Nature," in Nelson, Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 72. As Nelson's tide alone indicates, Sankara's nondualism does not embrace the natural world. More specifically, Nelson rightly argues that, "Advaita never escapes from its dualistic Samkhya heritage. It cannot accept the world as identical with Brahman, for that would admit change into the spirit." 12 Sankara puts it this way: "Since the Self.. .constitutes the essence of everything, therefore the mind cannot act with regard to its own Self. The mind can think only when it is illumined by the light of Consciousness within.... For the knower cannot be known by the knower, just as fire cannot be consumed by the consuming fire." See Sankara, Kena Upanisad Bhasya 1.6 and 1.9 in Gambhirinanda, trans., Eight Upanisads, 56 and 59. 13 See Brhadaranyaka Upanisad Bhasya 1.4.7. Swami Madhavananda, trans., Brhadaranyaka Upanisad with the Commentary of Sankaracarya (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1988), 95. 14 An explicit defense of this claim is not possible within this limited context. We assert here what must be defended elsewhere. 15 Reiner Schurmann, Wandering Joy: MàsterEckhart 's Mystical Philosophy (Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne Books, 2001), 183. 16 Ibid. 17 Paul Tillich, "The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion," in Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 10. 18 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-1963), 1.235. Hereafter ST 19 I borrow this expression from relational philosopher Harold H. Oliver

TOWARD A CHRISTIAN ADVAITA

227

who argues that God is portrayed in Biblical narrative as "Eminent Other." Oliver maintains that God who is so depicted as a "character-in-relation" must not be made into a nonrelational object. In this context, Oliver states that the Eminent Other is the Holy Other. Nevertheless, "'Eminent Other' does not mean 'Wholly Other', for 'other' - from a relational perspective - necessarily entails 'mutuality'." See Oliver, Relatedness: Essays in Metaphysics and Theology (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984), 164. 20 An early and still important critique of this structurally central feature of Tillich's system was made by Reinhold Niebuhr, "Biblical Thought and Ontological Speculation in Tillich's Theology," in Charles W. Kegley and Robert Bretall, eds., The Theology of Paul Tillich (New York: Macmillan Company, 1956), 215-27. 21 For a concise and lucid presentation of Neville's theory of God as creator, see Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32-44. 22 Robert Cummings Neville, Eternity and Time's Flow (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 166-67. 23 Robert Cummings Neville, A Theology Primer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 87-88. 24 Neville, Eternity and Time's Flow, 212-13. 25 Ibid., 213.

16

Nagarjuna and Creatio ex nihilo

Harold H. Oliver

For ten years, Robert Neville was my colleague and Dean at the Boston University School of Theology, during which time he and I engaged in public dialogue about issues on which we agreed or differed. The dialogues were characterized by civility and mutual respect, even when the differences loomed large. I can think of no better way to honor Dean Neville on this occasion than to continue the dialogue by making it a matter of public record, since nothing of that series was ever recorded or published. By calling attention to his theories I will be able to show something of the nature of his thought which has established him as one of the major voices in religious philosophy. The procedure I have chosen for this project is to set forth and evaluate Neville's argument for the importance of the union of cosmology and ontology in philosophy and religion, and to evaluate the issue by considering Nagarajuna and Creatio ex nihilo. Proceeding in this way is to allow the crucial distinctions to be defined by Neville, whether or not Nagarajuna so presented himself. In Neville's mind the reason this issue, namely, the union of cosmology and ontology, is fundamental is that only in this way can we keep to "the middle way" between eternalism and nihilism. I shall return to the theme of "the middle way" later in this chapter as a way of determining whether Neville's theory of Creatio ex nihilo as he develops it is more entitled to this designation ("the middle way") than Nagarjuna's view.

230

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Nagarjuna: Cosmology and/or Ontology? To keep the argument manageable, I shall confine my attention to Nagarjuna's Mulamadhayamakakarika (The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way [MMK\ ) and to some aspects of the commentarial tradition and views of modern Western interpreters. Throughout this section attention will be given to Neville's understanding and critique of Middle Buddhism, and especially of Nagarjuna, since Neville is allowed to frame the principal question. While Neville's commitment to Confucianism is deep and personal, 1 it is appropriate to speak of his "love-hate" relationship with Buddhism. He admires Buddhism for its emphasis upon the goodness of the world, morality, compassion, self-denial (but not kenosis!), its Bodhisattva ideal, and its philosophy of nature. He nevertheless has hopes that the encounter of Buddhism with the West will help to transform it, much as its initial entry into China altered it in major ways. He is less charmed by Buddhism than is John Cobb, 2 who has argued that Christianity has much to learn from Buddhism, and Thomas Altizer who writes sympathetically about Buddhism's commitment to the interrelation of all things. 3 The central question here is whether Nagarjuna's position (or non-view, if you will) is both cosmological and ontological. Neville sets out to show that Nagarjuna's position is principally cosmological, but deficient ontologically. The way Neville accomplishes this thesis is by setting forth "ten points of debate" between Nagarjuna and process philosophy, thinking in this way to show that the latter is superior in that Nagarjuna's view lacks certain "crucial factors" found in Whitehead's philosophy, such as "the creativity exercised within each occasion's coming to be."4 The ten points are taken from statements in the MMK, often directly quoted, which are chosen supposedly to give certain basics of Nagarjuna's argument. He contends that process philosophy "seems superior to the theory that Nagarjuna showed to be paradoxical," and hence, "that Nagarjuna's claim to have proved all dharmas empty, in the sense of their being self-contradictory, is unjustified."5 This is a bold claim, as is his statement that "Nagarjuna's refutation of causation and change fails with respect to the theories of causation and change in process philosophy" (and we might add, in Creatio ex nihilo).6 The problem with assessing Neville's last claim is that he does not amplify Nagarjuna's one-line statements, nor does he refer to the rich commentarial tradition about their meaning.

NAGARJUNA AND CREATIO EX NIHILO

231

A principal feature of Nagarjuna's MMK, and of Mahayana Buddhism generally, is the interconnection of all things. The doctrine of pratitya samutpada, or dependent origination, which is a given for Nagarjuna, is the basis for what is sometimes called its "relativity." This leads Neville to speak of Nagarjuna's view as basically cosmological. The question then is whether it is also ontological. It is on a somewhat "higher level" that Neville can speak of an ontological dimension in Buddhism: the Buddhistic aesthetic vision of interrelationship of things in their immediate factual character is, I submit, an appreciation of the ontological context of mutual relevance, even if Buddhist metaphors and philosophical categories do not achieve this radical perspective.7 According to Neville's view of "mutual relevance," "the religious vision grasps a genuinely ontological interrelatedness, not cosmological connections." 8 I find Neville's feint praise of Buddhism in this respect to be unwarranted. He interprets "emptiness" in Western rather than Eastern terms and fails to develop a sense for the difference between his position and Nagarjuna's. For example, he writes: "From a cosmological perspective...a thing is empty. The same characteristic viewed ontologically, however, reveals something different, namely that to be at all, things must be in a mutual relevance deeper than their cosmological, relative conditioning." 9 While he wants to intimate that Buddhism is somehow sympathetic with this claim for Creatio ex nihilo, what is missing is a deeper consideration of sunyata, or emptiness, in the Mahayana sense. While Nagarjuna argues that all things are empty (i.e., have no inherent existence, and are hence only phenomenally real), he goes on to the second of the "two truths," namely, that emptiness is itself empty. This blocks the "ontological move" Neville makes, at least from Nagarjuna's perspective.10 Perhaps this is why Neville completely neglects, or marginalizes, Nagarjuna's Two Truth theory.11 There is no discussion in Neville of chapters XXII-XXVII of the MMK, which are the heart of the treatise. If we follow the argument of these chapters, we must conclude that there is no ontology of the Buddha, of pratitya samutpada, or of Nirvana. The "Ultimate Truth" is that emptiness is empty, but it must not be thought that this statement is an ontological truth.

232

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Does this mean that Nagarjuna's view is nihilistic, that he fails to find the middle way between eternalism and nihilism? Not at all. Everything has phenomenal reality; it is not some-thing and not nothing. These are complicated matters in Nagarjuna and many of his interpreters would argue that things have only "constructed" reality. Garfield gives a skeptical reading of Nagarjuna, a theory that, for all Garfield's expertise in these matters, I find extreme. 12 Hopkins, drawing more self-consciously from the Tibetan commentarial tradition, gives no signs of the completely negative reading of Nagarjuna, nor does Streng.13 In this connection a quotation from Ninian Smart is in order: "He [Nagarjuna] harnessed what appeared to be a totally philosophical skepticism to a positive interpretation of Buddhism."14 I conclude that it is wrong to read "ontological' dimensions into Nagarajuna. Doing so may be only a Western desideratum projected onto Buddhism, as is the need to label Nagarjuna's view "cosmological." Perhaps it is neither. I have been following Neville's agenda, not Nagarjuna's, in framing the problematic in these terms. Creatio ex nihilo: Cosmological and Ontological Under this topic we are not referring to the classic Christian view of creatio ex nihilo that developed in the fourth Christian century, but to Neville's unique and idiosyncratic theory according to which God in giving determinate character to the creation, gives Godself a determinate character, namely, that of being Creator. Other than this, God is indeterminate, i.e., nothing. For Neville, everything has conditional and essential features. The conditional features are those by virtue of which a thing is "determinate with respect to at least one other thing."15 Essential features are those "by virtue of which [a thing] has a character of its own not reducible to the conditions of other things."16 Neville has been appealing to these dual features since he wrote his first book, God the Creator, in 1968,17 but one of the clearest statements about them is in a later work to which we have appealed earlier in this paper: Without essential features, a thing could not be different from other things and therefore could not relate to them as being conditioned. Without conditional features, a

NAGARJUNA AND CREATIO EX NIHILO

233

thing could not be determinate with respect to anything. [He continues:] A thing is a de facto harmony of essential and conditional features. This statement has two aspects. First, without essential features, the conditional features would not be different from the set of other things with respect to which the thing is supposed to be determinate. Without conditional features, the essential features would not be determinately different from anything else, hence not determinate in any way18 We could say that the conditional features are cosmological a n d the essential features are ontological. In the public dialogues m e n t i o n e d earlier I often r e s p o n d e d from the relational philosophy I h a d developed which has many affinities with pratitya samutpada, that the conditional features are the essential features. Of course, this response is facetious as stated. Better said: there are n o essential features. T h e conditional features are specified in pratityta samputpada, b u t t h e r e is n o function for essential features, as is claimed t h r o u g h o u t this paper. From this stance I c a n n o t agree with Neville's next p a r a g r a p h in the text just cited: The essential features do not account for the harmony because they are indeterminate except insofar as they are already harmonized with the conditional features. They presuppose their togetherness with conditional features and therefore cannot account for it. Lacking all "account," the de facto harmonies are empty in the profoundest ontological sense. Emptiness should not be thought to consist in the fact that each thing reduces completely to its conditional features and thus to things that condition it. This is a common but erroneous interpretation of pratitya samutpada.19 W h e n Neville says that this position "leads to nihilism," h e implies that Creatio ex nihilo avoids this pitfall, b u t does so only by going against the c o m m o n interpretation of Nagarjuna's MMK. O n e way h e argues for this conclusion is to appeal to the difference between what a thing is a n d why a thing is (shades of Wittgenstein's Tractatusl). Neville's words b e a r repeating: The character a thing has, and all the relations involved in that character, may be called cosmological.... However, that a thing is, with whatever cosmological

234

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

nature it has, is ontological. A thing can be understood in both a cosmological and an ontological dimension. Understanding what it is, is cosmological; understanding why it is, is ontological.20 This position is difficult to refute, especially in the West where the question, "Why is there s o m e t h i n g r a t h e r than n o t h i n g at all?" originated. A remark by my former student a n d now colleague, J o h n J. Thatamanil, confirms my impression that, "The B u d d h a knew of the question, b u t t h o u g h t it unanswerable a n d unadvisable to ask." I think that Nagarj u n a would find extremely problematic Neville's statement that "for cosmological relations to be positive, there must be an ontologically enabling context in which the two things, with their essential features, are mutually together." 2 1 1 would reply, along lines stated earlier, that "the enabling c o n t e n t in which two things are mutually together" is their co-arising. A further word a b o u t togetherness is in order, as it seems to be crucial to Neville a n d Nagarj u n a . Neville introduces the problematic by asking, "How are d e t e r m i n a t e things to be u n d e r s t o o d as together?" His answer reveals the major difference between h i m a n d Nargajuna: " O n e obvious way is by the conditioning connections of their conditional features [a reference to Nagarjuna]. But because d e t e r m i n a t e things would never make their conditional features real [sic] save by their essential features, things must also be in some sense with their respective essential features." 22 T h e following passage from the same b o o k makes evident the distance between Nagarjuna's "explanation" of togetherness a n d Neville's: The conditional features constitute a complicated set of cosmological, indeed temporal and spatial togethernesses. But the essential features of each thing are not contained in the other things to which it is related by conditional features. Rather, the essential features are what give it its own existence, allowing it its own being so as to be able to enter into conditioning relations with other things.... The mutual togetherness of the conditions does not include the togetherness of the essential features of the several harmonies together.23 Neville believes that this a r g u m e n t warrants the conclusion that "there is a deeper, ontological context," namely, "the context of

NAGARJUNA AND CREATIO EX NIHILO

235

mutual relevance."24 If one asks "what is the ontological one that makes possible the togetherness of mutually conditioning things with their in principle independent features," Neville has a ready answer, unacceptable to Nagarjuna: it is "a creator who makes all the determinate things in their complete, interdeterminate realities."25 These claims and counterclaims lead us to ask: what is the scope of Neville's use of the term "ontological" in his own speculative system? We saw that it applies to all worldly things, but does it apply to God? Is God determinate and indeterminate, and do the conditional and essential features apply to God? Does God exist? It is important to ask whether it is appropriate to use the term "ontological" of God (in Neville's sense), or whether it should be restricted to things. We saw that Neville tried to convince us that everything has conditional and essential features. He will claim that God has conditional, but lacks essential features. The paragraph in which he argues this summarizes his view of God: The ground is creator only because there is creation. Apart from creating, the ground would be utterly indeterminate and hence nothing. The ground's character as creator is thus a wholly conditional feature: as to essence, the creator is nothing. Of course, it is inappropriate to apply the distinction of essential and conditional features to the creator, because that would make the creator a determinate thing per se, which would require a further creator. Rather, the logic of creatio ex nihilo is such that, out of nothing, the conditional feature of being creator arises with the creating, conditioning the nothing as the ground of being.26

Is it appropriate to speak of the Creator ontologically? Neville never seems to do so, but speaks only of the "ontological creative act" and of "the ontological agency of the act of creation itself."27 Since for him the agent of creation is not the cause of, but the consequence of this act, it would seem that creativity, not the Creator, is ontological. His words on this are instructive: "we stand in awe before the Ultimate Making, and the Maker made in the Making,"28 He concludes therefore that "God is what God does."29 This position forces him to say that, apart from creation, God the ground is nothing. I am not sure why Neville introduces the notion of Ground nor why he speaks of "God the Ground." If apart from creation there is utterly nothing, what is gained by "naming" this nothing, especially with the term "ground" which classically meant "reason" or "cause"? What would

236

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

be a synonym for Neville's term "ground"? Neville will not and cannot argue that God exists. It is on this basis that he can claim that the terms theism and atheism are not relevant to his position.30 The question arises, whether Neville's view of "the nothing" is ontologically or epistemologically driven? When he says that "Without the act of creation, the indeterminate ground is nothing, absolute nothingness; it is not even the ground of anything and is wholly inconceivable,"31 the problem with these words is that sometimes Neville speaks of the nothing as what we know to be to be empty; at other times he speaks of the nothing as unknowable. The first would be an ontological statement; the second, an epistemological one. Apophatic theology adopts the second formulation; Neville seems to vacillate on this issue. I think that even on Neville's terms, the unknown is the utterly unknowable. Why then does he say what it is (not)? He oversteps the necessary restraint of apophaticism in saying that apart from creating, there is utterly nothing. Neville seems to link his apophaticism with that of the classic mystics of the church. I doubt whether the analogy is cogent. He bases this claim on his statement that apart from creating, God the ground is nothing. It is true that certain patristic authors held that apart from the creation there can be no Creator, but they were cautious about claiming that apart from creation God is nothing. While Neville sees something mystical in this claim, it is just as true for him that apart from creation, the world is utterly nothing, yet he draws no apophatic conclusions from it. It is difficult to trace the tributaries of Neville's Creatio ex nihilo. I am able only to identify two of these: his absolute fidelity to the distinction between conditional and essential features, and his recent mention of Scotus' view that "the divine will precedes the divine nature." 32 Whatever they are, he crafts them into an impressive religious metaphysics.

Whose is the Middle Way? Nagarjuna is the founder of what became known as Madhyamaka, or "the Middle Way." The meaning of the expression is that in his Mulamadhyamakakarika, he convincingly argued that his was the only Buddhist philosophy that steered a middle course between eternalism (or substantialism) and nihilism, both of which he found

NAGARJUNA AND CREATIO EX NIHILO

237

in prevailing schools a n d rejected. His fundamental position was that n o t h i n g has i n h e r e n t existence {svabhava) or "own being." In this way h e avoids the "reificationist extreme" of the eternalism of the A b h i d h a r m a School. 33 H e amplifies this view by saying that all things have " p h e n o m e n a l or conventional existence," a n d h e n c e , are n o t nothing; thus h e avoids nihilism. In C h a p t e r XV of the MMK, Nagarjuna illumines these extremes: To say "it is" is to grasp for permanence. To say "it is not" is to adopt the view of nihilism. Therefore a wise person Does not say "exists" or "does not exist".... "Whatever exists through its essence Cannot be nonexistence" is eternalism. "It existed before but doesn't now" Entails the error of nihilism.34 Garfield, whose expression "the reificationist extreme" we used, shows how this resolution of the issue is a soteriological matter: If one reifies phenomena - including such things as one's own self, characteristics (prominently including one's own) or eternal objects - and if one thinks that things either fail to exist or exist absolutely, one will not be able to attain any peace. For one will be subject to egoism, the overvaluing of oneself and one's achievements and of material things. These are the seeds of grasping and craving, and, hence, of suffering. The alternative, Nagarjuna suggests, and the path to pacification, is to see oneself and other entities as nonsubstantial, impermanent, and subject to change and not as appropriate object of such passionate craving.35 According to the Buddhist doctrine of pratitya samutpada, there is n o single creative act (as is essential to Neville's theory 36 ) b u t continual co-arising a n d ceasing. N o t h i n g is p e r m a n e n t . T h e interrelatedness of all things is the result of their co-arising. For Nagarjuna, this coarising is n o t something h e tries to prove, b u t is a given that needs n o speculative justification. I will say n o m o r e a b o u t Nagarjuna's position until I t u r n again to Neville's. E n o u g h has b e e n said to show that it is n o t appropriate to speak of Nagarjuna's "view" as ontological. His famous te tralemma - a thing is, is not; n e i t h e r b o t h n o r n e i t h e r - warrants against it. It is difficult to know what use Neville can make of this fourfold logic.

238

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

While some may read Nargajuna's tetralemma as totally negative, I read it as a great caution against eternalism and nihilism. So far, it appears that Nagarjuna's is a genuine "Middle Way." But Neville claims that his philosophy of Creatio ex nihilo is a better candidate for being called the "middle way" between eternalism and nihilism. He advances this thesis in a passage, which I quoted earlier, where he denies that the usual interpretation of pratitya samutpada avoids these extremes. His claim that it is Creatio ex nihilo that qualifies uniquely as a middle course is based on his contention that the view that "each thing reduces to its conditional features" (which he says is an erroneous interpretation of pratitya samutpada) is nihilism and the view that "the identification of a thing with its essential features which are indeterminate as thus mystically merged with the essential features of all things" is mystical eternalism. He concludes: "The 'middle way' is to acknowledge that emptiness consists in what the philosophical theology of creation reveals as the de facto harmony of essential and conditional features."37 How does his philosophy achieve this goal, if indeed it does? There are some aspects of Neville's theory that we have reserved for this comparative exercise. The first of these has to do with "the creative act." What does it achieve? Does it make beings be, and if so, in what sense? Neville's argument is a follows: "From a cosmological perspective, as a de facto harmony, a thing is empty. The same characteristic viewed ontologically, however, reveals something different, namely that to be at all, things must be in an ontological context of mutual relevance deeper than their cosmological, relative conditioning."38 He adds that this context is a "togetherness of determinate things more basic than their conditional features, because it is a togetherness of their essential features." I mentioned earlier that he credits Buddhism with "an appreciation of the ontological context of mutual relevance." Nargajuna's view is quite different. Because he does not accept "essential features," he would argue, as I did earlier, that the "enabling context" (not ontological, as in Neville's case) is their co-arising. Their togetherness is accounted for completely by their co-arising. No ontological explanation of their togetherness is warranted. From this point it would seem that Neville espouses some form of eternalism with respect to the creative act, but not of the Ground. In speaking of the Ground, he prefers to say that, apart from creation, it is utterly nothing. It is hard to avoid the charge this is nihilistic language. These considerations lead us to conclude that Neville's "middle

NAGARJUNA AND CREATIO EX NIHILO

239

way" is a both-and rather than a neither-nor: he is nihilistic in some respects, but not cosmologically (things have their "own being" 39 ), and eternalistic with respect to "the ontological creative act." His would not seem to be a "middle way" in Nargajuna's sense; it is certainly more nuanced. We might say that it is a nihilism mitigated by eternalism, and an eternalism mitigated by nihilism. It is difficult to be certain about this claim because of the extreme subtlety of Neville's argument, but it is certainly the case that terms like "ontology" have a priority in Neville's system whereas they do not in Nagarjuna. If Neville wants to avoid the suspicion of eternalism, he might benefit by avoiding expressions that are historically associated with being, such as essence, essential, ontological, substance and the like, however much he may qualify them.

NOTES 1

See Neville's Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late Modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), esp. chapter 10: "Confucianism, Christianity, and Multiple Religious Identity," 193-209. 2 Cf. Robert Cummings Neville, Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980), 116-26. Here Neville engages Cobb's book, The Structure of Christian Existence (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967). 3 Cf. Robert Cummings Neville, The Tao and the Daimon: Segments of a Religious Inquiry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 183-85. 4 Ibid, 179. 5 Ibid., 184. 6 Ibid., 182-83. 7 Ibid., 189. 8 Ibid., 190. 9 Ibid., 189. 10 Neville's view is reinforced by the argument of David Dilworth on this issue: "Despite its rejection of ontological pluralism, monism, and nihilism...the Mahayana position is not free from its own kind of ambivalence. A pro-ontological conception of 'true reality' has crept back into the discussion" (cited in Neville, The Tao and the Daimon, 177). 11 Ibid., 176. 12 The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, translation and commentary by Jay L. Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 13 See Jeffrey Hopkins, Meditation on Emptiness, rev. ed. (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1996), and Frederick Streng, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967). 14 Ninian Smart, "Nagarjuna," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 8 vols., ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co, Inc., & The Free Press, 1972), 4:

240 439.

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

15

Robert Cummings Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 90. 16 Ibid. 17 Robert Cummings Neville, God the Creator: The Transcendence and Presence of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 18 Neville, The Tao and the Daimon, 187. Neville's most recent treatment of conditional and essential features is found in Religion in Late Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press), 13, 21, and 68. 19 Neville, The Tao and the Daimon, 188 (italics added). 20 Ibid., 188-89. 21 Ibid., 189. 22 Neville, Religion in Late Modernity, 68. 23 Ibid., 21. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid, 68. 26 Neville, Behind the Masks of God, 92. 27 Ibid., 93. 28 Neville, Religion in Late Modernity, 28. 29 Ibid., 86. 30 Neville, Behind the Masks of God, 93: "In general, the debate between theists and non-theists is revealed to be a secondary matter by the logic of creatio ex nihilio, a matter of disputed ways of interpreting the world, and perhaps of genuinely different experiences." 31 Neville, Religion in Late Modernity, 25. 32 Ibid, 70. In this connection, the search widens by virtue of his statement, made over a decade ago, that "the lineaments of the systematic conceptions guiding my philosophy" are "harmony, essential and conditional features, the one and the many, order, chaos, mixtures, normativeness and value, vagueness, triviality, narrowness, breadth, personal structure, and social analysis"; see Neville's editor's introduction in Robert Cummings Neville, ed., New Essays in Metaphysics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), xiii. 33 Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, 122. 34 Ibid., 224. 35 Ibid., 152. 36 See esp. Religion in Late Modernity, 69: "The creative act is not only asymmetrical, immediate, and eternal; it is also singular. It has the singularity of being the one act by virtue of which all diverse and related things come to be." 37 Neville, The Tao and the Daimon, 188. 38 Ibid., 189. 39 Neville, Religion in Late Modernity, 68.

PART THREE

The Future of Christian Theology

17

Godhead, God(s), Religion(s) and the Future of the Christian Religion

Ray L. Hart

The ideas and lived realities my title comprises have claimed the mindful attention and daily devotion of teeming millions in all times known to humankind. 1 Especially in the modern west, they have also been the subjects of high dubiety and decreasing piety, and that among mounting numbers. The clash of these contrary attitudes and dispositions, scarcely limited to the west given an incipient but already pervasive world culture, is characteristic of our situation and on the evidence is likely to be so for as far as the eye can see. One could dream of treating discretely each subject named in the title, each leading into the next and the whole unfolding in order seriatim. But that is a dream quickly become nightmare. The more one knows about the literatures and practices concerning the subjects named, the more one approaches stasis of the mind: as the centipede pondering which foot to put down next cannot move. Automotion is a great gift to humankind (and was known long before the automobile! ), but the motility of thought needs be commensurate with what is thought. We automotors (who are also autolocutors) should remember that our natural mode of locomotion is walking (the mode Thoreau thought most conducive to thinking - especially walking as Sainte Terrdng [from which he derived sauntering]: "on

244

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

the way to the Holy Land"), and we should recall as well Aristotle's description of walking as a continuous estopment of falling. Each person addressing these themes named in the title will do so from the determinate situation of having fallen into them, as her or his thinking them will be a mindful estopment of a falling that will continue. Thus the mind "walks the walk." Even they who take up these themes in high dubiety and critique cannot prescind from the agnosis into which they have fallen. That said, the topical themes and their referential realities do not begin or end; they are rather underway, and with such force as to boggle the mind of modern predictors of their demise. Essays on them of course do begin and end, as this one does. Fidelity to the subject matter requires us to insert ourselves in the metaxu ("the between"), and that will not make for clear and distinct packages. These themes (and their putatively referential realities) suffuse each other, so that treating any one prolepsis and postlepsis requires treating them all. To that caveat must be added another and larger: this essay by no means delivers a theological project (particularly, senkrecht von obenl). It but offers the schema of a theological program yet to be made good on. 2 Moreover, it will be abundantly clear that this theologian is inserted in the metaxi of the western monotheisms generally and those of Christianity specifically. "Religion" is the word in western languages of latinate origin that comprehends the phenomena (the "appearances") of what is under purview here. Many languages have no exact equivalent word, but all have words for the selfsame purview ("the Way, "the Path," "Enlightenment," etc.) Nothing is more human than the effort to repair the Tower of Babel (it is the principal humanistic preoccupation of universities). Time is strewn with the linguistic debris of the effort to discern the term of sufficient extension to comprehend the most determinately intensive particular. If the centuries-long effort, intensified since the eighteenth century in the west, to elaborate a definition of "religion" that comprehends every pertinent determinate phenomenon has failed, there is a very good reason in logic, viz. that the extension and the intension of a term are inversely related (so the more one has of "man" the less one has of Socrates, and vice versa).5 Just this inverse relationship is what keeps the hermeneutical spiral going and that prevents it from becoming a (vicious) circle. The principle of interpretation to be honored is that diachronically within one religious tradition and synchronically across diverse religious traditions, one cannot say "the same thing"

GODHEAD, GOD(S), RELIGION(S)

245

without saying it differently. Even so and notwithstanding, some bearing is gained by attending to the word "religion." Religio, like most abstract nouns of its sort, harbors within its substantive lee the lexical estopment of an active verb ( ligere, ligare) meaning to bind, bond, or connect (as in all latinate words having the lig- stem: obligation, ligature, etc.). To this verbal complexity is added the prefix "re-," connoting doing again, or over. So at least etymologically "religion" comprises acts of re-ligation. The question immediately arises: re-ligation of what and what, the dogging and dogged question of reference} In its earliest usage the referential range of religo was not in doubt: in the Pax Romana that range was the civil state and its civil religion with its imperial rituals of re-ligating the citizen and the state (matters pondered as early as Plato's The Statesman). The crisis (decision/turning point) came with Augustine's brilliant confrontation of classical culture and Christianity precisely on the matter of "religating what and what?" in the Confessions. Augustine acknowledges copiously what he has learned from the "pagan" philosophers (above all Plato), including his adoption of an adapted version of religio. What he did not learn from Plato was the incarnation of the Logos, present(ed) to him in the timely fleshed preaching of Ambrose in Milano. The consequently different referential range of religio becomes evident as the Confessions unfold. He recollects his life, things he never really collected in their happening. He was born into perilous ligations, fell into even more perilous new ones. His recollections proceeded out of the resources of his knowledge, which was invariably selfinterested. The result was that he became to himself a "waste land" (whence derives T. S. Eliot's title). The Confessions comprise a long prayer, a cry from the heart to know not as he knows but as he is known, through and through, by One providentially (providingly) present in every determinate occasion: one dare scrutinize oneself only if one has been always under scrutiny by Truth itself timely present. Otherwise one only re-collects what was never truthfully collected. Only so can one remember, re-ligate one's life. Because Truth is not laid up in a preexistent Golden Age of Archoi but rather is present in the bodily margins of timely determinate contingencies, re-ligation is without end. Thus enters the multi-referential range of religio in the Christian west, although this range was already effective prior to Augustine, especially in the Alexandrian school and among the Greek Fathers.

246

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

(Needless to say, the other monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, offer different accounts.) Ever after, that range has been simultaneously anthropological and theological (to which was added in the Renaissance, especially through Ficino and the Florentine Academy and such theologians as Jacob Boehme, the cosmological - which has been exacerbated with the rise of the modern sciences: above all in our own day). The extent of the range, to my mind, remains open and that because the referents themselves (humankind, God, cosmos) remain open as to what they comprise. The word "theology" has a no less rich history and complexity of referential range (its intentionality, or logical/onto-meontological object). The word antedates Christianity, was coined by Plato; it and its word-group {theologia, theologein, theologos, theologikos) are altogether lacking in the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers. 4 It is rare even where one would expect to find it abundant, in the Apologists. The term is used randomly by the Alexandrian Christian thinkers, largely out of Plotinian rather than Platonic resources. Only in and after Augustine does the word begin to gather currency in Latin Christianity - and that with hard reserves. The reason for the slow adoption/adaptation of the word "theology" owes to developments both in the Platonic Academy and in the early community of Christian thinkers. Plato used the term "theology" to refer to God, gods, and "divine things" indiscriminately. Philosophy was to offer mindful distance on and critique of all that bears upon the conduct of human life, and that under the "measure"(to metrion) of the Good. He recognized the independence of popular piety deriving from "divine things," as he did the priests/poets who were the announcers or presenters, the keepers of (what we may call) the first-order language of divine things (although some of the earliest Greek, pre-Socratic philosophers, had been themselves cultic priests - e.g., Pythagoras, Parmenides). The (philosophical) theologian was to think what was religiously presented, was to engage a second-order language commensurate with the first-order language of presentation. Since Plato's interest was essentially that of the state, to "mythical" theology was added "political." The Stoics added "physical" theology, according to which the physical cosmos was construed as the bearer/presenter of "divine things." (And Augustine, in the City of God, substituted for "physical" the term "natural" - arguably, fatefully so.) So one has the three classical forms of theology: mythical, political, natural. But Plato's grand project for theology - that of preserving the

GODHEAD, GOD ( s ) , RELIGION ( s )

247

independence of the first-order language of religion and that of the second-order language of reflection and critique, while relating them mindfully - ran afoul, thwarted by an apparently unbridgeable aporia. That aporia is itself a variant of the rule referred to above: that of the inverse relation between the extension and the intension of a term. The matter may be summarized. If theology sticks to its method of critical dialectic, its object becomes less that of mythical theology and more than of its own generation: thus the later Plato and Aristotle take steps toward what could only be formulated as independent philosophical doctrines of God, gods, divine things. If on the other hand, theology accommodates itself steadily to the religious "object" and thus to the cultic archetypes or epiphanic appearances, its own critical independence is compromised. It is no accident that in the Late Academy of Hellenism, at roughly the time of the resurgence of the old Mystery Religions - and the emergence of various forms of Gnosticism - theology came to be exhaustively (again) mythical theology. In short, the dilemma is that theology either maintains itself as a critical enterprise but dissolves the object it set out to understand or it maintains the object steadily in view but suspends its critical character. 5 One voice (say a distinctively modern one) will be heard to say "this aporia was the result of a faulty methodology"; another (say a Barthian) will chime in, "what would you expect? Begin with and stay with philosophy and you will have all its aporiae." The first carries force only if methodology holds priority over every material subject matter (the modern bias); the second only if the actual course of the earliest Christian community is ignored. For that community in fact held itself only to the material subject matter, and was agonizingly slow to generate formal modes of its intelligibility. What claimed individuals was the kerygma of divine manifestation itself, the kerygmata of announcement and presentiment, whether of event or speech. Josephus wrote of the atrophy of prophetic immediacy at the onset of the early Christian community, and of the regnant conviction that the old continuous divine-human intercourse had finished for the current aeon. Accompanying that atrophy, however, was the ambient air of apocalypticism, the expectation of the arrival of a prophet who would renew the immediacy of divine-human intercourse. In the conviction of the disciples and apostles, that renewal was occurring before their eyes and said in their ears in the events and sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. They were preeminently concerned to keep the

248

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

kerygma intact, not to think it and all it implied and entailed: they were still rubbing their eyes and unplugging their ears in astonishment. Apostolicity could be counted on for keeping the kerygma intact only as long as there were apostles: what then after Jesus and the witnesses were gone? Enter Paul and "the Spirit." But what is the relation of Spirit to Jesus, and both to God? And what protects against freeranging spirit, "enthusiasm"? Collect all the stories and attributable sayings, and write them down. How to protect the written against the old atrophy? Establish the authoritative Church as interpreter, presided over by apostolic successors, etc., etc. Like all persons, the earliest Christians were situated and understood themselves to be divinely situated anew, as they were rendered complicit in situating their situation. When the immediate enchantments of origins faded, they were left to think. In a cluster of befalling events the relation between God and humanity had been decisively and normatively renewed: the referential range of God, notably the humanity of God, had been broadened. This renewal was by no means utterly discontinuous but rather gathered up a revivified past, that of Israel into which they were ingrafted on the stem of Jesse. The renewal of the past was accomplished proleptically out of the power of an apocalyptic future, the conjunction of which comprised the immediacy of the present. What happened before their eyes and in their hearing with compelling immediacy was a lived claim to the full triadic temporality of the re-origination of divine epiphany (or epiphanies). Immediacy without wholeness is empty; wholeness without immediacy is blind (to mimic Kant's language if not his point). Immediacy is nothing but for the wholeness made somehow immediate; and wholeness "takes time" for mindful disclosure or uncovering. How to think the wholeness of deity and the immediacy of deity's claims, the wholeness of humanity and the immediacy of its claims, is and remains the aboriginal problematic of Christian theology. Given their caution about losing their "object" to some prevailing or self-generated schema of thought, it is altogether understandable that early Christian thinkers took three or four centuries to come to some (even then controverted) meeting of minds on matters directed to the referential range of God. Chalcedon and Nicea were historically inevitable and necessary, as much so as that they were disastrous for theological thinking. What they succeeded at, over time, was in canonizing forms of atrophy, at establishing acceptable forms for the stasis of thought about "divine things."

GODHEAD, GOD ( s ) , RELIGION ( s )

249

How could they who traced their origins to God's own increase of referential and phenomenological range have forgotten the fact, and worked to estop any other? When John Henry Newman converted to Catholic Christianity, among his first projects was "the development of Christian doctrine." 6 As an originating Christian he wished to participate in the origins of Christianity (an especially English passion, hence their fine work on Patristics). The project is to be commended. As Gaston Bachelard has advised of any matter up for understanding: repeat its origins and continue its exaggerations. I should not be misunderstood as denigrating "orthodox" doctrines: who has no concern whatsoever for orthodoxy has no respect for truth. But the truth of which the Christian religious speak is not timeless, once for all laid up against the last days, but rather is both timely given and timely won, neither without cost of human complicity in its realization. I go further (to speak only of Christianity) : orthodoxy internally requires heterodoxy (often, historically, even heresy) for the actualization of the truth that is its goal. It could scarcely be otherwise if the "other" (heteros) is essential to the "same." (Case in point: if theology as a technical term gained its majority only in the tenth century CE, that owed in significant measure to the Jewish thinker Saadya Gaon and the renaissance of Greek studies mediated through Islam.) In my theological fetching up I was required to read endless tomes of orthodoxy, and had to discover on my own those "heretics" who preserved the questionableness of what the orthodox had "settled," and thus managed to keep God godself in view (think of Eckhart, of Bruno, of Boehme, even Luther, et at)? Godhead and God(s) I said just above that the deepest problematic in early Christianity was the conjunction of wholeness and immediacy of deity and humankind in their relationship. The matter may be stated more inclusively, abstractly and neutrally as the ever-changing relation between the unity and the manifoldness of theology's subject matter or material object (a variant of the ancient problem of "the one and the many"). (This change is a leitmotif, recurrently, in the biblical saga). And before all else, the subject matter of theology is God, divine things: the divine God, not the god of mindful projection, or at the end of the critical trail.

250

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Theology for good reason forsook "queening the sciences." Whatever the relation between science and religion (and it is an increasingly critical one), there can be no "science" in the modern sense of God. A science depends altogether on the repeatability of its objects, their stability of situated relatedness and their phenomena (hence the challenge of quantum theory!), as indeed do all names. Moreover, for the reference to be repeatable, the phenomena of the referend must be representable by multiple specimens. What is sui generis is not repeatable or susceptible of representation by specimen. God is such a one in the western monotheisms, although Judaism and Islam are infinitely more reserved on naming God than is Christianity. (One recalls Rudolf Otto to the effect that Christian clergy often refer to God as though God were their "familiar," having developed a professional insensitivity to all things holy.) Not so fast, an objector says: did not God show godself in creation? Is not Creation, the cosmos itself, the multifaceted specimen of deity (so Spinoza: deus sive natura), mindbogglingly varied in representation and repeatability (and the subject matter of all the hard sciences)? But this observation carries force only if the whole of deity is immediately exhausted by and emptied into the cosmos of this aeon. Such a claim has been resisted (rightly) by the sum total of the Western monotheistic religions: no one has seen God and lived. Even so, the cosmos has been taken as some kind of theophany, say that of God the Creator. But God is differently determinate as Creator and Redeemer (so the non-repeatable theophantic epiphanies: to Moses, Jesus, Mohammed). If indeterminate Godhead does not equate to cosmos, determinate God as both Creator and Redeemer cannot be extrapolated from the cosmos. Not a science, theology is a poetic art that traffics in determinate intelligibles. But determinate intelligibility depends on that which is itself not determinately but only indeterminately intelligible. This may be taken in the quite ordinary way in which the principle or principles of a science cannot be taken with the certainty gained from results within the determinate science itself. More exactly, the critical methodological matter may be put in an Hegelian way, but without Hegelian consequences (as William Desmond has suggested), viz., there is a determination process more ultimate than determinate intelligibles. The critical metaphysical (ontological/ meontological) matter is that theology's determinate intelligibles track and trace theogony, the very self-generation of determinate God from indeterminate Godhead. Thus theology is "poetic" (from

GODHEAD, GOD ( s ) , RELIGION ( s )

251

poien: to make) because God is a making {creatio ab origine, creatio continua) ; and an "art" because its cognitive freight arrives by nondiscursive forms, by figuration. Godhead and God are to be distinguished. Theoretically and analytically they are distinct although inseparable in act. Upon this distinction depends the intelligibility of multiform historical world religious traditions, particularly what is common and what is diverse among them. Godhead (in the West, deitas) is the sheer indeterminacy of the sacred, the holy. Indeterminate Godhead enfolds the root of all that is and is not determinately, thus all that is and is not in the cosmos (Eriugena). Godhead pure (indeterminate enfoldment) cannot be manifest because it is unconditioned by any contingent determinacy, thus cannot be known in any ordinary sense. Godhead is grasped in (or one is grasped by) an intellectual intuition as the primordial root, the groundless ground (Boehme's Ungrund) of what there is and what there is not. Much older than Ockham is the intuition that the higher an entity's destiny the fewer are the principles of its constitution: hence the nisus toward the divine simplicity. God is One, thus "simple," as the uniquely princip(a)led determinateness of Godhead; is multiform, thus many and diverse, as determinately principled in the temporal visages of creation and redemption. The principal and principles of the divine economy condition every construal of evil and good - which may be reduced to the slogan: no cosmogony or anthropogony without theogony. Only late modernity and postmodernity have been able to think the dying (as in "death of God") God, hence have positioned Christian theology to take up where Greek theogony left off (and as otherwise than the Greeks thought), thus to think the metaxy of the living and dying God (to think, in Robert Scharlemann's phrase, "the being of God when God is not being God"). 8 If medieval theology "went wrong" in its overdetermination of eternal creation, late modernity threatens an ovenndetermination of non-being and "the death of God." It remains to be seen whether theogonical theology can now evade both entrapments, can think the dying God that lives, the living God that dies, and above all whether a religious piety can live the ceaseless dialectic of the indeterminate and the temporal determinate without loss of the metaxic eternal nondeterminate; that is, whether one can be reborn in the totally present aeon of the cosmos of which God is both Genesis and Apocalypse (Rendezvous), be reborn between (living) God and (dying) God.

252

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

But for the transformation of Godhead in God the Creator, the "between" (metaxy) of evil and good would be exhaustively internal (to Godhead). But for the transformations of Godhead in God the Redeemer, the "between" of evil and good in humankind would be exhaustively external. The "between" of creation and redemption is embodied in the flesh of the human person, in the body of the cosmos, or, as the Christian tradition wished to say, in the "between" of in imago Dei (in the image of God) and ad imaginem Verbum (toward the image of the Word). If a religious ethic is always and necessarily subservient to theology, that is so because evil and good have finally to be parsed in the grammar of internal and external relations, the grammar of the "between": internal to the person, external between persons; internal to Godhead, external between Godhead and God, and between God and creatures. To be possessed of determinate relations between good and evil is to have a destiny. To be possessed of wholly indeterminate relations is to have a fate. As determinate, God has or is a destiny; as indeterminate, Godhead has or is a fate. Ancient Greek religion venerated fate as sacred; and because fate was thought (rightly) to be unprincipled, the great metaphysical thought-experiments of the Greek "axial age" arose to contest fate in the name of "principle." Christian thought-experiments arose not to contest fate head-on (Augustine being the incomparably great exception) but rather to reckon with the lived transformations of fate as destiny. Determinate God is at the apex of the divine determination process, thus the Creator of the determinate conditions under which the cosmos emerged and emerges, the conditions under which anything at all is and is not (which is by no means to say that God is the cause of the cosmos or any determinate thing or relation within it). These conditions are solely internal to God godself and are of God's free deployment. Thus one emends the classical creatio ex nihilo (God creates from nothing) with creatio ex nihilo siveDeo ipse (God creates from nothing, that is, from God godself). This claim entails that the nihil, as that from which things are that they are (that they are something and not nothing), is internal to God (although their what is external to God), so that the determinate conditions of being and nonbeing are internal to God. Without the nihil internal to God, the modern preoccupation with the nihil can only issue in "nihilism." The relation between Godhead and God is without mundane parallel or instance (with one exception to be noted below). This is a

GODHEAD, GOD ( s ) , RELIGION ( s )

253

relation sui generis obtaining between what is exhaustively internally related (Godhead) and what is both internally and externally related (God) to that "desert" (Eckhart) of barren (because indeterminate) internality. The sere sirocco of that holy desert, whence arose the monotheisms of the West, is energized by the force and counterforce of indeterminate One and determinate Many, constrained by enfolding internal relations. The name of this energy is indeterminate Desire (Boehme, Blake). The inexhaustible turbic energeia of indeterminate Godhead, the primordial force traced in everything that is and is not (whether in determinate God or by creation determinately in the creature) is wholly inchoate Desire: which is why both God and creature are marked aboriginally both internally and externally by turbulence. Wisely did Boehme say that Desire is the mother of being and non-being, of something and nothing (an insight not limited to Buddhism). And that is why suffering is at the heart of all that is determinate, whether in God or creature: suffering owes not only to the relation between "things" but simultaneously to the internality of "things" themselves. Indeterminate turbic Desire entails inevitable suffering because Desire is intrinsically insatiable. Equally inevitable is the telic force of Desire for satiation in determinate form (William Blake: "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires" 9 ). It is impossible to speak of these matters, not only in theology but especially in the concrete language of religious traditions, without non-discursive figuration. That holds true cardinally of the role of Will in the satiation, frustration, and interdiction of Desire. One thinks of Plato's two horses, one white and one black, and the charioteer whose task it is to make them pull together. In the Christian West (or is it the same everywhere?) it is all but impossible to speak "Desire" without bodily reference, indeed without explicitly sexual metaphor. Only to "outsiders" can it come as a shock that religious language in respect of God is saturated with sexual reference, above all in the ascetic mystics (cf. John of the Cross, the Song of Songs). Why not and how else, for is not the bodily the most specifically determinate existence known to us? Where is the at once ecstatic and excruciating turba of the "between" of Desire and Will more determinate than in the lifegiving, death-dealing explosions and implosions of consummated sexuality? Where else the determinate coincidence of bodily living and dying? Here a rule holds: anthropogenesis recapitulates ontomeontogenesis (of Godhead), tracingly recapitulating theogony.

254

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

The primordial "project" for the satiation of indeterminate Desire in Godhead is the emergence-y of God the Creator, by whom or which there is anything determinate at all, hence determinate "objects" for the determinate (potential) satiation of Desire. Left to itself, Desire is but an indeterminate raging internality, which can be called the indeterminate Wrath of Godhead, and is traced in the determinate Wrath of God (of which the Judaic and Christian scriptures are redolent). The sheer terror of pure divine Wrath is transmogrified as Will, transforming the indeterminate force of Desire into the power (Will) to effect a potential determinate "object" for its satiation. Thus the "birth" (or "emanation") of God the Creator. Because no object of Desire exhaustively satisfies Desire, but rather serves to revivify, enhance and re-form Desire itself, turbic suffering is constitutive of all that is and is not, of Creator (assymetrically) and creature (symmetrically) alike. In the indeterminate Desire of Godhead vests the "evolution" and "devolution" of all being and non-being, of all good and evil, of all love and wrath. The rudimentary task of theology - especially a theology unspooked by metaphysics - is to think the groundlessly renewing ground at the inmost core of Godhead, thus of the divine God (or gods) of the "positive" religions, and of all that, qua created, simultaneously is internal and external to God. Theology without theogony is both empty and blind (to mimic Kant again). Although the relation between Godhead and God (gods) is lacking in cosmic or human instantiation, save in "the ground of the soul" activated by the imaginem ad Verbum (Eckhart), human life is saturated with intuitions that source symbols of that relation, and the relation between the sacred/holy and the human world. Beginning with the Renaissance and climaxing with modernity, all symbols of the sacred have undergone a process of "breaking." Now and for as far as the eye can see, they function intellectually (but arguably not emotively) "brokenly."10 From all determinateness follows mutability, hence suffering. Thus eternal creation includes the divine but untested (by temporal creation) nondeterminate parameters of God the Creator's Love and Wrath, light and darkness, good and evil. Were God's suffering redeemable wholly within the scene of eternal creation (creatio ab origine) there would not have been the mis en scèneoitemporal creation (creatio continua). The suffering of God the Creator is redeemable in, and only in, the temporal suffering of creatures created in imago dei et in imaginem ad verbum.

GODHEAD, GOD(S), RELIGION(s)

255

Because inexhaustibly indeterminate, Godhead comprises neither principle nor principal. God, being determinate (and being so both by self-effusion of or emanation from Godhead, and by the coeval conditioning of temporal creation), is both principled and a principal in the unity of principles. It was an early argument in Christian theology whether the "principles" comprising deity are that or "persons," an argument reaching orthodox closure in the formula: one substance, three persons. (Caveat: "person" in the early Councils bore no relation to a modern understanding of person, and was drawn from classical theater.) It is no longer possible to think the principality of God through (peripatetic) "substance," nor the internal energies of divine principles through "persons." In truth "substance" and "persons" never did cohere metaphysically. The principality of God is not that of a person (which does not forfend the efficacy of broken personal symbols, used constantly in the rituals of many religious traditions), but rather is that of Wisdom {Sophia, so venerated in Eastern Orthodoxy). Here again the apophatic via negativa is traveled: what God is not is more exactly said than what God is. If metaphysics is the scientia of "first principles," itself an inexact account of its full task, and may not commit petitio principii in their probative demonstration, it has the perduring problem of the status of the that whose what the putative first principles putatively comprise. The sheer thatness of God and God's groundlessly renewing ground in Godhead is delivered to religious or theological intuition, as its what is accessible (brokenly) symbolically through epiphantic manifestations as received in human experience. Religion (s) To the remarks made earlier about religion (s) should be added at least the following three in respect of the problematic shared by all religions. First, all religion (s) recognize a distinction between what is taken ordinarily as "real" and what under certain conditions puts itself upon us as "really real." Each integral religious culture has its own conceptuality, figures, and language for the formulation of this distinction. In the west the distinction has been, stated as neutrally as I can, that between "what is there" (and how it is there) and "what there is" (and how that "what" is). "What is there" comprises all that is apparent determinately to ordinary, common perception (hence

256

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

is there in space/time). "What there is" was taken to be the province of classical metaphysics, whose intentionality was the durable source of the shifting phenomena of "what is there." The special vocation of religion was (and is) to live from and out of "what is there" toward "what there is." This way of stating the distinction will not travel across the religions, and indeed unaltered will not work even in construing the western monotheistic religions.11 As one who breaks with the ontotheological tradition of metaphysics (without abandoning metaphysics), and does so fundamentally for theological reasons, I re-state the distinction as that between "what is there and is not there" and "what there is and is not." (In this I am preceded by Eriugena, among others.) This restatement permits the distinction to travel farther across the range of the religions. In remarking some alleged relation between the religions, it is always well to get one's own religion "right" first. A second distinction may well be a variant of the first. Among "what is there and not there" are multiple religions (and their negation). Each recognizes and honors multiple planes of human experience. Normally one lives in the plane of ordinariness in which "what is there" appears to culturally conditioned forms of perception (in the modern west called the "secular" plane). Religions are among "what is there and not there" because of the imperative mood hovering over all of "what is there and is not there", viz., that one should be in some other plane. That plane both is and is not there, and some breach of present plane is necessary for actual access to the surmised plane. The breach and the transition (depending on the religion in question) may be managed variously: by initiative of the individual, at the initiative of the deity or power of the dimly sighted target plane, by the guidance of a seer or sage habituated to the target plane, etc. Most religions have tales of cycling between planes, and of the recycling of all. Third, these distinctions (or variants of one) are not themselves among "what is there," although the phenomena on which they are based are. The ordinary person may well not see what is there in her life as ordinary because she has no special sense for the "special" in relation to which what is there is "ordinary." All religions recognize that some certain discipline is required to see and hear what is there and not there, what there is and is not. Religions hence differ from merely intellectual enterprises, in that they require the disciplines of practice to see and comprehend the planes pertinent to a fulfilled human existence.12 As William Blake urged repeatedly, a cleansing of

GODHEAD, GOD ( s ) , RELIGION ( s )

257

the portals of perception is itself the gateway to understanding what is important. That is why in terms of time and energy the bulk of religion (s) is given over to rituals, whether individual or corporate, which are forms of preparation for seeing what is not there in one plane and seeing what there is in another, and vice versa. Theologians in high abstraction from religious ritual are not to be accredited. What then of a theology of the religions of the world? The first thing to say is that if it is indeed it is a oology of religions it will proceed first and foremost from a doctrine, theory, or understanding of godhead (the indeterminate plane of sacrality), God(s), "divine things," of the plane of "what there is and is not." The second thing to say is that if it is indeed a theology, it will be concerned with truth and normativity. On the first, the present schematic implies that all religions are temporally and culturally determinate forms of the reception and transmission of the determinations of the divine, indeterminate abyss; each has its own determinacies of the divine and its own understanding of the determination process. By my (Christian) lights, this worldly plethora of religions falls under the divine Providence. To contest the plethora one would have to deny the indeterminacy of the groundlessly divine abyss (the sacred, the holy, the Way, etc.) and affirm that that abyss has in fact become a unitary determinate to which all wayward religious cultures must either bow or acknowledge that they are but variants of the reception of that unitary determinate divine. That has not happened and it will not. To my knowledge, it has not happened within a single religious tradition either. What of the second, the nisus of theology toward truth, normativity? It is too late in this essay's day to enter upon "truth." Suffice to say that (by Christian lights anyway) truth is not alone to be known but also to be done. A carpenter must "true up" a structure in order for it actually to fewhat it is in potency. Torah is not just scripted; it is said, sung, danced, not once but endlessly in order to be Torah. As said above, a religiously disciplined repetitive doing is a condition of knowing what is otherwise unknown, or at least unacted upon. If such a doing is the condition of living one's own religion, a sympathetic doing of another - scarcely that of an adept - has both additive and corrective power in respect of truth. One hears the murmur, "relativism." What can truth be that is not normed? Doesn't the carpenter "true" the structure by the plumb line? Can one be absolutely committed to a truth not normed by a determinate Absolute? To which I answer: absolutely! Generally:

258

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

truth is of such a nature as to claim one's absolute fealty. Such fealty is itself no verification since one can be committed to folly and farce. (I marvel now at the "truths" that have had my erstwhile commitment, and now know how determinately relative they were to the contingencies of time and place. It would not be otherwise if I lived one thousand years and were gifted with omnipresence.) More specifically in Christian terms: the norming of truth is sited in the metaxu, the between of discarnate and incarnate Logos. But I trench on the next topic. The Future of the Christian Religion (s)13 Theologically the future of the Christian religion (s) depends on how its/their christology and anthropology are construed. In remaining space only the earnest of a foretaste can be offered on either. Both presume the foregoing distinctions drawn in respect of Godhead and God(s). Christology is often claimed to be the essence, the core, the distinctiveness and exclusivity of Christianity over against other theistic religions. If true, it is so only in a strongly qualified sense. Godhead is temporally determinate as God, multiply both as creative and redemptive. God is not only externally (as related to temporal creation) unitary and manifold, but is so internally. To conduce to the intelligibility of these claims, one resorts to a revivified and refurbished hoary distinction, that between eternal and temporal creation. Eternal creation refers to that logical marker in theogony that is the metaxu between the sheer indeterminacy of Godhead and the determinacy of God, which "stage" I call nondeterminate (Boehme's ungrund, abgrund, grund). (In the Middle Ages the sole traces of eternal creation comprised the stars of planet earth, themselves the aura of pure essences - as cosmogonie astrophysicists resort to the stars for access to the earliest moments following the Big Bang.) The self-effusion, fulguration, or emanation of God from Godhead thus proceeds eternally through the internal differentiation of the Holy Trinity, whose "principles" are eternally nondeterminate, and whose nodes I name Wisdom, Logos, Spirit.14 No one of these exhausts plenarily the others; all together comprise the unity and manifoldness of eternally nondeterminate God. Determinacy proper in its intelligibility emerges only with the coevality of God the Creator/Redeemer and temporal creation (the cosmos of the present aeon): while the former is the condition

GODHEAD, GOD ( s ) , RELIGION ( s )

259

of the latter, they are mutually conditional (assymetrically). Thus christology is set in, framed by a primordial theological context, which seems to have been forgotten by those given over to a rampant "Christomonism" (a term used by H. Richard Niebuhr and others, especially of the Neo-Orthodox Christian theology of the twentieth century). While doctrines and theories of Logos (and its functional equivalent) abound in most religious cultures, Christianity is claimed to be distinctive in its claim that the Logos became temporally and culturally determinate in Jesus of Nazareth. (But "those who know, know" that most religions have their divinely or at least preternaturally afflated persons.) This claim may not be made, however, without due cognizance of the theological conditions just noted. A warrantable Christology, then, will have both "high" (because of eternally nondeterminate Logos) and "low" dimensions (because of temporally determinate Logos). For Christians, Jesus stands not only as instantiation but paradigm of the metaxu between nondeterminate and determinate Logos, the Mediator between them. In John's Gospel, site of the highest of the christologies, the incarnate logos (or principle) was said to be "the light of men." That says that humankind has a special place in the cosmos of the present aeon, thus in the divine Providence for the selfsame creation. Christology is thus as much about humankind as it is about God. If the future of the Christian religion is not in free association with its christology, it is no less so with its anthropology. If Christians have forgotten how to think God, and have been licensed to do so by the forgetfulness encased in the closures of orthodoxy, they have not learned how to forethink humankind and its standing in the cosmos. On this matter theology itself has little if anything worthwhile to say, and must go to school to the "hard" sciences that do. Have we recovered from the shock of Darwin: if species come and go, why not that of humanity? Especially now when we have the technical power to effect cupidity and stupidity in self-destruction (if finally wearied with merely destroying each other) ? Or perhaps the demise of humankind will be less by human hand than by planetary collision, the implosion of the universe, the final showing of the dark matter comprising the bulk of the cosmos? We need to shed such light as we have on the dark penumbra of human existence. I propose an anthropology of what I call "the two nots." Accustomed to living off inflated capital (maintained only by borrowing more inflated money), we need have recourse

260

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

to "hard reserves," those of both being and non-being. Those are accessible only by evading sacrosanct closures, including the creatio ex nihilo. I have said that the nihil from which God creates and gives determinate being is internal to indeterminate Godhead. Humans come from nothing but, on the evidence, they go to (ward) nothing as well. The critical question for the meaning of human existence is: is the nothingness toward which I go the same as that from which I come? Eckhart said yes: the "breakthrough" is a regression back into "the desert of the Godhead." If it is, human existence is nothing but a distinction without a difference in nothingness so Sartre. Each human being is summoned both to be and not to be what he or she becomes, determinately, distinctively. The meaning of a human existence is the tasked-being between a discarnate and an incarnate nothingness. My distinctive nothingness is what I add to the cosmos. If Eckhart was wrong about regression to godhead as the telos of humanity (which for him entailed the effacement or death of determinate God), he was right about Christology in his claim that (I cite from memory), "if the Son is not born in the ground of my own soul, He is nowhere born." (Ditto, Kierkegaard). He was adjudged heretical, as I shall be. That does not deny the reality of the birth of the Son (Logos) in Jesus of Nazareth; it says, as do most religions, that the real awaits realization. For Eckhart, as for me, it is the ground of the soul that traces the groundless indeterminate godhead, but the indeterminate remains nothing until realized in the determinacies of embodied "powers of the soul." Jesus himself is instance and paradigm: he came from nothing/nowhere (Nazareth) and went to nothing (the Cross), distinctively; in between, his doings/saying and their kenotic displacement. If Jesus is the name above every human name, that is because of the signature added to his distinctive anonymity, "the man nobody knows."

Excursus The Editors have asked me very briefly to indicate and sharpen my differences with the honoree of this volume, Robert Cummings Neville. That I agree with him on much should be obvious, and it should be equally obvious what I have learned from and with him. Most generally I think it fair to say that in the end I am more heterodox than he (if orthodoxy be determined by the historical

GODHEAD, GOD ( s ) , RELIGION ( s )

261

Councils, Confessions, etc.). However much we descend and ascend the same speculative mineshaft in essaying a constructive theology, the respective historical ores we use derive from different veins and, when refined in the fire of mind, assay differently. The principal difference between us is that which compels my distinction between Godhead and God (between the divine indeterminacy and the divine determinacy). Ironically, that difference owes to different construals of what we both affirm to be critical in speaking determinately about God, viz., the creatio ex nihilo. My project of thought in respect of God is not the alchemical one of turning base metals into gold but to mine the ore that assays as the gold itself, the inexhaustible Providence of the living and dying God. In the second century of the Common Era, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo achieved its intended immediate purpose, to demolish intellectually (but not actually, as subsequent Christendom has shown) the two domains/two deities account of all that is. If that doctrine explained why there is anything determinate at all, it did not explain why nothingness (or non-being) suffuses all that determinately is. What remained to be thought was the nihil from which God determinate qua Creator creates all determinate beings. If the nihil is not external to God (as Gnosticism claimed), it must be internal; and that cannot be if God is exhaustively and without remainder Being-itself. Ironically, it was Neo-Platonism as received in the mystical traditions of the western monotheisms that kept alive the questionableness of Being. But if Neo-Platonism did so, it itself had not the metaphysical wherewithal for remedy, since it could think non-being only as privative being, could not think nothingness in its divine force. Theologians should not yield to modern "nihilism" the exclusive rights to thinking the nihil, for thinking non-being is neither more nor less difficult than thinking being in relation to the divine living and dying. Nor is this project merely speculatively entailed; it is required even more so by the "appearances" and "disappearances" of God in the symbolic figurations of biblical religion. Summarily: the fundamental distinction between indeterminate Godhead and determinate God is required in order to make sense of other distinctions in Christian theology: that between eternal and temporal creation, that between immanent and economic Trinity, that between immanent and economic Word, that between determinate Creator and determinate Redeemer, etc. Further, the intelligibility of the fundamental distinction between Godhead and God depends on a process more ultimate than itself, viz., the enfolding/unfolding

262

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

of the divine living and dying itself, what I have called theogony. I am mindful that Neville will respond (as he has recognized and said) that there are indeed dimensions of indeterminacy in God, but that one can speak only of what is determinate (hence only of God as determinate Creator). One should say only what is sayable ("from possibility to actuality, the chances are good," as was said in the Middle Ages) - an exhortation that made Wittgenstein famous: "whereof we cannot speak thereof we should remain silent." To observe this restriction on speech would prevent us from speaking of much that is most precious in our existence. Why limit "unsayability" to the indeterminate end of the spectrum? Why not extend it to the determinate end? Nothing in my existence is more determinate than my love for my spouse, children, and parents. Yet no one of those determinacies is what it is without incalculable infusion and suffusion with indeterminacy. And I do not for that reason prescind from speaking to and about them. My "speech" is not limited to words but is figurated not only vocably but by freighted gesture, action, and complexes of symbols. Here one comes again to the inverse relation between extension and intension in logic. But there is another integral "logic," that of the imagination, and it is the goal of all imaginative discourse to make the extension and intension of a referend coincide. I fully grant that all talk of indeterminate Godhead is "merely" speculative, that it is a requirement of mind to give coherence to what is not derived from mind but from determinate epiphantic presentiment. Without it one is left with the variegated determinacies of the cosmos of this aeon, with nothing to account for cosmoi that may have preceded and may succeed this one - indeed there may be synchronically alternative universes. Whatever may be the state of this or any possible "world," the Godness of God is intact. Without indeterminate Godhead, the very Godness of God, all religions are at risk of being "idol factories."

NOTES 1 This essay is being written at my haunts in the northwestern Montana wilderness (as in "a voice crying in...") where forest fires are raging and where I do not have access to my library. While I am morally certain that my attributions are correct, I can cite bibliographical details only from the few books at hand. 2 In a book whose subject matter has preoccupied me for in excess of two

GODHEAD, GOD ( s ) , RELIGION ( s )

263

decades, tentatively titled God Being Nothing. 3 A hard rule when applied in christology (so the more of Christ the less of Jesus, and vice versa) This rule (although not its implications for theology) was driven home by one of my teachers at Yale, Paul Weiss. I have written of it extendedly in Ch. II ("Problematic and the Hermeneutical Spiral") of Unfinished Man and the Imagination (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 63ff. 4 I have treated of such matters in an excursus, "Pre-Modern Cognates of "Revelation", "Method", and "Theology"," in Unfinished Man and the Imagination, esp. 394-402. 5 The perdurability of this dichotomy, not between philosophy and theology but within Christian theology itself, is remarkable. If it did not mark the High Middle Ages (and I'm unconvinced it did not, with notable exceptions), it has been characteristic of Christian theology since the nineteenth century with mounting vengeance and acerbity. In America today the former (maintain the critical enterprise but dissolve the religious "object") obtains in the liberal academic establishment, and the latter (maintain the religious "object" on pain of suspending the critical stance) obtains, arguably, in the evangelical academic establishment. 6 Of course, this sentence has the order wrong, for Newman's work on the development of Christian doctrine preceded and contributed to his full conversion. 7 The reader will be unsurprised that I, a Methodist by church affiliation, am situated in the "dissenting," free-church tradition. 8 Thus I should say that the being of God when God is not being God is a) the nothingness of God qua determinate; b) the sheer indeterminacy of Godhead. When one asks, "what is God to you?" and is answered, "nothing," one has the being of God when God is not being God for that person. Oddly, one has the indeterminacy of Godhead rendered determinate, as nothingness. 9 One of the "Proverbs of Hell" in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 10 1 use the term "broken symbols" in the sense developed by Robert Cummings Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 11 If I continue to include metaphysics within the execution of theology, that is not in ignorance of its having come a cropper in the execution of its aboriginal intentionality. Metaphysics intended to attend to "all that (really) is," which of course had to include what is not (as was known amongst the metaphysical heresiarchs). As metaphysics progressively identified "all there is" with Being and, with the help and urging of Christian theology, identified Being with God construed as either Supreme Being or God as Being-itself, "what is there" ontologically could only be privative, diremptive, or otherwise nugatory. 12 It was not always so, in the west. Plato's Socrates spoke of the therapeia necessary before one could take up philosophy. 13 So great are the differences within Christianity across time and place, one probably ought speak of Christian religions? 14 Why I substitute Wisdom for "Father" is another story, but by which I will stick even if untold.

18

The Primordial, Godhead, and Apocalyptic Christianity

ThomasJ. J. Altizer

Ours is a time that is ever increasingly becoming obsessed by an ultimate desire for the primordial, a primordial vastly distant from everything that we have known as history and consciousness, and one seemingly possible only when that consciousness and history comes to an end. Indeed, so ultimate is this desire that it is evoked by language of an absolutely primordial, or even of the pre-primordial, as manifest most clearly in contemporary French philosophy, a philosophy which is now having a profound impact upon our theology. Theologically, such a quest for the ultimately primordial can be understood as a profoundly conservative or reactionary movement, and thereby it is in continuity with the deep conservatism of a new postmodern world. Never previously in our history has conservatism been so powerful as it is today, and this is not only a political conservatism but a religious conservatism as well, as fully manifest in the contemporary theological world. Perhaps nowhere else is such conservatism more profoundly present than in a new and radical quest for the absolutely primordial, an absolutely primordial absent from our Western theological traditions, or occurring there only in our most mystical thinkers such as Eriugena and Eckhart, and all too significantly such thinking has again and again been judged to be heretical by our religious authorities. Is such heresy

266

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

now passing into a new orthodoxy, a new orthodoxy reflecting a new world, and an orthodoxy going far beyond everything which we have previously known as orthodoxy? Despite the power of this movement, there has been little thinking about the primordial in the theological world, just as the primordial as such has only partially been entered by either literary scholarship or the history of religions, and is apparently being ignored by the social sciences. Yet the immense impact of Heidegger upon our world is revealing, for he is surely the greatest primordial thinker since Plotinus, and even as his thinking became ever more fully primordial as it evolved, it was precisely thereby that it deconstructed our Western thinking. This is the deconstruction that inspired Derrida, and just as Derrida's project presumes that "absence" is older than "presence," perhaps its most decisive key is what he knows as differance, a differance that is "older" than being itself, and which he can know as the preprimordial unnamable. Here, there is and can be no name for absolute origin or for differance, not even the name differance, for differance is not a name, for it is "older" than the primordial name, the Name of God. While Derrida today identifies himself as a radical atheist, he has ever more fully become a theological thinker, and as such most drawn to a radical Neoplatonism finally transcending everything which the West has known as God, so perhaps it is only in that context that he is an "atheist." So, too, Heidegger can be known as an atheist to the very extent that he is a primordial thinker, and just as he seldom speaks of God except in his posthumously published, Beitrage, it is there that he most openly assaults the uniquely Christian God. Neoplatonism is that thinking which historically has been most in quest of the primordial, hence its compelling attraction today, and it is Neoplatonism which first evokes Godhead itself, thereby not only decisively differing from Greek philosophy, but differing from all philosophies throughout the world in its centering upon the Godhead. While the West has commonly understood Asian philosophy as being directed to the absolutely primordial, this is a major misapprehension, for Asian thinking does not know that primordial which the West has come to know, and does not know it because it does not know a primordial which is reached by a backward movement. Genuinely Asian or Oriental ways dissolve every distinction between backwards and forwards, hence they do not know what the West knows as an ultimate movement of eternal return, here return as such is not only impossible but illusory, and

THE PRIMORDIAL, GODHEAD, AND APOCALYPTIC CHRISTIANITY

267

illusory because there is ultimately no distinction between forward and backward. Concretely this can be observed in the absence of nostalgia from the East, a nostalgia which has consumed the West; so, too, what the West, and above all the modern West, has known as an historical consciousness is absent from the East, an historical consciousness inseparable from ultimate distinctions between the present and the past, distinctions which alone make possible a genuine or actual future. Now it is true that Neoplatonism is the least historical of all forms of Western philosophy, and thereby it is more open to the East than any other Western philosophy, and above all so in its understanding of the Godhead. This is most true of Plotinus and of a pagan Neoplatonism, and while Neoplatonism has been extraordinarily powerful in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, it is here that the deepest conflicts between philosophy and theology have occurred, conflicts inevitable because of the deep polarity or opposition between what these traditions know as revelation and what Neoplatonism knows as primordial Godhead. True, such conflicts were veiled in Christian Neoplatonism for well over a millennium, only openly occurring in Christian heresies such as Arianism, but the Trinitarian controversies of patristic Christianity are inseparable from this conflict, and even today it is impossible to separate Christian Trinitarian language from its Neoplatonic ground. Christian dogma itself was created by a deeply Neoplatonic Eastern Christianity, a Neoplatonism which even had a profound effect upon Aquinas himself, and while it was Aquinas who first decisively transcended a Christian Neoplatonism, neither Aquinas nor any other Catholic thinker has effected a final or ultimate transcendence of Neoplatonism. This has occurred in the Protestant world only insofar as Protestant theology has been either non-philosophical or anti-philosophical, and it is Protestantism more than any other tradition which knows philosophical thinking or full philosophical thinking, as an atheistic thinking. Kierkegaard is that Protestant thinker who is most profoundly antiphilosophical, and it was Kierkegaard who called forth an ultimate difference between a uniquely Biblical repetition and a purely pagan recollection. For while here repetition and recollection are the same movement, they are movements in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, and is repeated backwards, but repetition is recollected forwards. Few if any such distinctions have more astutely captured a uniquely Biblical movement, a movement which is a truly forward movement, hence it is not until the prophetic revolution

268

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

that the archaic or primordial movement of eternal return is truly challenged, and not until then that a genuine or actual future is decisively or ultimately called forth. Yet this is a forward movement which is reversed by Christian Neoplatonism, as now a movement to Godhead itself can only be a profoundly backward movement, a movement which now and for the first time is an open movement of eternal return, and a return to that Godhead which can only be an absolutely primordial Godhead. Nor can such a Godhead be confused with a Hindu Brahman-Atman or a Buddhist Sunyata, and cannot be so confused if only because it is so profoundly inseparable from a movement of return. Only in Neoplatonism are we given an actual philosophy of eternal return, and it is precisely thereby that it is philosophy and theology at once. While Neoplatonism is surely not confined to Christianity, and in the wake of Heidegger it is Jewish thinkers such as Lévinas and Derrida who are our most profound primordial thinkers, nevertheless Neoplatonism has more comprehensively effected Christianity than any other tradition. A decisive question is just how it is that Neoplatonism became so powerful in Christianity. Certainly Neoplatonism does not have a Christian origin, and just as it was the most influential philosophy in that pagan world which early Christianity confronted, it would be difficult from a Biblical perspective to imagine a more ultimately pagan philosophy. But Christian theology became a Neoplatonic theology in less than a century after its birth, and every major ancient Christian thinker was a Neoplatonic thinker, even including that Augustine who created a uniquely Western theology. Yet Augustine is deeply revealing at this crucial point, for the ultimate polarity or dichotomy in his thinking is a consequence of its polar source or ground in Paul and Plotinus, and while it is simply inconceivable in our world as to how it would be possible to integrate Plotinus and Paul, it is this integration which made possible the Augustinian theological revolution. Thereby was established the deepest theological polarity between Eastern and Western Christianity, one that has never been breached, and as opposed to Eastern theology, Western theology has ever increasingly undergone profound conflicts, conflicts inseparable from everything the West has known as the movement or evolution of theology, an evolution truly unknown in the East. Just as what Heidegger knows as ontotheology is a Western and not an Eastern theology, Eastern theology has never known profoundly theological thinkers who were ultimately heretical thinkers, and all too significantly those modern Western philosophers who have

THE PRIMORDIAL, GODHEAD, AND APOCALYPTIC CHRISTIANITY

269

been the most profoundly theological thinkers, such as Spinoza and Hegel, have been our most heterodox thinkers. At the very time that Neoplatonism came into existence a truly new and ultimate other-worldliness was born in both East and West, as manifest in the advent of both Mahayana Buddhism and of the Vedanta in Hinduism, and this was also the time in which Buddhism decisively entered eastern and southeastern Asia, thereby first becoming a universal way. Not only is other-worldliness alien to non-apocalyptic Biblical traditions, but it is alien to ancient Asian traditions as well, so that the advent of such other-worldliness was universally revolutionary. A Neoplatonic other-worldliness is most clearly manifest in its response to the body and to matter itself, for the first time these are known as being alien and "other," and above all so in Christian Neoplatonism, and such a purely negative response is universal in both ancient and medieval Neoplatonism. This other-worldliness, moreover, is inseparable from the ultimate goal of Neoplatonism, a return to an absolutely primordial Godhead, and Christian Neoplatonism unlike its Asian and pagan counterparts knows that Godhead as being absolutely original or absolutely "first," so that the way to that Godhead can only be a way of return. This is truly an ultimate innovation, and here a Christian Neoplatonism decisively differs from a pagan Neoplatonism, and does so precisely in knowing the primordial as being truly primordial, or as absolutely "first." A purely Plotinian One is not primordial in this sense, indeed, it is not truly past at all, hence not primordial in a Christian sense. Here lies a root difference between a pagan Neoplatonism and Christian Neoplatonism, so that a pagan Neoplatonism does not know an ultimate or a final fall, and cannot know such a fall because it does not know a uniquely Christian transcendence. Christian theology has continually maintained that the Christian God is truly unique, and most manifestly unique in its absolute transcendence, a transcendence going far beyond that transcendence called forth in the Hebrew Bible, and even beyond its pagan counterparts. But it is also unique in its very apprehension of the absolutely primordial, and this is integrally related to its apprehension of absolute transcendence, an absolute transcendence that is absolutely primordial or absolutely "first." This is most clearly manifest in the Christian dogma of the Trinity. Here only the Father or the Creator is "unoriginate," that Father who eternally generates the Son and the Holy Spirit, thus giving the Christian Creator a transcendence going beyond the transcendence known by

270

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Judaism and Islam, and certainly beyond any transcendence known by the pagan world as a whole. All too significantly, Heidegger in Beitrage can know the absolutely transcendent God of Christianity as an abandonment of Being, an abandonment in which Being first abandons beings, and this is the most profound mystery in the history of Western humanity. Clearly, this uniquely Christian transcendence is an ultimate innovation, and if thereby Christianity is absolutely new, how could this advent have occurred? Christianity is the only tradition in the world that begins with a deep internal conflict, a conflict ravaging the early Christian communities and most manifest in the ultimate conflicts surrounding if not engendered by Paul, but also occurring throughout the ancient Christian world. This conflict is most pure or most total in the opposition between a primitive Christian apocalypticism and a new Christian Gnosticism; indeed, Gnosticism and apocalypticism can be known as the most truly opposite movements in the history of religions, yet each is profoundly other-worldly, just as each intends an absolute negation of the world. Now we know that Paul was deeply if not purely apocalyptic, but we are also coming to understand that Gnosticism originated in Christianity, for there are no extent pre-Christian Gnostic texts, and already Paul was assaulting a Christian Gnosticism, just as Gnosticism deeply divided the Johannine community. Christianity's ultimate struggle with Gnosticism is a genuine civil war, one that has occurred again and again, and occurred in radically different expressions. Gnosticism can be understood as giving us our most ultimately primordial quest, and one inseparable from a radical and a total fall, a fall even comprehending Godhead itself, with the consequent advent of a Satanic Creator. But apocalypticism has given us our most ultimately forward movement, a movement directed to an absolute apocalypse, even if that apocalypse has already dawned. Thus the backward and the forward movements of Gnosticism and apocalypticism are true opposites, and just as the backward movement of Gnosticism is even more radical than the backward movement of Neoplatonism, the forward movement of apocalypticism can be understood as the most revolutionary movement in the world, and it engendered both modern political revolution and our most revolutionary philosophical thinking as in Hegel and Nietzsche. But the very radicality of these movements is inseparable from a primal center of each in an absolute and total fall, and while each is given to a reversal of that fall, these reversals occur in truly

THE PRIMORDIAL, GODHEAD, AND APOCALYPTIC CHRISTIANITY

271

opposite directions. There are scholars who are persuaded that apocalypticism and Gnosticism fundamentally affected each other in ancient Christianity, and in modern Christianity, too, but far too little attention has been given to their deep impact upon orthodox Christianity. Orthodox Christianity arose as a negation of both apocalypticism and Gnosticism, hence its radical distance from the earliest Christianity, even if there are seeds of orthodoxy in the New Testament. But the language of orthodox Christianity is most distant from the language of Jesus himself, and if the Kingdom of God is the primal center of Jesus' words and acts, that is a kingdom that is wholly transformed in orthodox Christianity, as it now becomes known as the absolute transcendence of God, as opposed to the absolute immanence of a dawning Kingdom of God, an immanence that Paul could know as even now becoming all in all. 'Kingdom of God', as opposed to "kingdom" or "reign" of God, is a phrase or title that does not occur in writing until the New Testament, and not even in the Dead Sea Scrolls where we might most expect it. Moreover it is almost certainly an apocalyptic title, and the Kingdom of God as Jesus enacts and proclaims it is a future totality that even now is dawning. Hence the way to that kingdom is a radically forward movement, a movement reversing "the world," a world that even now is coming to an end. This calls forth and makes actually possible a new and radical ethics, as most clearly inscribed in the Sermon on the Mount, an ethics of perfection, and one only possible because of the advent or near advent of the Kingdom of God. Now this is a forward movement that is reversed in orthodox Christianity, as it passes ever more into a backward and primordial movement, and a Kingdom of God that even now is dawning from a radical and total future is wholly transformed into an absolutely primordial Godhead. If this can be understood as the most radical and immediate transformation that has ever occurred in the history of religions, it also can be known as embodying the very birth of the absolutely primordial, and thereby it can be understood as only being possible by a reversal of a radically forward and apocalyptic movement into a radically backward and primordial movement. If here forward and backward or apocalyptic and primordial are truly opposite, this is an opposition that is absolutely new, and one making possible the advent or birth of the absolutely primordial, a truly new absolutely primordial that is the consequence of an absolute reversal of absolute apocalypse. Whereas orthodox Christianity has been deeply conservative

272

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

throughout the greater course of its history, and never more so than today, apocalyptic Christianity has been deeply radical, and most so in its deeper as opposed to its more popular expressions. Apocalyptic Christianity became heretical after less than a century of the advent of Christianity, and it has given us the most profoundly heterodox expressions of Christianity, as in the Christian epic tradition from Dante through Joyce, a heterodoxy that becomes ever more heterodox as it evolves, and an apocalypticism that becomes ever more apocalyptic as it evolves. Nothing else more decisively identifies the Christian epic tradition, but this is a tradition that culminates in Joyce with a coincidentia oppositorum of the absolutely apocalyptic and the absolutely primordial, as called forth symbolically and actually in the ultimate union between Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle. If this is an absolute ending which is an absolute beginning, it is a beginning and ending profoundly illuminating its source, which is nothing less than a uniquely Christian history which is nevertheless a universal history, and a universal history revolving about an ultimate war between the absolutely primordial and the absolutely apocalyptic. Surely Joyce is the deepest Catholic visionary of the modern world, but he is also our most heterodox Catholic visionary, thereby he has no counterpart at all in modern Catholic theology, unless this is occurring in the revolutionary work of D. G. Leahy. It is to be remembered that Heidegger himself is not only a profoundly primordial thinker but also an apocalyptic thinker, one whose later work ever more fully called forth the apocalyptic advent of an apocalyptically redemptive Ereignis. This is the Heidegger who was deeply affected by Paul, and by the apocalyptic Paul, an apocalyptic Paul called forth in his 1920 lectures on the phenomenology of religion, and at that time New Testament scholarship had not yet discovered the apocalyptic Paul. But it is in Being and Time itself that Heidegger is most deeply a Pauline thinker, and not only in knowing Dasein through "thrownness" ( Geworfenheit) and fallenness and Angst, but even more deeply in understanding authentic human existence as "being towards death," a death that can be understood and perhaps can only be understood as a uniquely Christian crucifixion. Indeed, it is Heidegger who is the most deeply theological of all twentieth century philosophers, the only one who received a full theological education, and the only philosopher who could engage in deep theological dialogue with the most advanced theologians, even thereby shaping that Bultmann

THE PRIMORDIAL, GODHEAD, AND APOCALYPTIC CHRISTIANITY

273

who is the most creative and influential of all twentieth century New Testament scholars and theologians. Perhaps Heidegger will finally be known as a revolutionary Catholic thinker, and while he could assault Catholicism as has no other major thinker, as in knowing "Latinization" as the passage of a uniquely Greek truth or aletheia into a Roman imperium, wherein the domination of command passes into the very essence of ecclesiastical dogma (Parmenides #3), he is nevertheless profoundly Catholic in his ultimate commitment to Being. Is it possible that a uniquely Christian primordial Godhead is finally inseparable from an apocalyptic horizon? This would certainly be true if its very epiphany or realization is the consequence of the reversal of an apocalyptic horizon, but no less true if such a Godhead is finally a genuinely Christian Godhead. Only Christian Gnosticism has finally negated and transcended an apocalyptic ground, thus making possible the radicality of the Gnostic way of absolute return. Every other form of Christianity finally gives witness to an apocalyptic goal, and even when apocalypse is known as the final epiphany or realization of primordial Godhead, as it is in Christian Neoplatonism, there nevertheless remain echoes of an apocalyptic horizon. Thus Christian Neoplatonism, as opposed to pagan Neoplatonism, can never purely know the absolutely primordial, can never know a primordial which is and only is primordial, can never abandon that revelation which so profoundly challenges every purely primordial horizon, a revelation which is finally a forward moving revelation, and a revelation inseparable from the full actuality of history. While Augustine can only know a forward movement of history as the movement of the City of God, and never of the City of Man, that movement does occur, and it will culminate in an apocalypse transcending an original paradise, or in a Jerusalem transcending Eden, thus inevitably calling forth the uniquely Christian paradox of the felix culpa or fortunate fall. This is the context in which we must understand the Christian realization of an absolute fall, one more purely known by Augustine than by any other Christian thinker, and one inseparable from the apocalyptic theology of the City of God. And just as this is the only ancient work which is open to what the Christian knows as the actuality of history, it is the fullest apocalyptic theology in the ancient Christian world, and the only one deeply inspired by the Book of Revelation. While both Paul and Plotinus are decisive influences upon the City of God, only here in Augustine's vast corpus of writing are the tensions

274

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

between these polar sources fully explicit. And despite appearances to the contrary, this work is Augustine's least systematic theology, but it is nevertheless his most influential work. That in itself is revealing of Christian theology, a theology inevitably in profound tension with itself, and far more so than any other theology in the world, perhaps nothing else so decisively distinguishes Christian theology, and even if Aquinas created a fully systematic theology, not even his summae are free of discord, as witness the tension between their Aristotelian and Neoplatonic poles. Is it possible to understand the profound discord of Christian theology as the consequence of an ultimate polarity between its apocalyptic and its primordial grounds? And is it only here in the world that there is an ultimate tension between an absolutely forward and an absolutely backward movement, an ultimate tension which is an ultimate opposition, and an ultimate opposition which is the consequence of the full coming together of true opposites? This is the context in which we can understand Hegel as a profoundly Christian philosopher, the only Western philosopher who created a full and comprehensive philosophy of the coincidentia oppositorum. As opposed to its counterpart in Mahayana Buddhism, this is both a fully historical and a fully apocalyptic philosophy. While everyone knows that Hegel created the first fully historical philosophy, it is commonly unknown that he created the first fully apocalyptic philosophy, and here, just as in the Christian epic, the historical and the apocalyptic are finally inseparable. Even the Science of Logic, our only purely dialectical Western logic, is grounded in an absolutely forward movement of thinking, and a forward movement which is ultimately the movement of Absolute Idea or the Godhead. And if this movement is occasioned and made possible and necessary by an absolute self-negation or an absolute self-emptying of Absolute Spirit or the Godhead, this is our only philosophical understanding of an absolute polarity or an absolute opposition within the Godhead, and an opposition that is the ultimate source of all life and movement, or of what Hegel knows as actuality itself. Hence absolute apocalypse itself is the consequence of an absolute polarity or opposition within the absolutely primordial, and if this is our only Western dialectical understanding of the absolutely primordial, it is only through this ultimate ground that an apocalyptic philosophy first becomes possible. How ironic that Christian theology commonly knows Hegel as our most purely atheistic philosopher, but so, too, is Joyce

THE PRIMORDIAL, GODHEAD, AND APOCALYPTIC CHRISTIANITY

275

commonly known as an anti-Christian visionary. Yet Joyce and Hegel are dialectical even if polar twins, and each realized a coincidentia oppositorum between the absolutely primordial and the absolutely apocalyptic. Now if a uniquely Christian absolutely primordial is the consequence of a reversal of an absolutely apocalyptic movement, and one giving birth for the first time to the idea or symbol of the absolutely "first," only thereby is the purely primordial called forth and made possible, and yet here a purely primordial which can never be manifest or actual only as itself. Only in a violently disruptive history of almost two millennia does that primordiality finally reverse itself, one issuing in the comprehensive revolutions of modernity itself. And if those revolutions are now ending in their deeper ground, does that make possible an absolutely new primordial quest? This is perhaps our deepest contemporary theological question, and it is everywhere about us, one making possible that ravaging fundamentalism which is now engulfing us, and one no less making possible our comprehensive conservatism, for nothing is more conservative or backward moving than a profoundly primordial quest, hence the primordial itself can be understood as the deepest ground of conservatism. But when the primordial is most deeply manifest as the primordial and the primordial alone, does that inevitably call forth an absolutely impossible or an absolutely pathological or self-destructive movement, and one which at bottom is engulfing us today? While ours can certainly be known as an apocalyptic time, and as an ultimately apocalyptic time, it is even thereby the culmination of an apocalyptic history, but now a culmination in which an actual apocalyptic thinking has seemingly ended. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger are all ultimately apocalyptic thinkers, but now we are confronted with an ultimately primordial thinking without any apocalyptic horizon, as in that Lévinas who is our most purely primordial thinker, who can call forth an absolute passivity in response to an absolutely primordial "Infinite." Is such a passivity a decisive sign of our new world, and is it accompanied by an absolutely new anonymity and emptiness, a new interior emptiness inseparable from a new and total exteriority? Both this emptiness and this exteriority are truly new, and while they do evoke an apocalyptic horizon, that is not evoked in our thinking itself, which resolutely resists every possibility of an apocalyptic transfiguration, thereby inevitably sanctioning an invisible but nevertheless absolutely primordial ground. Blake could name that ground as Satan, just as Hegel could know it as a

276

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

wholly abstract Spirit. Is there now no possibility today of a reversal of that Spirit, or of an absolute self-negation or self-emptying of the primordial itself?

19

Graceful Reality: A Foundation for the Future of Philosophy and Theology

Jennifer Hockenbery

"Is there anything in philosophy, in the process of philosophy and philosophical reflection, equivalent to grace in matters of the spiriti" - Michael Malone interviewing Robert Neville o n the television series A Parliament of Minds. " . . . Experience teaches. Reality teaches us. It usually teaches us that our hypotheses are wrong, but not wholly wrong, a little bit wrong. So you have to modify your positions. I think that unless philosophy takes as its topic philosophy, it's going to be dealing with reality and reality will correct it. Maybe not fast enough, but that's pretty much like grace. " - R o b e r t Neville 1

The hope of Christians studying philosophy and theology rests on the idea that God, who is the Truth, is gracious in the revelation of knowledge. This grace is apparent not only in the revelations of Scripture but also through the light of reason that is a gift of God and in the experience of the world that reveals knowledge of its creator.

278

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Early Christians were so struck by the optimistic idea that Truth wishes to be known that the most popular icon of the fourth century (more popular than the crucifix, the Madonna and child, and the good shepherd) was the icon of Jesus as a teacher surrounded by students. 2 With such an image in mind, the philosopher and theologian Augustine closes his Confessions with the Scriptural promise that all who seek will find, a promise uttered by He who called Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Light.3 This fundamental Christian faith of thinkers like Augustine, Boethius, Julian of Norwich, and Hildegard of Bingen claims that Wisdom gracefully reveals Herself to those who seek Her. Such faith has allowed many Christian philosophers to optimistically search for knowledge about ultimate reality, without a dehabilitating skepticism or fear of error. When Robert Cummings Neville says, "Reality teaches us," he reveals that his own optimism in philosophy is fueled by this same graceful belief. Indeed, I will argue that Neville has been able to do the great work in philosophy and theology that he has because of this fundamental faith. And, thus, he is in the tradition of Christian philosophy. I will argue that Neville is Christian in his foundational belief that experience teaches us. I will also argue that traditional Christian metaphysics, which Neville rejects, better grounds that belief than Neville's own symbolic account of the Incarnation. However, I believe that it is the common faith in the grace of Truth, or if one prefers, Reality, that allows fruitful conversation between traditional Christians, Neville, and all others who look earnestly for knowledge. In this way, this faith in grace is the future of both philosophy and theology, for it grounds the challenge and dialogue that is necessary for growth in understanding. Grace in Neville's System Robert Neville is a metaphysician, a rarity in philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He believes that philosophers have the task of questioning in order to understand reality. He believes that philosophers can grow in their understanding of reality. He writes books about his understanding of reality. And he believes that theology, the understanding of faith in God, is improved by the quest of philosophy. As a metaphysician, Neville is better known among theologians than philosophers. Philosophers have spent more recent time discussing the possibility, or rather, impossibility,

GRACEFUL REALITY

279

of d o i n g metaphysics, t h a n actually d o i n g metaphysics. Academic skepticism is the d o m i n a n t voice in most philosophy d e p a r t m e n t s today. In the field of philosophy, Neville is a respected oddity. But his students a n d fans are m o r e likely to be found at the AAR t h a n the APA. Perhaps what the theologians u n d e r s t a n d that the philosophers are n o t willing to accept is the underlying foundation of Neville's faith, a faith that is distinctly Christian. I n d e e d , this underlying Christianity may well be that which is incomprehensible to the secular academic skeptics who find Neville's c o m m i t m e n t to d o i n g metaphysics enigmatic. Neville, while always willing to explore o t h e r systems of t h o u g h t a n d to challenge Christianity, is a Christian a n d h e has n o t claimed to be otherwise. W h e n asked how Christianity impacts a n d collides with his philosophy, h e said, So I always had some faith, pretty silly, childish faith when I was a little kid, but the corrections to that, although sometimes wrenching have never been foundational. It is not that I ever looked for a foundation that was certain, only to improve the understanding and the faith and the practice that I had. There are lots of things that come together. I was raised in an entirely Western Christian Midwestern culture. 4 Neville is a Christian, b r o u g h t u p in the Christian faith, o r d a i n e d in the Christian c h u r c h , a n d newly n a m e d Dean to Boston University's Christian chapel. As such, Neville is a different type of philosopher t h a n the m o d e r n or post-modern. H e is n o t looking for the clear a n d distinct foundations of knowledge that can be known t h r o u g h reason alone. Neville is looking to clarify his basic u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the world. A n d his basic u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the world, Neville claims, is Christian. T h e viewpoint that h e learned at his m o t h e r ' s knee was a Christian viewpoint. A n d that viewpoint includes as part of its framework a belief that reality teaches us, that experience teaches us. To use the language of the early Christians, Neville believes that Truth pursues us. Readers familiar with Neville's m e t h o d in philosophy can quickly grasp how fundamental Neville's faith in grace is. First, Neville rejects modernity's claim that reason, when used carefully, will reveal the fundamental truths of reality to us. Instead, Neville has a d e e p sense of the brokenness of reason a n d o u r ability to see a n d think clearly.

280

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

No matter how hard we try and how long we ponder, our hypotheses are almost always wrong. They are not necessarily totally wrong, but a little wrong. But they are wrong enough to pervert our ability to theorize well beyond them. They are shaky foundations for our science, philosophy, and theology. Neville's rejection of modernity entails what Christians call an understanding of the fallen nature of humanity. No matter how hard we try, we do not seem to be able to avoid error. We are in bondage to error. We are inadequate for a rationalist philosophical method. But Neville's rejection of rationalism is not a rejection of philosophy. Nor is Neville overwhelmingly pessimistic, as are many other philosophers who in rejecting modernity label themselves post-moderns. Instead, Neville suggests that while reason alone cannot build a firm foundation for our knowledge, we have the help of reality. Indeed reality, through our lived experience of it, corrects our hypotheses. Neville believes that by thinking and experiencing and thinking again, we might well learn more truths. With such a belief, Neville not only examines his own common experience, but reads and discusses with others: philosophers, theologians, and scientists. In so doing, Neville reveals another optimistic tenet. We can understand the thoughts of others, and use them to improve our own understandings of the world and others. Contrast this view with that of many contemporary academic skeptics who believe that Kant revealed something even Kant could not bear to accept, namely, our experience of the world tells us nothing beyond our experience. Thus, reality cannot correct our hypotheses, since our hypotheses are the lens through which we see the world. A thinker cannot know that she wears rose-colored glasses unless she has at one time seen the world without them. Even more dehabilitating for philosophy is the added belief, attributed so often to Wittgenstein, that we cannot understand the meanings of the words of others unless the words express meanings that we ourselves attach to those words. As Wittgenstein asserted, if a lion speaks we will not understand him. So too, if another speaks of a world seen through a different colored pair of spectacles, the first thinker will not understand, or more likely not even hear that communication that brings forth the differences. Yes, Neville stands in a different place than those that optimistically believe in the power of reason to comprehend our experience and discover reality. And he stands in a different place than those that pessimistically denounce the ability to see beyond the lens of the

GRACEFUL REALITY

281

hypothesis that forms the parameters of o u r experience of reality. His stand is Christian. We are b r o k e n creatures who c a n n o t by o u r own power save ourselves from error. But we are n o t left alone; truth or reality comes to o u r aid. Reality points o u t o u r errors to us. Reality breaks t h r o u g h the thickest glasses a n d helps us see beyond the wrong-headed ideas that imprison o u r eyes. This description is perhaps too i m b u e d with traditional Christian imagery for Neville's own taste. H e might fear that reality is a n t h r o p o m o r p h i z e d in a way that is unhelpful. But my p o i n t is that it is Neville's belief that "reality teaches us" that allows h i m to e m e r g e as an optimistic metaphysician after the fall of modernity.

Symbolic versus Incarnational Engagement While Neville clearly seems to hold a faith in something like grace, h e is c o n c e r n e d a b o u t holding o n to doctrines that are o u t d a t e d a n d fantastic to o u r twenty-first century sensibilities. 5 Neville is also c o n c e r n e d about doctrines that are exclusive in their offer of salvation. In his concern for inclusivi ty, Neville is often willing to expel doctrines that are incompatible with the fundamental stances of the majority of o t h e r philosophical a n d religious systems. Truly, there are in traditional Christianity doctrines that are u n i q u e to Christianity. Perhaps the most fundamentally u n i q u e a n d fantastic doctrine is that of the traditional u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the incarnation, a doctrine that early Christians from Irenaeus to Augustine admitted appears scandalous a n d childish. T h e doctrine of the incarnation is so different from o t h e r philosophical ways of t h o u g h t that W h i t e h e a d claimed it was the only metaphysical innovation since Plato. 6 T h e scandalous traditional doctrine of the incarnation is different t h a n Neville's symbolic e n g a g e m e n t in its very metaphysical stance. A full discussion o n this topic is impossible in such a short paper, b u t to explain byway of an example I will c o m p a r e Neville's u n d e r s t a n d i n g of Jesus as friend with that of Augustine. Much of the metaphysical differences will be evident, a n d their implications will be explained. First, Neville writes, In the relevant sense of intimate friendship, of course, Jesus is our friend only in our imagination. The historical Jesus prior to his death knew no one like us, at least not like in culture. The continuing historical Jesus does not

282

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

have subjective consciousness in the relevant sense for friendship with us. Jesus as friend is one whom we imagine, constrained by what we know of the historical Jesus down to now, and by what we learn of ourselves in the friendship.7 In Neville's view, Jesus as a friend is a symbol that engages o u r imagination in the work of thinking a b o u t o u r true selves a n d o u r obligations to the world. T h e symbol is powerful in that it helps o u r m i n d s uncover truths that reveal us to ourselves so that we might be m o r e u n d e r s t a n d i n g a n d kind towards others as well as to ourselves. F u r t h e r m o r e , in imagining Jesus as friend we share the trials a n d sufferings ofJesus as we have b e e n taught t h e m in a way that helps us t h r o u g h o u r own suffering a n d helps us empathize with the suffering of others. Thus, the symbol of Jesus helps o u r minds engage in u n d e r s t a n d i n g reality. Jesus as friend is a teaching tool, a m e n t a l exercise. In comparison, Augustine does n o t discuss his friendship with the divine b u t merely engages in it as seen in several passages in the Confessions. Early in the book, h e speaks directly to God, saying, Say to my soul, I am your salvation. Say this so that I can hear. Look at my ears before you, Lord; open them and say to my soul: I am your salvation. I will run after this voice and grasp you. Don't hide your face from me: ... My house is in ruins; repair it. It has things which will offend your eyes: I confess and I know it. But who can clean it? But to whom else other than you can I cry[?] 8 Augustine, h e r e , does n o t seem to be using a symbol of God as friend to h e l p his imagination grow in u n d e r s t a n d i n g . Instead, h e is begging his friend, his caretaker, his lover, to h e l p him. Moreover, h e believes h e is answered, n o t in his imagination b u t in reality. Augustine claims to experience the real care of Christ. A n d this h e experiences in very sensual ways. You called and you cried aloud and you broke my barrier of deafness: you flashed, you shone, and you chased away my blindness: you breathed fragrance, and I drew breath, and I pant for you, I tasted and I hunger and thirst, you touched me, and I burn for your peace. 9 Moreover, lest the r e a d e r desire to read these prayers symbolically,

GRACEFUL REALITY

283

Augustine asserts that only by embracing the mediating friendship of Jesus could h e gain wisdom or strength in u n d e r s t a n d i n g . And I searched for a way of gaining strength in order to be sufficient to enjoy you, but I could not find it until I embraced the mediator between god and human, that human, Jesus Christ, who is God over all blessed forevermore, calling and saying: I am the way, the truth and the life, and the food, which I was too weak to take, mingling with flesh: for the word was made flesh, so that your wisdom, through which you created all might give milk to our infancy.10 Augustine does n o t discuss how the symbol of Jesus opens his imagination to better u n d e r s t a n d i n g of himself, his suffering, a n d his relationship to the world a n d reality. Instead Augustine speaks directly to God a b o u t his friendship with Jesus, a mediator who speaks to him with a voice a n d mingles with his very flesh in o r d e r to h e l p him grow. A God who dwells in flesh is a God who leaves the realm of imagination to partake of the world of lived experience. Augustine claims that Christ himself (or often herself in Augustine's Latin) has a fleshy reality that is experienced immanently as a caring other. Jesus is n o t a symbol of a way to u n d e r s t a n d i n g reality, b u t a friendly voice that calls, points, a n d drags Augustine to reality. Without Jesus as a friend, Augustine declares that h e would be lost. Augustine's God actively engages in his lived experience. As Neville claims that reality corrects o u r errors, Augustine states that truth is o n o u r side calling us from error a n d promising, "Everyone, indeed, who asks, will receive; a n d the questioner will find, a n d the o n e who knocks will have the d o o r opened." 1 1 But unlike Neville, Augustine sees reality n o t t h r o u g h b r o k e n symbols b u t in the flesh. Augustine takes literally the birth, life, preaching, death a n d resurrection of Jesus. As a result, Augustine's Christian metaphysics includes an ontology that claims reality can be felt, seen, a n d known in the flesh. Mary truly held the g r o u n d of all being in h e r w o m b a n d at h e r breast. Reality spoke with a h u m a n t o n g u e with h u m a n words that h u m a n beings could h e a r a n d write. Being itself was p u t o n a cross a n d crucified, a n d the non-Being of death u p o n swallowing Being is swallowed itself a n d is n o m o r e . After the resurrection, God allowed doubters to touch the h a n d s of Truth a n d fed companions with fish a n d bread. For philosophers a n d theologians this is g r o u n d breaking. This

284

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

is an ontology that declares that reality is not reflected in matter, but is actually present in it. This is an axiology that declares that bloody wombs, human babble, and excruciating pain are not low on a ladder towards the Good but can contain Goodness itself. This is an epistemology that declares that the human mind need not use imagination, opinion, and calculative reason to extract truths from the world as art critics extract meanings from paintings. Indeed, real truths are present in the fleshy objects of our lived experience. We need not climb the ladder of our intellect to uncover them; we need only experience them. Academics who have made their livelihood on the use of mind to get beyond the illusion of common sense may rebel against this theory. And non-academics too may be shocked at such a scandal. Common opinion, today, holds that opinion is all that we have. Our lived experience is considered virtual rather than reality, a video game produced by the neurons in our brain. And those neurons in our brain run in patterns that were determined when we were babies and children. The words of our parents, the actions of our government, the classes at our church - all formed the pathways for the chemicals that interpret the objects of our world which we never see directly. Thus, any hope of real understanding of our world, each other, or even ourselves is delusional. We simply have no access beyond the neurological firings of our brains. And even our understanding of those neurons is dictated by the same neurons. The quest for understanding true reality is hopeless. This is why the doctrine of the incarnation is so ground breaking. Reality can be present in the fleshy, organic matter of our brains. Augustine's terminology declares that God enters our very minds in order to shed light. Our contemporary scientific language might read that God directs the neurons in our brain in order that we might understand reality. A symbolic metaphysics cannot claim that. The way a symbol helps a brain engage in reality is difficult to explain, mysterious as Platonic participation, and liable to the arguments of post-Kantians, private language Wittgensteinians, and post-modern nihilists. Indeed, Plato's own symbolic metaphysics lasted only until his death, when Speussipus gave a convincing reading of the dialogues' ultimate skepticism. Neo-Platonism suffered similar accusations from the New Academy. And American pragmatism has members like Richard Rorty who are firmly in the camp of a skeptical post-modernism. But while symbolic schools of thought often deteriorate into

GRACEFUL REALITY

285

skepticism, the common experience of the philosophers who created them most often argues to the contrary. Neville seems clear that his lived experience as a philosopher and a theologian shows that communication, learning, and growth in understanding are possible. Dialogue, even cross cultural and interfaith dialogue, has increased Neville's understanding of the world according to Neville's own works. He has learned from others, even others whose lenses through which they see the world are of a vastly different shape and color than Neville's own Midwestern Methodism. He has learned from science. He has learned from teaching and writing and lecturing. He continues to have new insights and publish new books at a rate unthinkable to most. And while people disagree with parts of his work, most people that read Neville understand something of what he speaks. And most people come away from his works with something more in their understanding of themselves and their world than they had before. Thus Neville's own experience and our experience of Neville seem to be evidence for his view that when we look to understand reality, reality teaches us. While I agree with Augustine and many other Christian thinkers that a theology of incarnation rather than symbolic engagement better explains how reality teaches us, the point in common is that reality teaches us. To believe that reality teaches us is to believe in grace. To expect that the truth will point out the philosophers' error is to expect that the truth is on our side, wanting to be known. To trust that lived experience can help us modify our hypotheses, even if only slowly, is to trust that philosophy is not a fruitless exercise, but a journey towards richer understanding of a reality that guides us in the journey. Such a belief in grace is a foundation for a philosopher and theologian who lives and works in an academy where skepticism flourishes. Such a belief in grace allows optimism in the philosopher's quest when others debate whether philosophy's goal is tenable. Such a belief in grace is a gift of Christianity.

A Theology of Grace: The Ground for the Future of Philosophy and Theology The future of philosophy and theology depends much on the current debate between skepticism and optimism. The goal of academic skepticism is to use philosophy as a check against arrogance and fundamentalism in science, religion, and ethics in

286

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

order that we might be saved from commitment to error. The goal of optimistic philosophers like Neville is to go beyond questioning towards understanding. What allows Neville to go forward without a dehabilitating fear of error is ultimately a faith that reality will correct us as we go. This is ultimately a faith in grace. If philosophy is to get beyond the argument over the goal of philosophy, an argument that Neville finds impeding the project of philosophy to uncover reality, Neville and those who agree with him must be persuasive to the academy that a belief in grace is justified. Such a justification may be possible through pragmatism. But probably the idea that reality teaches us is so foundational as to be an axiom of Neville's thought. As such, it cannot be proven. But it can be explored through his system and the reader's own lived experience. How this belief holds up under exploration will be the test of its viability. Thus far Neville's faith seems to be holding up well. He is one of the most important and prolific philosophers and theologians of our age. His works call his readers to think, to question and to dialogue with others and to consider new ideas. Thus his works call his readers and students towards a future of philosophy and theology as fields that seek understanding of wisdom about ourselves, our world and our God. This is in contrast to those who teach, as did the ancient academics, that the best path is refusal to assent, lest one be trapped in error. Neville claims that the future of wisdom seeking is in exploration, commitment, engagement and dialogue. After all, we may assent to a wrong hypothesis, but as long as we continue to be engaged, reality will continue to teach us. Maybe not fast enough, but that is the way grace works. This hopeful faith allows philosophers and theologians to discuss important issues with those who think differently, act differently and speak differently than themselves. True global dialogue can be fruitful if Neville is right that experience teaches us. Then, we are not prisoners of the lens of our own culture and upbringing. And happiest yet, understanding, while slow in coming, is a goal worth pursuing. With Truth as our guide, we go forward as thinkers faithfully believing that reality will be revealed to us.

287

GRACEFUL REALITY

NOTES 1

Michael Malone and Robert Cummings Neville, "Philosophy at the Beginning of a New Millennium," in Michael Tobias, J. Patrick Fitzgerald, and David Rothenberg, eds., A Parliament of Minds: Philosophy for a New Millennium (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 2-13, quotations from 12 and 13. 2 Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 42. 3 See Augustine, Confessions, XIII.38. All translations from the Latin Loeb Classics edition of the Confessions are my own. 4 Malone and Neville, "Robert Cummings Neville: Philosophy at the Beginning of a New Millennium," 11. 5 Cf. Robert Cummings Neville, Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xvii: "The interesting Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ are mostly fantastic; that his blood saves, that he is the cosmic king, a divine being, the incarnation of God in history, each person's friend, and the final judge of human history, just to name a few." 6 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1961), 171. 7 Neville, Symbols of Jesus, 206. 8 Augustine, Confessions, 1.5. 9 Ibid, X. 27. 10 Ibid,VII.18. 11 Ibid., XII. 1.

20

The Future of the Cross: Symbolic Engagement with the Atonement

S. Mark Heim

"The symbols of the atonement schematize the transcendent creator to the human condition of blood-guilt. " - Robert Cummings Neville

In one of his most recent works, Robert Cummings Neville has proposed a "Christology of Symbolic Engagement." 1 The sophisticated understanding of symbolic relation he has developed in many other writings is deployed in this book to address the specific family of images by which Christians have expressed the importance of Jesus. 2 This is systematic theology, but in a very particular key. It is not purely doctrinal theology, for Neville wishes to judge the symbols in question from a more public than ecclesial perspective. It is not a "natural" theology, for Neville rejects a literal, empirical translation of the images into pure descriptive terms or the neutral language of some generic public. It is a biblical theology, in that the constituting symbolic code is given in the explicit text of Scripture, and that code cannot be replaced. It is a pluralistic theology in that much that is done by Christian symbolic engagement may be done elsewhere, but only by another web of symbols with their own

290

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

distinct particularity. Neville's "symbolic engagement" is much closer to literal truth than many liberal theologians would allow and much farther from it than many conservative theologians would wish. This essay will briefly consider Neville's theological understanding of symbolic engagement and then focus on the topic of atonement as a concrete example within his Christology. I One common treatment of religious symbols regards them as expressive rather than descriptive, expressive of a subjective state or attitude of a human subject. They refer, not to ostensible objects but rather to the feelings of the symbol consumer, which feelings can be religiously appropriate or not, but hardly true or false. Neville's approach is quite different. To him symbols refer in a much stronger way than this. Rather than symbolic reference, Neville prefers to speak of symbolic engagement. Symbols are not true because they describe divine realities iconically (empirically) or because they express a proper emotional disposition toward those realities, even if such description and expression sometimes occur. They are true when they carry over something of the actual divine reality that is important and relevant to the present context into the life of the interpreter. Neville's project makes a rigorous and nonconfessional case for the intelligibility of traditional theological images. These symbols are neither mere shorthand for human emotional states or social dynamics that can equally well be described more empirically, nor are they mass-access versions of more precise concepts about transcendent reality that convey truth more directly. To put it another way, when we map the symbol onto historical experience, it coheres with, or even reveals, actual social and personal dynamics. But it does more than this. When we map the symbol onto the best metaphysical concepts of our current age, it coheres with and enhances these concepts. But it does more than this. Something irreducibly more is conveyed in the symbol, both for human practice and for intellectual reflection. In Neville's terms, a schema is a "rule or formula for rendering a transcendent concept in experiential terms" while a schemaimage is "an imaginative representation that expresses the rule." 3 In some cases both the rule and our understanding of it can be so

THE FUTURE OF THE CROSS

291

clear that the role of schema-images is primarily that of illustration (the rule for turning the concept of a circle into an actual drawing on paper, for instance, as distinct from all the circular things I see or imagine). I take it Neville's special emphasis is that in some cases the comprehension of the rule (if indeed there is one simple rule) is necessarily so imperfect that schema-images conserve and convey as much content or more. But since such images, unlike concepts and rules, are dramatically multi-faceted, it becomes a very complex process to distinguish in what respects and in what contexts schematized images reflect their referent. Because at least some theological symbols carry reference value irreducible to other modes, this complex process is both unavoidable and worthwhile. Neville's approach might be likened to the traditional interpretation of four senses or meanings in Scripture, with theological symbols in the place of texts and considerably more than four layers of sense. To take a crude analogy, consider the movement of a baseball, as it is pitched, hit, thrown, and bounced during a baseball game. The forces and the natural laws (of a Newtonian sort) transcendent of the actual players and events of the game can in principle be schematized: each line drive or curve ball can be described in terms of the application of these rules. But such descriptions are too laborious and impractical to be of use to those who play the game, who instead trade in schema-images of "top spin" and "follow through." When transcendent physics manifests in the concrete events of a baseball game, it is schematized in such symbolic terms. Here the schemaimages are arguably necessary for any one to successfully take part in the activity- and irreducible in that respect- though in principle they could be reduced to rule understanding. The theological assertion is that some dimensions of human life, including those dealing with the meaning of human life as a whole, are not even in principle reducible (by us) to rule understanding. When the transcendent divine is carried over into the human context, its image is symbols. When a three dimensional object like a sphere "pokes into" a twodimensional world, the two-dimensional inhabitants see a circle or a series of circles. These circles schematize the objective referent for this context, but only in certain respects (the density and weight of the circle, for instance, do not bear a specifiable, rule-like relation to the density and weight of the sphere). When the divine reality is manifest in the world of our experience and reflection, it leaves its mark and can be referred to in terms of symbols.

292

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

II There could be few Christian convictions more fertile or more challenging for the application of Neville's perspective than the complex that revolves around the cross of Christ. Christ's life, suffering, death and resurrection are supposed by Christians to resolve a fundamental estrangement in human life, to overcome sin and bring reconciliation or atonement. To a great many inside and outside the church this belief seems to presuppose assumptions about human nature that conflict with scientific ones a n d / o r offend against moral principles. 4 An evolutionary biophysical view of humanity identifies no problem for which the sacrificial work of the crucifixion might be a solution and the centrality of redemptive violence threatens to idealize innocent suffering. For many commentators, the traditional images of blood sacrifice and the cross have no future in Christian theology.5 Neville has addressed this challenge directly. He argues that the atonement symbols are not in fact central to Christian faith.6 And he has developed his own account of Christian salvation without attributing any sacrificial benefit to the suffering of Jesus. 7 Despite this, Neville does not join the current movement to expunge sacrificial language and atonement. Quite the contrary: he offers a strong critique of this movement, by arguing that it willfully ignores the true original religious reference of these symbols and indeed, considers only non-religious forms of reference as their replacements. 8 Sacrifice is a dead symbol for us, but it was once a true symbol. The need today is to find other symbols to replace it.9 In his own constructive effort to do just this, Neville argues that the images of blood and cross, for all the features fantastic and repugnant to the late modern mind and the ties to lost sacrificial assumptions, still remain crucially truthful and faithful ones. 10 The shift needed is a rather subtle one, from a focus on moral guilt to a "primitive sense of stain or impurity," the "shame of corruption and disattunement." 11 His shorthand for this is "blood guilt." This is not a condition incurred by our figurative participation in Christ's execution, nor by our volitional sins. It is a more universal and less personal reality, though it can only be appropriated personally. All order, stability and life have exacted enormous prices, paid in the evolutionary struggle of our biological emergence, in the uneven sacrifice of our social and economic structures, in the costs borne by our families for our existence and development, in the losses and

THE FUTURE OF THE CROSS

293

pains of our individual lives undergoing the unavoidable collisions with the natural needs of others. This condition is our blood guilt. Unlike many liberal Protestant interpreters, he does not avert his eyes from the sacrificial frame ofJesus' death or the cannibalistic subtext of its eucharistic remembrance. Nor does he argue that while these images had a valid meaning in their original context, that meaning can be fully translated into our context by jettisoning all these crude associations. Their theological value lies precisely in their vivid and offensive particularity. In reviewing nine different layers of symbolic reference in the Eucharist in The Truth of Broken Symbols, the last that Neville discusses is the cannibalistic.12 This seems to have special resonance in his constructive theology. The saving power of atonement "has little to do with whether Jesus in fact died in the way that the gospels say, or was the person they describe," and has "nothing to do with whether God is in reality a supernatural person with an ill will toward sinners.... It has only to do with whether we have a symbol that allows us to present ourselves to God, to stand in ultimate perspective, given our blood-guilty identity as sinners."13 The scandal of particularity attaches not to Jesus, but to certain symbols about Jesus. Although a key aspect of traditional atonement theology has been the exchange of forgiveness - the wiping out of our personal guilt for individual sins in exchange for Christ's punishment for sins he did not commit - Neville sees this as only a peripheral issue. Blood guilt is similar to original sin in that it is a condition quite independent of our individual acts. And like original sin, it rightly contradicts the late modern belief that we can be guilty only of wrongs we have consciously and purposely committed. Even so, Neville suggests, it can powerfully thematize elements in our contemporary world. To see ourselves as deserving the suffering and death inflicted on Jesus, even to identify with it by meditation and prayer, may strike many as irrational. But Neville maintains that we, precisely as persons furnished with modern scientific and social analysis, know we are constituted by processes that both literally and figuratively fed on the blood of others. This is a reality so profound and so inescapeable that simple clarity about it offers few alternatives: paralysis, rage, flight toward forgetfulness. No secular language, Neville says, can carry the force of this reality. We are helpless and guilty. If in this condition we cannot approach God or have full life, we are lost. This is not a moral issue in the usual sense. The others that have died for our sake may have done so before we were born or in a place

294

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

we have never visited. Much harm that we do to others may literally be "natural" and unavoidable. The punishment that Jesus suffered precisely because it did not correspond to any specific offense on his part - could be due us, because we are the beneficiaries of suffering just as arbitrary. The cannibalism once charged against Christians in their communion celebration might just as well be true, in terms of our guilt, since we do live by feeding on other life, human and not. In the extreme symbols of the atonement all this is laid before us in terms whose alien character is their aptness. In accepting Christ's death, in eating his "body" and "blood," we acknowledge our blood guilt and confess that we are constituted by it (this is what "sin" means in this respect). To see this truth is an accomplishment and the only way to wholeness. But to see it is to despair. The only way forward is a paradoxical, Kierkegaardian faith. The symbols of sacrifice that most powerfully represent this tragic reality to us at the same time dramatically signify that we are accepted by God. That is, all the crushing regret, resentment and paralysis that inevitably come with knowledge of the price paid for our own existence are removed. God the creator has taken that burden, accepted the guilt. We can live in freedom, aware of the price, the on-going price, but not forestalled from creativity and joy. The symbols of sacrifice and blood guilt thus map truth about the pain, loss and death that undergird human life. But they do more than simply collate the descriptive accounts of evolutionary biology or social analysis which would detail how any single life feeds on others. For the symbols express, as none of these other descriptions must, the unacceptability and offense of this situation, the debilitating burden that this truth is. The symbols thematize truth about God, about the divine creator before whom our condition is nakedly evident, and in relation with whom our recognition of the offense of that condition is confirmed. But the symbols also express, as no conception of God as judge may, that God shares the burden of this condition of blood guilt and has lifted its weight from us. In these respects, the symbols of Jesus' atonement carry us into truth about God and ourselves. The very complex question of the particular respects in which a symbol properly engages us with God is addressed partly by the constellation of symbols with each other. The most stark sacrificial and cannibalistic symbols are supplemented with others. Neville points particularly to the eucharistic symbols of communal flourishing. If Jesus' death points to the intrinsic loss and suffering at every level

295

THE FUTURE OF THE CROSS

of h u m a n b e i n g a n d accomplishment, w h e t h e r in biology or family or politics or economy, the eucharistic symbols point to new life in all these dimensions. They p o i n t b o t h to life lived in the midst of this blood guilt a n d yet free of crippling fear or despair, a n d also to an eschatological form of life which does n o t d e p e n d u p o n such suffering. Neville's summary is worth giving in full: An account has been given here of blood-guilt as the price paid for human life and civilization, an account that is sharpened by late-modern sensibilities. The remedy for blood-guilt, making possible a genuine engagement of the Ultimate, God the Creator, is not a form of ancient animal sacrifice, meaningless in our world, but identification with a person like ourselves who suffered the punishment for blood-guilt that we deserve, an identification as primal as cannibal ingestion and as cosmopolitan as the Eucharistic table. The atonement so understood makes sense in latemodern culture. 14

Ill Any reconstruction of the theology of the cross can be e n r i c h e d by elements in Neville's treatment. H e succeeds in making these central Christian symbols intelligible in their very concreteness to a thoroughly critical c o n t e m p o r a r y consciousness. H e gives a truly public account of what those symbols m e a n , a n d of why the m e a n i n g n e e d s these symbols. O n e who does n o t share t h e m can see why others d o a n d could even, with Neville's instruction, j u d g e to some extent w h e n their m e a n i n g is being faithfully believed a n d practiced. Neville's account is an unusually n u a n c e d o n e , able to articulate why the same symbols may d o so m u c h good a n d so m u c h h a r m , according to the n a t u r e of their interpretation. Since many within the Christian churches find themselves uncertain about these same points, Neville's interpretation is also significant for the internal life of the c h u r c h . H e outlines a path by which persons troubled with the sacrifice a n d violence at the h e a r t of the Christian story can in good faith n o t only affirm these symbols a n d participate in their collective ritualization, b u t also engage t h e m with piety a n d devotion. This is a p r o f o u n d contribution to Christian ecumenism, for sharp rifts t h r e a t e n between those who would affirm these traditional symbols

296

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

and those who would reject them outright. Neville does not hide the difference in interpretation that guides his faith, as compared with that offered by some other Christians. But no one can read him seriously and doubt that this is real piety, truly directed at the same symbols. In the midst of this appreciation of Neville's accomplishment, I also have reservations. According to his own system, it is crucial in theological discussion to specify which aspects of symbols are taken to refer to the divine, and in what important ways. Neville's treatment focuses strongly on the blood-guilt motifs of Levitical sacrifice and the cannibalistic references of eucharistic celebration. These are certainly major aspects of the biblical passion symbols and they are among the most problematic ones for contemporary understanding. So this focus is to Neville's credit: he does not seek easy cases. But this focus has another, more distorting effect. The primary reference-field Neville establishes for the passion symbols is that of blood-guilt, which he understands above all in terms of our unintentional, universal participation in the natural and social webs of sacrifice, suffering and death. Biological and social life alike are red in tooth and claw, whether at first or second hand. The particular passion symbols that Neville chooses are treated almost exclusively as signs of a universal and unalterable human condition. But these same symbols have other dimensions of interpretive relevance, and there are other crucial passion elements. Neville's emphasis on the modes of reference he chooses tends to make the moral of the atonement a rather Nietzschian one, a message of healthy freedom and vitality equipping us to live wholeheartedly in the midst of this bloody and uneven process, with joy in the creativity at its core. There is too little of what Nietzsche himself saw - rightly - in the passion: a to-him all too unhealthy refusal to reconcile with the socially sacrificial nature of life. To parse this difference it is necessary to give more play to the narrative as opposed to the ritual elements of Jesus' death. Neville acknowledges Rene Girard's theory of sacred scapegoating, and grants there is much validity in the thesis.15 But he says there is something even deeper involved in sacrifice, related to the evolution of human physiology. It is one grand pattern, the pattern of vegetation's harvest and regrowth, of animal fertility and slaughter, of the human reptilian brain whose violent outbreaks and passions are harnessed and sacrificed to the ego's social controls. We accept responsibility for the loss and pain that cannot be otherwise. This is

THE FUTURE OF THE CROSS

297

the key referent for the blood of the cross. I think the story should be just reversed, and that the issues Girard points to, if not his entire theory, deserve more weight. What is distinctive and saving in the cross is not Jesus' death as our symbolic reconciliation to the necessary natural loss that intrinsically attends human life or as the mythic integration of our reptilian and our mammalian brain modules. Crucial to the meaning of the crucifixion is a responsibility both personal and universal for what very much could be otherwise in our world. Neville thinks that the symbol of sacrifice is dead. Girard does not. Animal sacrifice may be as alien to our culture as Neville supposes, but animal sacrifice was only itself an outgrowth of the sacred violence against human scapegoats that nourished ancient social order and that endures among us. The notable thing to Girard is not that the gospels use old sacrificial ideas to interpret the death ofJesus: it is that the death ofJesus reveals the truth behind the process that gave rise to the sacrifices in the first place.16 That process is rooted in mimetic human violence, which produces crises of escalating conflict in human communities that are only defused when people unify against exemplary victims. That sacrificial dynamic, a kind of homeopathy of violence, is ritualized and mythologized as necessity. Neville and Girard seem to diverge on this background assumption. Neville sees violence as a necessary and permanent concomitant of the evolutionary process, which can be progressively restrained and harnessed to higher ends. Girard, while acknowledging that there may be some such instinctual substratum as Neville describes, sees an emergent level of human violence that is of a more social than simply genetic origin, and which can legitimately be seen as a fall, a destructive path that is contingent and not inevitable. Thus it is crucial to Girard that the passion narratives deny that scapegoating can be schematized as an organic inevitability or even as an unavoidable tragedy. Cannibalism and ritual blood guilt loom large in Neville's symbolic engagement, representative of universal features of the human condition. But the victims of both ritual sacrifice and cannibalism are the products of very particular social dynamics. We are all implicated in those dynamics, but they are neither pure nature nor simple physiology. Such ritual violence can genuinely ward off greater violence and social dissolution, and in this sense it merits some of the aura of tragedy that Neville casts around it. But this interpretation would hold only if the crucifixion of Jesus were but one more in this unbroken line, and affirmed without complication

298

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

in the gospels. In fact, the biblical setting of these symbols offers a quite different emphasis, which falls not on the endless necessity of this bloodshed, but on its end. Jesus' death is saving, and it ought not to happen. Both aspects are key elements of the gospel telling. In Neville's symbolic engagement, the passion narrative- of Jesus' betrayal, arrest, the accusations, the abuse, the legal forms of condemnation, the redemptive intentions of his murderers, the abandonment of his friends, the despair of his death, the message of non-retaliation from the risen one - falls far into the background in favor of these two images. The person of Jesus Christ - in the concrete character of victim, of the unjustly sacrificed - likewise falls into the background. To recognize a victim in this sense requires us to see something in the mechanism of Christ's death that could be otherwise and that can be reversed, this reversal being part of the salvation that Christ brings. This is the context of the interesting exchange between Michel Foucault and Girard, in which Foucault reproached Girard, 'You should not build a whole philosophy around the victim." Girard replied, "No, not a philosophy, rather a religion. But one already exists!"17 Neville sees the saving power of the atonement as having little to do with whether Jesus in fact died in the way the gospels say. I think that power has very much to do with whether Jesus died this way. Or at the very least, the way Jesus died according to the gospels, the narrative structure just noted, should be considered much more seriously as an engaging symbol itself. It is the primary setting for the complex of biblical symbols Neville deploys. To emphasize this setting is not to retreat into a confessional theological perspective, but rather to seek to specify more fully that symbolic substance, the public meaning of which one wants to test and refine.18 What does it mean that the schematized image of the divine in our world should be this story of religious and social scapegoating? The tradition has held that the punishment that Jesus suffers is rightly due to those who would inflict it on him or acquiesce in its inflicting, a group that in principle includes us all. This does not have in view a generic divine wrath directed at us for the necessities of our very existence, but a specific repudiation of the idea that such scapegoating, however foundational it may seem, can be treated as natural or divine law. The executioners of Jesus are not hostile to an existential interpretation of the passion, one in which Pilate and Herod and Judas and Peter and Mary could all get on with their lives, with

THE FUTURE OF THE CROSS

299

Christ's death in their background as a sign of the acceptance of that inevitable, invisible nexus of blood and pain that undergirds the whole creative dynamic of life. They also see the passion as reconciling in a much more concrete historical sense, as defusing the outbreak of social conflict, Jews against Jews, Jews against Romans. These are "redemptive" readings of Jesus' death, but ones that Girard views as vetoed by the resurrection. The resurrection is a vindication of the innocence of the crucified one, and a rejection of any confusion of this kind of scapegoating with a divine system. For Neville, the sacrificial images acknowledge our subjective sense of taint and corruption in relation to aspects of our biological and social reality that could only be as they are. In his view, the passion has to do with the human reality of this subjectivity, and any reading that relates it to our own personal acts or to collective moral considerations threatens to flatten its symbols into literal terms, to choose the wrong referential valences. But the form of the passion explicitly addresses precisely the ways in which we ritualize vicarious suffering as religious antidote to both our existential dread and our social divisions. No one has done more to educate us to the layers and subtlety of religious symbols than Neville. My criticism is an ironic one, for in this case it seems to me he has insufficiently credited the depth of the signs in question. Blood guilt and cannibalism figure in the passion accounts as symbols that are both linked with many others and shaped by a long history of ritualization and religious application. They stand in need of some interpretation from these other symbolic standpoints. This is nowhere more in evidence than at the last supper, where the gospel accounts have Jesus offer his own interpretation of his sacrifice. Neville suggests that ritual sacrifice is a case where the energies of lower-level behaviors of life are given expression while coordinated with higher level civilizing controls.19 But perhaps even crude scapegoating sacrifice is in fact a "higher level" civilizing control, and one in which there are levels of freedom that rightly bring into play considerations of personal and collective guilt.20 That is, an outburst of rage or indiscriminate violence may be a function of a more primitive brain module. But the calibrated organization of communal scapegoating is no mere license for instinct but a highly developed social process requiring sophisticated symbolic and religious resources. For instance, the victim is most often specifically indicted for paradigmatic offenses against the higher level control of lower level cognitive energies (offenses like incest, sedition, and

300

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

blasphemy). To put it simply, in ritual sacrifice violence is deployed in the service of higher cognitive aims, under the shadow of symbols whose form leaves the actual violence sometimes hardly evident in its true nature to the participants or in their recollections of the events. In the last supper, a thoroughly non-violent event (the actual communal meal of wine and bread) is given an explicitly violent and bloody overtone, pointing to recollection of Jesus' violent death - which the passion narratives hardly allow one to miss in the most explicit terms - but also to that individual and collective choice for victimization with which the Eucharist must always stand as a conscious alternative. What needs to be "domesticated" from the perspective of the passion narratives is not the lower brain stem, but the highly developed cognitive faculties, and indeed religious symbols that have themselves domesticated lower functions to rationalize and ritualize violence as part of social ecology. Indeed, Jesus already stands within a Jewish tradition that has in the prophets pioneered its own "critique of sacrifice" in these terms. The symbols at the heart of Neville's interpretation are moving targets, subjects of a narrative transformation in the gospel telling. They need to be set in that wider network. When they are, there is more to be unfolded in symbolic engagement with the atonement than yet appears in Neville's Christology. This critical conversation with that work is itself an appreciation. His entire project has pressed us back toward serious engagement with the crucial and distinctive material of Christian tradition. The vitality of the conversation that project evokes testifies to its success. There is a vital future for a theology of the cross, in no small measure due to Neville's example.

NOTES 1

Robert Cummings Neville, Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2 In particular see Robert Cummings Neville, Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), and Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 3 Neville, Symbols of Jesus, 3. 4 Joanne Carlson Brown and Carol R. Bohn, Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist critique (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989); Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs ofAshes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves

THE FUTURE OF THE CROSS

301

Us (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); and Patricia A. Williams, Doing without Adam and Eve: Sociobiology and Original Sin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). 5 J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 6 Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols, 210-11. 7 Robert Cummings Neville, A Theology Primer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 93-97. 8 See Chapter Six, "Judging Religious Symbols by Consequences," in Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols. 9 Ibid., 222. 10 In Chapter Two, "Jesus the Lamb of God: Blood Sacrifice and Atonement," in Neville, Symbols of Jesus. 11 Neville, The Truth of Broken Symbols, 222-23. 12 Ibid., 84-85. 13 Neville, Symbols of Jesus, 78. 14 Ibid., 92 15 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), and Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Matteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). 16 See Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccerò (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), and Girard, / See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001). 17 Rene Girard, Quand Ces Choses Commenceront... : Entretiens avec Michel Treguer (Paris: Arlea, 1994), 112. The translation is mine. 18 And in this respect I have been influenced by the work of Hans Frei, George Lindbeck and, on the particular topic of this paper, Raymond Brown and his massive work, The Death of the Messiah, 2 vols. (New York, Doubleday 1994). 19 Neville, Symbols of Jesus, 71. 20 See S. Mark Heim, "A Cross-section of Sin: The Mimetic Character of Human Nature in Biological and Theological Perspective," in Philip Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss, eds., Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), forthcoming.

21

Infinity and Intersubjectivity

Joseph A. Bracken, SJ.

Robert Neville and I have known and respected one another for many years. I have written reviews of several of his books in different journals, and he wrote the Foreword to one of my books.1 In addition, we both share admiration and respect for one of the great philosophical minds of the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead. But we both also have reservations about certain features of Whitehead's philosophical scheme and the way in which those same features have been incorporated into what has come to be called process theology. In brief, because by his own admission Whitehead was at work in Process and Reality and other works on a cosmology rather than an ontology in the strict sense, his metaphysical scheme does not address certain issues which would seem to be part of one's normal understanding of the God-world relationship. One such issue is the relation of the Infinite to the finite and vice-versa. It is revealing that in the index to the corrected edition of Process and Reality there are only three page references to the term "infinity."2 This is not to say that the notion of infinity was totally foreign to Whitehead. Clearly infinity is implied in Whitehead's definition of the divine primordial nature as "the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects."3 Likewise, infinity seems to be implied in his description of creativity as "an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents."4 But the link between the two concepts is rather vague: "The non-temporal act of

304

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

all-inclusive unfettered valuation is at once a creature of creativity and a condition for creativity. It shares this double character with all creatures." 5 Yet, in fairness to Whitehead, is this not what one should expect from an "Essay in Cosmology"? Both creativity and God are dealt with on the level of cosmology, that is, as necessary conditioning factors within the cosmic process, and not on the level of ontology where their existence and activity have to be explained quite apart from their involvement in the current cosmic process.6 Both Neville and I have undertaken in our various books and articles to lay out this implicit distinction between the Infinite or Uncreated Reality and the finite or creation in some detail. Yet our positions, while agreeing in some respects, differ significantly in others. In what follows, then, I will initially give a summary of Neville's basic approach to this issue and then set forth my own position in two stages. That is, I will first lay out my thinking on the relation between the Infinite and the finite as stated in The Divine Matrix and then offer some further reflections on the subject arising out of the metaphysics of intersubjectivity which I developed in a subsequent book The One in the Many? At the same time I will keep making reference to Neville's position by way of contrast with my own. In this way, the similarities and differences in our respective revisions of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme should gradually become clear. Neville's basic presupposition in thinking about the Infinite is that it is the necessary ontological presupposition of everything that is finite or determinate. It is that which is in itself indeterminate and yet that which determines everything else. For, if the Infinite were itself determinate, it would be dependent upon some further Reality for its own determinateness and a logical infinite regress would then occur. At first glance, this is clearly an offense to the sensibilities of ordinary Christians since in their view God is infinite and yet God is a fully determinate reality, a personal being who is creator of heaven and earth. Neville meets this challenge by redefining what is meant by creatio ex nihilo. I quote from Behind the Masks of God: creation ex nihilo is creative activity with three identifiable features: the world created, the source of creation, and the activity itself. The three are indissolubly united. There could be no activity without the actual creation of something; there could be no world without its being created; and there could be no creator without the creating. Each depends upon the other two, and together they make up creation ex nihilo.9,

INFINITY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

305

The key phrase in that summary statement, of course, is: "there could be no creator without the creating." Here Neville clearly distinguishes between the transcendent source of creation, which is an indeterminate reality prior to its own self-originating activity, and God the Creator who is a determinate reality. Thus the determinate reality of God as Creator of heaven and earth is as much dependent upon this creative activity coming from a transcendent indeterminate source as is the physical world. There is much to be said for this understanding of the relation between the Infinite and the finite. From a Christian theological perspective, it guarantees the incomprehensibility of God as Divine Mystery which was so much a part of the theology of both Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, perhaps the two most influential Christian theologians of the twentieth century. Moreover, from the viewpoint of contemporary interreligious dialogue, it establishes common ground between religious traditions which heretofore have stood in dialectical opposition to one another. As I tried to make clear in my book The Divine Matrix, only if Christians are prepared to admit a distinction between God and the Godhead, something defended more in the mystical tradition than in conventional systematic theology, can they begin to understand what Hindus mean by Brahman, what Buddhists imply by Emptiness or Dependent CoOrigination, and what Taoists have in mind with the Tao? Hindus, Buddhists and Taoists, for their part, can then begin to grasp that the Christian notion of God is multi-dimensional and therefore worthy of more serious study and reflection. Yet, as I also made clear in The Divine Matrix, I have misgivings about Neville's thesis that "apart from the creating, the source is utterly indeterminate, nothing; it is not even a potentiality for creating." 10 1 respect the logical rigor of that conclusion, but it worries me that, what is totally transcendent and humanly incomprehensible can be readily marginalized or secularized. That is, one gradually comes to ignore the presence of the divine in one's life because one cannot understand it, or one thinks of this creative activity simply as an energy-source empowering the world process and nothing more.11 Furthermore, as I shall indicate below, there seems to be away to make novel use of the Whiteheadian notion of creativity as "an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents"12 in order to vindicate

306

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Neville's insight into the ontological priority of the indeterminate over the determinate and yet reaffirm the classical Christian belief in God as both determinate and tripersonal apart from the world of creation. To be specific, in The Divine Matrix I argued that creativity is not simply a metaphysical "given" as in Whitehead's own scheme but the nature or essence of the triune God of Christianity. That is, just as Thomas Aquinas identified the nature of God with the act of being and then further specified how the three divine persons share this act of being equally in virtue of the immanent processions of generation and spiration, so the three divine persons within my neoWhiteheadian scheme could be said to share equally in the activity of divine creativity whereby they are simultaneously three and one, three personally ordered societies of divine "actual occasions" and one "structured society" constituting their unity as a divine community.13 Key to this trinitarian conception of a process-oriented God is the stipulation that creativity is not only responsible for each of the divine persons being a dynamic unity of its "prehensions" 14 of self and the other two persons at every moment, but is likewise the reason that they are a single objective reality, namely, a specifically social reality which we may call the divine communion or the divine community. Creativity as the principle whereby "[t]he many become one and are increased by one," 15 accordingly, applies to societies as specifically corporate realities as well as to actual occasions and individual entities. The phrase "increased by one" within the context of a society (as opposed to that of an actual occasion) thus means that the society is here and now (at least numerically) different from what it was a moment ago. It is in some sense a new reality as a result of the ongoing dynamic interrelationship of its parts or members. Proceeding in this way, I effectively reconceived both Aquinas's metaphysics of being and Whitehead's metaphysics of becoming. With respect to Aquinas's philosophy, I insisted that the act of being should be understood dynamically rather than statically. God is not to be understood as Subsistent Being but as Subsistent Activity distributed among three dynamically interrelated centers of activity called the divine persons. With respect to Whitehead's philosophy, I maintained that societies are equiprimordial with actual occasions since both are the necessary instantiations of Creativity as an infinite or indeterminate activity which becomes determinate or finite only in its instantiations. What was further required in order for this modification of

INFINITY AND INTERSUBJECTWITY

307

Whitehead's metaphysical scheme to work, however, was a new understanding of the category of society. Whereas Whitehead conceived societies as aggregates of actual occasions with a "common element of form" linking them to one another, 16 I expanded upon his passing remark in Process and Reality that societies exist in "layers of social order" as "environments" for one another, 17 and stipulated that Whiteheadian societies are structured fields of activity for successive generations of their constituent actual occasions. Thus, while Whitehead saw "form" (the common element of form passed from one set of actual occasions to another) rather than "substance" as the principle of continuity in the midst of change, 18 1 insisted that something more was needed to guarantee continuity: the form must be located in the enduring environment or structured field of activity within which successive actual occasions (or sets of actual occasions) come and go. The common element of form for a given society, in other words, is in my view an objective reality already present in the field or environment for newly concrescing actual occasions. The occasions do not have to generate from moment to moment a new common element of form for their dynamic interrelation as a result of what Whitehead himself called a process of "transmutation." 19 Yet, unlike substances in the classical sense, a field likewise admits of gradual evolution in structure or form as a result of the activity of those same constituent actual occasions in their dynamic interrelation from moment to moment. Here we may pause to ask how this rethinking of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme compares with Neville's own critique of Whiteheadian creativity in Creativity and God. Neville argues that, while Whitehead accounts for the workings of creativity within the cosmic process in terms of the self-constitution of individual entities (including God as the primordial actual entity in interaction with the world), he cannot account for the existence of creativity as a strictly ontological principle for bringing unity out of plurality in the first place.20 For, in line with Whitehead's own "ontological principle" that the reasons for the existence of things are to be found in the "decisions" of actual entities,21 creativity as an intrinsically indeterminate reality cannot be the reason for its own existence and activity within the creative process. Neville's own solution, as already noted, is to claim that in the act of creation, the indeterminate source of all actuality

308

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

constitutes itself as creator and as one relative to many. This kind of creativity does not presuppose an ontological unity because it is not a reduction of a multiplicity to unity through a novel entity, nor a production of a multiplicity out of unity. It is the creation of both unity and multiplicity ex nihilo, the creation of determinateness as such.22 My argument, on the contrary, is that if God be conceived as triune and therefore as existing as a divine communion or community even apart from the world, and if creativity, as noted above, is conceived as the nature or essence of that triune God whereby God is simultaneously both three divine persons and one God (one collective or specifically social reality), then Neville's definition of creativity in ontological terms is equally well verified. That is, since the divine persons do not pre-exist their common nature and their nature (creativity) does not pre-exist the persons, the creativity operative within God is "the creation of both unity and multiplicity ex nihilo, the creation of determinateness as such." In fact, as I see it, my explanation works even better than Neville's to make clear the status of creativity as a strictly ontological rather simply a cosmological principle. For, prior to its operation and activity within the cosmic process, creativity is the reason why God exists as triune even apart from the world. There is no need to appeal to a primordial creative act somehow emergent from an indeterminate source. The creative act is the nature of God at work in the world of creation as a result of the joint "decision" of the three divine persons to create a finite world as participant in their own divine life in a finite way. Admittedly, belief in a triune Creator God is primarily based on Christian revelation, not on human reason from the perspective of the philosophy of religion. But, as I shall indicate below, it admits of empirical verification indirectly in that it also allows for a new rational paradigm for the relationship of the One and the Many with theoretical implications well beyond the field of religion. That is, it implies that the One is not transcendent of the Many as in classical Platonism (and indeed as in Neville's conception of the God-world relationship as a result of the primordial creative act). Rather, the One is understood to be emergent out of the dynamic interplay of the Many with one another from moment to moment. Thus the three divine persons are one God in virtue of creativity. Individual actual occasions coalesce into societies as higher-order objective social realities or "systems" in virtue of creativity. Finally,

INFINITY AND INTERSUBJECTTVITY

309

as we shall see below, the God-world relationship can be understood as a communal reality with creation as a communion of interrelated subsocieties integrated within the primordial communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. What results then is a new social ontology or metaphysics of intersubjectivity with theoretical implications, as noted above, ranging beyond the more restricted field of religion (even world religions). 23 In the remaining pages of this chapter, accordingly, I will focus on the issue of the Infinite and the finite within the context of the metaphysics of intersubjectivity that I have developed in The One in the Many and in some additional publications. 24 Two key insights governed my thinking in The Divine Matrix, first, that the Whiteheadian notion of creativity corresponds to Neville's definition of the Infinite as intrinsically indeterminate since it is actual or determinate only in its instantiations; second, that a Whiteheadian society should be understood as a structured field of activity for its constituent actual occasions. The project of The One in the Many was to bring these insights even closer together in virtue of two further proposals. The first is that infinity, properly speaking, is located in subjectivity.25 That is, a subject of experience, whether divine or created, is in principle infinite during its process of concrescence since it is proceeding from indeterminacy to determinateness. The scope of its infinity is naturally dependent upon the range of its prehensions, both physical and conceptual. The infinity of each of the divine persons, therefore, is completely unlimited; the infinity of a created actual occasion is limited to its physical and conceptual world with the infinity proper to a moment of human consciousness being much more far-reaching than the infinity proper to a moment in the life of an electron. By way of contrast, the reality of an actual occasion as a "superject" corresponds to its actuality or finitude. What it has become by virtue of its own self-constituting "decision" is its "universe" and "beyond it there is nonentity."26 The second proposal follows from my earlier conjecture in The Divine Matrix that actual occasions co-constitute a society understood as an ongoing structured field of activity for their dynamic interrelationship. Given this hypothesis, then, the "superject" for a set of dynamically interrelated actual occasions or society is that same structured field of activity for their dynamic interrelation. It is the finite actuality of their dynamic interrelatedness from one moment to the next. As such, this finite structured field of activity mediates between the infinities represented by the subjects of experience that

310

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

co-constitute it. In this way, as Martin Buber seems to have recognized with his concept of the I-Thou and I-It relations, two or more subjects of experience can remain themselves as distinct subjects with neither of them being reduced to the status of an "object" for the other and yet co-create something bigger than themselves as individuals, namely, the specifically social reality of life in community.27 In his critique of Whitehead's concept of the God-world relationship in Creativity and God, Neville properly criticized Whitehead's theory for a lack of genuine intersubjectivity between God and creatures. As he comments, "in the Whiteheadian conception, God can know, feel or appreciate only people's deeds as done, finished; God cannot prehend them in their hearts, in their processes of becoming." 28 In myjudgment, Neville is exactly correct on this point. Since in Whitehead's view contemporary actual occasions cannot influence one another's process of concrescence, 29 intersubjectivity between actual occasions is logically impossible. But does that mean that intersubjectivity is impossible between Whiteheadian societies? Admittedly, Whiteheadian societies are not themselves subjects of experience. Yet if the interplay of their constituent actual occasions constitutes societies as structured fields of activity, and if these fields of activity can merge with one another to constitute a shared field of activity as suggested above, then intersubjectivity can be said to exist between and among Whiteheadian societies. I will illustrate this point with reference, first, to how created actual occasions can conceivably prehend God and thereby derive from God an "initial aim"30 for their process of concrescence, and, secondly, how God can prehend created actual occasions precisely as subject/superjects. With reference to the first issue, I once again have recourse to Neville's statement of the problem: "Whitehead equivocated on whether God's concrescence is something forever in process and never complete or something that has at least some completed and completely determined decisions. It is clear that for occasions to prehend God, God would have to have some completed and objective presentations." 31 But, in the light of what I said above about subjects of experience being infinite and thus incomprehensible to one another and yet being able to co-create an objective shared field of activity for their ongoing interrelation, the problem of the created actual occasion being able to prehend God and the divine initial aim for itself might be solved as follows. The created actual occasion directly prehends the structure of the field of activity which it shares with God and indirectly feels the divine subjectivity likewise at work

INFINITY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

311

in the field.32 To be specific, among the logical possibilities for its self-constitution which it finds within the field, the created actual occasion feels drawn to choose one on the basis of a divine initial aim, a feeling-level "lure" in one direction rather than another. At the same time, the occasion remains free to ignore the divine initial aim and choose another possibility since the latter is also objectively present in the prevailing structure of the field. The key idea here is that subjectivity and objectivity are dialectically interrelated such that one is never present without the other. My subjectivity must express itself in some form of objectivity or cease to exist in its own right, and the objectivity thus achieved only makes sense as the current self-expression of my subjectivity. In similar fashion, God prehends created actual occasions not simply as superjects but as subject/superjects. The intersubjective relation between God and the created actual occasion is sustained by what the occasion currendy is by way of self-expression in the superject. Logically, of course, the actual occasion as a subjective process of concrescence precedes its existence as an objective superject. But, in point of fact, they cannot be distinguished as Whitehead himself seems to concede: "Each phase in the genetic process [of concrescence of an actual occasion] presupposes the entire quantum, and so does each feeling in each phase." 33 Marjorie Suchocki in her book The End of Evil defended the possibility of subjective immortality for created actual occasions within the divine consequent nature by proposing that God alone can prehend them as both subject and superject simultaneously.34 My argument is that not just God but all actual occasions, finite and infinite alike, prehend one another both objectively and subjectively at the same time. The Infinite (a given subject of experience) is always present in the finite as its objective self-manifestation here and now. Likewise, some years ago Judith Jones argued persuasively that the functioning of an antecedent actual occasion in a subsequent actual occasion "never completely loses the subjective, agentive quality of feeling that first brought it into being." 35 1 heartily concur but with the proviso that the deeper explanation of this phenomenon lies in my own proposal that Whiteheadian societies should be understood as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions. The field, in other words, is the ontological principle of continuity not only for the transmission of form but also for the communication of subjective feeling from one actual occasion (or set of actual occasions in the case of societies with extension in space as well as in time)

312

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

to another. Otherwise, the atomism latent in Whitehead's scheme becomes an insuperable obstacle to the common sense experience of the ongoing subjective identity of the self and of intersubjective relationships with other selves, both divine and human. In summary, then, I have found Neville's critique of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme very insightful and helpful to my own work, above all, in terms of the relationship between the Infinite and the finite in a bonafideontology. As I see it, we differ on details and agree on essentials in this matter. I hope that Neville views my work in somewhat the same light.

NOTES 1

Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link Between East and West (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995). 2 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, rev. and corrected ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978). 3 Ibid., 31. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Ibid., 31. See also articles by Denis Hurtubise and Lewis S. Ford in Process Studies 30 (2001): 78-100 and 101-11, where they argue for implicit reference to at least two, if not three, distinct concepts of God within this passage and its immediate context in Process and Reality. 6 See here Robert Cummings Neville, Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York: Seabury, 1980), 45: the world "is ontologically created, not by decisions within its own process - that would be self-referentially absurd - but by a transcendent creator that makes itself creator in the act of creating. Although this advance does not give a reason why there is this world rather than that, it gives a reason how there could be any world." 7 Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., The One in the Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001). 8 Robert Cummings Neville, Behind the Masks of God: An Essay toward Comparative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 13. 9 See especially Bracken, The Divine Matrix, 128-40. 10 Neville, Behind the Masks of God, 15. 11 Bracken, The Divine Matrix, 139. 12 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 7. 13 Bracken, The Divine Matrix, 25-37. Note that for Whitehead, actual occasions or actual entities are momentary self-constituting subjects of experience which in the aggregate are "the final real things of which the world is made up" (see Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18). The primary analogate for such a metaphysical concept is a fleeting moment in human consciousness, but secondary analogates are to be found, mutatis mutandis, everywhere as the ultimate constituents of all

INFINITY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

313

created entities and even within the divine being. 14 A prehension is the way in which a momentary subject of experience or "actual occasion" incorporates entities in its environment into its subjective selfconstitution here and now (see Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18-20). 15 Ibid., 21. 16 Ibid., 34 and 89. 17 Ibid., 90-91. 18 Ibid., 29. 19 Ibid., 250-51. 20 Neville, Creativity and God, 36-47. 21 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 24. 22 Neville, Creativity and God, 44-45. 23 Cf., e.g., Bracken, The One in the Many, 179-217, where I explore the implications of this metaphysics of intersubjectivity for the notions of truth and objectivity in a postmodern context. 24 Besides The Divine Matrix, see my "Intersubjectivty and the Coming of God," Journal of Religione (2003): 381-400, and "Toward a Value-Oriented Metaphysics of Nature," Worldviews:Environment, Culture, Religion! (2003): 80-92. 25 See, e.g., Bracken, The One in the Many, 109-30. 26 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 28. 27 See Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner's, 1970), 53-64 and 87-100. Buber, to be sure, is more pessimistic about the dangers of the institutional or "It-World" for the human spirit than I am although he too admits the necessity of such an "It-World" for sustained I-Thou relations. 28 Neville, Creativity and God, 15. 29 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 61. 30 Ibid., 244. 31 Neville, Creativity and God, 19. 32 See here my article "Prehending God in and through the World," Process Studies 29 (2000): 4-15. 33 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 283. 34 Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 81-96. 35 Judith A. Jones, Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 3.

22

A More Radical Pluralism

John B. Cobb, Jr.

Robert Neville has contributed significantly to the future of Christian theology in a global context. He has dealt sensitively with distinctively Christian themes. He has also shown how Christianity is but one of several paths to be appreciated and explored in this pluralistic time. For Christian theology to have a healthy survival in this new century and millennium, it must hold these two elements together, that is, the convincing affirmation and development of its particularities, on the one hand, and its self-understanding as one among many ways, on the other. Furthermore, it should hold these elements, not in tension with one another, but as mutually calling for one another and implying one another. Neville has gone far in pointing the way. Nevertheless, one feature of his thought, a central one, blocks the full realization of this task. He is fully pluralistic in his understanding of the many religious paths, but when it comes to the understanding of the divine, this pluralistic sensitivity is absent. It is replaced by a firm conviction that the divine can only be that to which his metaphysical reflections lead him. He is quite sure that there is just one divine reality and that he has accurately identified its basic character and role. He allows other views only secondary status as ways of (mis) representing what he accurately describes. Neville develops his whole approach as a Christian. It is clear, therefore, that the position to which he comes is a possible one for

316

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Christians. Nevertheless, it seems that to follow Neville means to abandon the God of the Bible. This may be overstated. Neville derives from the Christian tradition the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and takes this as central both to his approach to other traditions and to his Christian theology. Although I do not find this doctrine in the Bible, it has certainly long been connected with it in the tradition. Hence to say that emphasizing the Creator out of Nothing abandons the God of the Bible is problematic. Nevertheless, the systematic implications of the doctrine, rightly drawn by Neville, have not been part of the Christian tradition and lead a long way from the biblical God. Neville is fully cognizant of this. Like Tillich he calls on Christians to worship the God who is beyond the God of the Bible. And he is usually more careful than Tillich not to write about God in ways colored by biblical personalism. His claim to connect with the Christian tradition is through the apophatic tradition, one that, while important, is quite different from the biblical faith. No one, obviously, can simply affirm "the God of the Bible" if that means all the ideas about God that come to expression in the canon. There are great differences in the thinking of various biblical authors, and much of what is said is clearly mythical. Every theology engages in demythologizing, and most theologies reject some of the images of God in the Bible as outgrown. Christians regard the revelation in Jesus Christ as providing a point of departure for considering ideas and images that are present elsewhere in the scriptures. Nevertheless, I venture to make some generalizations about the God of the Bible. God as understood in the Bible has a determinate character, usually described in terms of justice, righteousness, mercy, and love. Right and wrong, better and worse, are intimately connected to the understanding of God's relation to the world. A reality that is wholly indeterminate and indifferent to issues of better and worse is fundamentally different from the biblical God. It may be that twenty-first century thinkers now know that the God of the Bible does not exist and that the only hope for Christian faith is abandonment of these crude and false notions. This seems to be Neville's view, and I respect the integrity with which he affirms and presses the matter. For the church to continue to bind itself to false ideas and pointless practices will make it increasingly a refuge for the ignorant and credulous. The church must be prepared to do some radical rethinking of its claims and affirmations. But I do not agree that this requires so radical a break with the God of the Bible.

A MORE RADICAL PLURALISM

317

At least in part Neville's negative conclusion about the biblical God arises from his positive convictions about the nature of the Creator out of Nothing. Yet it is not clear that the affirmation of the Creator out of Nothing excludes the affirmation of the God of the Bible, or, more generally, personalistic theism. In most of the traditions with which Neville connects his doctrine, this sharp exclusion does not occur. For example, Neville likes to point out that in the Daodejing, the Dao that can be named is not the ultimate Dao. But he does not go on to emphasize that the Dao that can be named is. said to be the Mother of All Things. To be the Mother of All Things is not a minor cosmological status. If some people orient their religious lives to the Mother of All Things, are they necessarily delusional or misdirecting their spiritual energies? This is not apparent to me. It is true that the Mother of All Things is not Creator ex Nihilo, but she is creator all the same, at least in the biblical sense of creation. Neville can connect his doctrine with elements in neoConfucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. All have apophatic doctrines, but all have suggestions of a more personalistic theism as well. In addition to the emphasis on Brahman in Advaita Vendantism, some Vedantists are open to the worship of a single personal deity, Isvara, with cosmological functions not unlike the Mother of All Things. In Buddhism there is the doctrine of the three bodies of Buddha. Apophatic thought is connected with the Dharmakaya, and some Buddhists, in a way similar to Neville, consider any talk of the other bodies as, at best, a concession to weakness and ignorance. But there are major Buddhist traditions that believe that the Sambhogakaya, the Buddha as characterized by wisdom and compassion, is both real and supremely important religiously. The reality of the Sambhogakaya in no way denies or depreciates the reality of the Dharmakaya, the ultimate reality that is radically beyond good and evil and has no form or character whatever. A similar distinction can be found in the Christian tradition between God and Godhead. Meister Eckhart is the classical expositor of this distinction. For him "God" is the personal God of the Bible and most of the tradition. "Godhead" corresponds to what Thomas Aquinas identified as Being Itself. Godhead is beyond all characterization. I have come to this pluralistic view of the divine through Whitehead, although he did not affirm it himself. Neville recognizes that there is a family resemblance between his own doctrine of God

318

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

and Whitehead's doctrine of "creativity," which takes the place of "being" in his conceptuality. However, Neville has found, rightly, that most of the secondary interpreters of Whitehead are so focused on the ontological principle, that only actual entities act, that the uniqueness of creativity as ultimate has been misrepresented. Too often it is treated as an abstraction, whereas, according to Whitehead, creativity is that ultimate that is actual only in its instances. Even what Whitehead calls "God" is an instance, "a creature," of creativity. Creativity has no character of its own and is, as Neville says of what he calls God, completely indeterminate. It is the Dao that cannot be named. When Whitehead first raised metaphysical and theological questions in Science and the Modern World, he formulated a distinction between substantial activity and the principle of limitation or concretion. Substantial activity is the indeterminate formless that is so important to Neville and that Whitehead renamed "creativity" in Religion in the Making. But Whitehead did not understand how that which is completely indeterminate can, by itself, explain the emergence of what is determinate. There must also be a principle of determinateness, which he called "the principle of limitation" or "the principle of concretion." Viewing this situation religiously, Whitehead judged that it is the principle of limitation rather than substantial activity to which religious interest is oriented. He made this judgment because of his assumption of the close connection between religion and value appraisal. That which is wholly beyond the distinction of good and evil, such as substantial activity, does not meet the requirement. My own judgment is pluralistic. Neville among others shows that the apophatic tradition finds great religious significance in that ultimate reality that is beyond any distinction of good and evil. But the biblical God, with whom Whitehead was more familiar, is certainly informed by this distinction. Can we not say that both aspects of the totality of things are religiously important? Must we deny the reality or divinity of one in order to accent the reality and divinity of the other? I have no objection to Neville's insistence on the ultimate priority of the indeterminate. Whitehead's language supports him in doing that. So do typical formulations in Buddhism and Hinduism. However, I believe that this kind of ranking is not truly helpful in our pluralistic age. In metaphysical terms, it can, perhaps, be justified. But even from a strictly metaphysical perspective, I prefer the

A MORE RADICAL PLURALISM

319

formulation that Whitehead proposed in a less formal part of his reflections in Process and Reality. Here he noted that creativity, the principle of limitation, and the actual world are all necessary to the coming of anything into being. Creativity brings the new into being out of the actual world; so its working requires that world. It cannot do so apart from the principle of limitation. Obviously, neither the world nor the principle of limitation can function apart from creativity. Each, it seems, is an ultimate requirement of the coming of anything to be. 1 Even if one does not agree to this complex pluralism of ultimate requirements, one may acknowledge that these three factors do exist in our reality. One may then note that historians of religion have sometimes classified religious traditions as cosmic, acosmic, and theistic. The parallel is remarkable. Some religious traditions are oriented to the world in its concreteness. Some distinguish the object of their concern from the world as its ultimate ground. Some are chiefly interested in what gives concreteness and value to the world and calls for human beings to be righteous. Although religious traditions can be classified according to their emphases, the truth is that all three foci show up in most traditions. In real life they do not function as mutually exclusive. This is especially clear in South and East Asian traditions. The problem has been with West Asian monotheism, especially as it appropriated Greek philosophy. I will deal here only with Christianity. It has always focused on the biblical God of justice, righteousness, mercy, and love. But it has attributed roles to this God that do not fit. The biblical God is certainly understood to be powerful. The tradition, in order to honor God, declared God omnipotent. It has even substituted this supposed attribute of its God for the proper name "Shaddai" in many Old Testament texts, so that the unwary reader of the Bible supposes that from ancient times God was understood to be "almighty." Once this doctrine was established, the problem of evil and the problem of human responsibility became, in principle, insoluble, however many supposed solutions have been offered. This attribution of all power to God is closely connected with the development of the idea of creatio ex nihilo. The biblical story of creation attributes to God a forming role. But later Christians were not satisfied with this idea; they attributed to God the bringing into being of something from absolute nothing. This seemed to them a more powerful role. In any case, once God is conceived as

320

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

omnipotent, there is no room for any other aspect of reality to play a role. Neville shows that once we take this role of radical creator out of nothing as the basis for thinking about God, we end up, not with the biblical God but with the indeterminate that is, in Tillich's language, beyond the God of the Bible. The tradition tried valiantly for centuries to hold together the biblical idea of a supreme personal being with the metaphysical need for an ultimate that is beyond all characterization. Usually this ultimate was called "Being Itself," and this was sometimes identified as the Godhead. Reflection about this ultimate supported the apophatic tradition that is so important to Neville. Even those theologians who have been most concerned to focus on the biblical God have generally continued to attribute characteristics to this God that are derived from the creatio ex nihilo tradition. Few have been willing to acknowledge that the God of the Bible is different from the ultimate ground of being. This is partly responsible for the fact that those, such as Tillich, who are convinced of the importance of the ultimate ground of being sometimes reject the biblical God. In the process they often give up any distinguishable ground of better and worse. In Tillich the rhetoric about God as Being Itself borrows so much from the traditional rhetoric of the church about God that the reader is likely not to recognize the drastic character of the difference in what can really be said. Neville makes the difference far more explicit. But even Neville, when he turns from the discussion of God to that of religious experience and behavior, discusses this in ways more appropriate to the God of the Bible than to the indeterminate ground of all things. For example, when Neville turns to the role of religions in the political order, he features the idea that human beings are under obligation. I would not word the matter in quite this way for two reasons. First, this is too much of a generalization from the Western Asian traditions to all Eastern ones. One certainly finds Confucianism supporting a strong sense of obligation, but the situation with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhism is different. At least in these cultures, Buddhism functions more as a release from the psychological pressures of the obligations that pervade them than as reinforcement. Emphasizing that the ultimate reality is beyond good and evil is part of the basis for such release. Second, the term obligation is too legalistic in connotation to fit Pauline Christianity. Christians are called to love God and

A MORE RADICAL PLURALISM

321

neighbor and to act as such love implies. I realize that in fact this distinctive note is often lost, and that sociologically it may be a useful generalization to say that Christians stand under obligations. But as one who strives to overcome that legalism, I am not happy to see it placed in so central a role. However, these objections are not my fundamental point here. My interest is that in terms of religious phenomenology Neville gives to morality a central place. This centrality of morality in the Abrahamic traditions comes from the conviction that God is righteous and calls for righteousness in those who worship. In India and China it is less central, but it comes from a sense of a more immanent principle in things that identify the right. It may be called Dharma or Dao. It does not come from Brahman as the ultimate that is beyond all distinctions of better and worse or from the Dao that has no characteristics whatsoever. The problem is that Neville, in his metaphysical theology, seems to deny the reality of the Abrahamic God and to turn attention away from the principle of Tightness to which all the traditions do witness in some way. The God to whom he points has no interest in such matters. It is hard, therefore, to connect this centrality of the moral in the religious life to the relationship to what Neville calls God. If God is beyond the distinction of good and evil, it is easier to understand that those who relate themselves most closely to God will also seek a mode of being that frees them from standing under obligation. That such a quest can be found in the apophatic tradition is clear. That this tradition gives rise to a strong sense of being under obligation is not clear. My suggestion is that, contrary to his intention, Neville provides here a reason for recognizing the biblical God as a reality distinct from the indeterminate ground he names as God. The connection between the biblical God and moral experience works quite smoothly in Whitehead's formulations. In Religion in the Making Whitehead finds a common element in religious experience to be a "rightness in things partially conformed to and partially disregarded." 2 Whitehead understands this to result from the working of the principle of limitation in all human experience. The arguments Neville typically gives for rejecting the God of the Bible do not work against the pluralistic understanding of the divine I am advocating here. In Religion in Late Modernity he offers two such arguments. The first is metaphysical, although from the metaphysics he draws immediately a religious conclusion. "No

322

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

consistent meaning system can be devised showing God to be a being alongside worldly beings, personal or otherwise, which does not run afoul of the problem of the one and the many. The context in which such beings would be together would be more profound and divine than the being of God."3 What this shows is that if God has a reality other than that of the creatures that make up the world, there must be something that grounds both. Whitehead agrees. That something is creativity. Neville's point is metaphysically correct. But Neville proceeds to say that the context in which such beings would be together, that is, creativity, would be more profound and divine than God. Perhaps. Everything depends on what these words "profound" and "divine" mean. I am willing to grant that in some sense "creativity" is more "profound" than what I call "God," but not that it is more "divine." My own weighting is the reverse. For me, righteousness and love contribute more to "divinity" than does power or metaphysical ultimacy. But my point here is not to argue about which is more divine. It is to say that the Mother of All Things and the Dao that Cannot be Named are both divine, as are both Isvara and Brahman, both Sambhogakaya and Dharmakaya, and both God and Godhead. To these pairs I would add also the Cosmos in its Totality, with a focus on this dear planet of ours. Is this polytheism? I think not. Polytheism implies a plurality of divinities of essentially the same type. Trinitarianism verges on polytheism when the three are viewed as distinct persons in the modern sense. But the distinction of the Godhead and God cannot be understood as identifying two gods. And certainly the cosmos as a whole is not another god, however deeply we learn to love and respect it and order our lives to it. Neville's first argument against the biblical God is that this God cannot be metaphysically ultimate. My reply is that the insistence on metaphysical ultimacy in Neville's sense is not essential to the biblical God, however important it has been in the Hellenized tradition. As we move into a more fully pluralistic world of thought and experience, this is an insistence that should be surrendered. This is not really so great a sacrifice! The work of the biblical God in forming and inspiring and judging and saving the world, to many of us, continues to be of ultimate existential and social importance! Neville's second argument is very simple. "The empirical checks, to see whether the world is the kind of thing a personal creator would make, turn out to be largely negative."4 This is the argument from

A MORE RADICAL PLURALISM

323

evil. Against traditional Christian theology, it is persuasive. Against the proposal put forward here, much less so. Traditional theology, as noted above, has gone from the biblical conviction that God is very powerful to the doctrine of omnipotence. It has gone from the biblical vision of God giving shape to the chaos to creatio ex nihilo. Having made these moves, it has to explain why exactly this world, with all its waste and suffering and sin, is the one God has chosen when God could have chosen any self-consistent world whatever. Perhaps every world with great positive value would also include some waste and suffering and sin, but it takes very little effort to imagine some significant improvements an omnipotent God could have made without significant losses. The efforts to demonstrate that this is the best of all possible worlds have failed. Neville is correct. But if we return to the more modest affirmations of the Bible, and if we develop our understanding from them, and especially from what is revealed of God in Jesus, it is not clear that this problem is so great. We understand that the nature of the world in any moment is largely the result of the past projecting itself into the present. The question is whether we can discern anything that transcends this determinism, any element of novelty and self-determination. If we can, can we see any pull within that self-determination toward the heightening of value both in the moment of occurrence and beyond? Does the course of events suggest that there is a power working for life and consciousness and love? There are those, of course, who do not discern anything of this sort. In some cases this is because they are convinced that mechanistic forces determine everything and fully account for life and consciousness and love. In other cases, it is because they see that the effects of life and consciousness and love involve much misery and destruction, so that they have little interest in revering and opening themselves to their source. But as a minimum, most people would agree that noting and valuing these elements in the world and orienting our lives to what we believe to be their source is not ruled out by the empirical check to which Neville appeals. As I read Neville, I respond as I do to many brilliant thinkers. In their positive insights and affirmations they are profound. Their negations are less impressive. He has reflected with intensity and subtlety on the Creator, understanding creation in its most radical sense. We can all learn much from him about this. In a philosophical context in which making any claim for the reality of the divine is

324

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

profoundly suspect, he has cleared the ground of other approaches and shown that this one is valid. In this way he has provided a basis in reality for religious experience and thought. This is a bold endeavor indeed. I believe that, in principle, he has succeeded, even though the great majority of philosophers pay little attention to this achievement. That there is a better chance of persuading a skeptical, secular community of the reality of what Neville calls "God" than of what I call "God" is probably the case. I doubt, however, that in the long run this makes a lot of difference. Few in that community will be particularly interested in either discussion. I am more interested in addressing the religious communities, taking their insights and beliefs seriously. When I do so I am driven to reject the idea that all these insights and beliefs about that with which they have to do are ways of relating to exactly the same thing. Some wish to realize their identity with the religious object, Brahman or Dharmakaya or Godhead, for example. Some worship their religious object, giving thanks for all they receive from it. Is that with which some find identity the same as that which others worship? I doubt it. Still more do I doubt that the primal traditions, which seek right orientation to the world about them, are engaged primarily in either of these activities. Why can we not recognize and celebrate these differences of orientation including differences of that toward which religious people orient themselves? Why must we insist to most of them that what they relate to is in fact very different from the way they experience it and think of it? In my view the way ahead for the several religious traditions is to recognize the diversity not only of religious paths but also of religious goals. When progressive Christians seek the "Basileia theou" the Commonwealth of God, their goal is not the same as the enlightenment sought by Zen Buddhists. This does not mean that they need regard the Zen Buddhists as wrong or inferior. The more they study Zen, the more they are likely to appreciate the deep wisdom embodied in that tradition and the enormous value of its goal. Many Christians now practice Zen meditation for these reasons. Of course, if they abandon the distinctive Christian goal in order to do so, they are converts and no longer Christian. But many see that these are complementary rather than competitive goals. To appreciate and even emulate Zen practice does not make one less a Christian. This complementarity can be fully appreciated only if we

A MORE RADICAL PLURALISM

325

understand that the quest for the full realization of what one always already is relates us to a different reality from the attempt so to live that God's will is done on earth as in heaven. In Christian terms, the former relates us to the Godhead, the latter to the God of the Abrahamic tradition most fully revealed in Jesus. This latter relationship is most fundamental for the great majority of Christians, but a healthy Christian faith is open to the pursuit of the former as well. Christians can recognize that the ways of realizing that we are instances of ultimate reality have been developed more thoroughly in the traditions of South and East Asia than in the Abrahamic faiths. We may decide that without learning from these faiths and being enriched by them, our efforts to take part in God's work of bringing the Commonwealth will be impoverished. But this does not redirect us away from our own scriptures and theistic tradition. On the contrary, in a pluralistic age, our tradition calls for its own continuing growth through learning from others. I have tried to show how Christians can understand our particularity as calling on us to appreciate and affirm the particularity of others. I have written from the point of view of a theist as to how valuable it can be to develop the apophatic dimension of our tradition through openness to other traditions. I believe it is equally important today that we learn from the traditions that have focused neither on God or Godhead but on the Earth. Our monotheistic and apophatic traditions all witness to a history of human alienation from the Earth. Today we see the terrible consequences of that alienation. We turn humbly to the primal traditions we so long scorned in hopes that we can learn again to understand ourselves as part of a created order rather than transcendent of it. If we fail to do so, our prayer for the coming of God's Commonwealth cannot be answered. I would greatly appreciate Neville's aid in developing this more radically pluralistic approach to religious pluralism. This would not require that he give up the insights he has gained about the indeterminate ultimate out of which all things come. It would require that, instead of simply negating the biblical God and theism generally, he would separate out what is valid in this tradition from the teachings that do conflict with his central insights. In this way we could go far toward providing a conceptual grounding that would give scope for multiple religious traditions to explain themselves in congenial and realistic terms while leaving full space to appreciate the truth and reality of the others.

326

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

NOTES 1 See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 225. 2 Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), 66. 3 Robert Cummings Neville, Religion in Late Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 77. 4 Ibid.

23

Which Way toward a Theology of Religions: Pragmatista Methodist, Ecumenist?

Gabriel Fachre

Long-time friend and colleague in the nine-theological school Boston Theological Institute, Robert Neville, is offering a new proposal looking "toward a theology of religions." He set it forth in a recent lecture at Boston University's Institute for Philosophy and Religion.1 My contribution to this Festschrift is an appreciative word for his enterprise, done with the "edge" he welcomes in theological dialogue. How important this venture in our present global setting! For Christians, two challenges come to the fore: 1) Learning to work with other religionists who share the goal of world peace in a time when continuing violence and its amplified means imperil the planet itself. 2) Coming to terms with the manifest facts of religious pluralism with a fresh generosity. The question here, as with other contexts, is how to relate, but not capitulate to the givens, keeping in mind Bonhoeffer's wise warning about the danger of being "servile before the factual." Dean Neville brings to the challenge an amazing set of resources. His command of varied disciplines, from philosophical forte to knowledge of the varieties of, and within, world religions, makes his thesis fruitful, but commentary on it a daunting task. Evidence of the latter can be found by downloading from the Barnes and Noble listing

328

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

of his works on the Internet the observations on his range of writing and indications of who his readers are. A remarkable spectrum of the latter, for the people who bought his books run from devotees of Joseph Campbell to disciples of Timothy LaHaye (of Left Behind notoriety). And as for identifying his point of view, descriptions go from "at heart, a pious Methodist" to, at bottom, "a mystical atheist." So, given this diversity of readings of Neville's work, humility is in order for this response to the case Neville is making for a new kind of theology of world religions. I'll attempt to do it in two moves: some commendatory words, then some questions shaped by my own heritage and ecumenical faith. However, first a brief summary of the main lines of his proposal. Dean Neville begins his Institute paper with an appreciation of Leroy Rouner's imaginative 23-year long series that exemplifies important features of his own method of dealing with world religions: creative attention to "enduring issues" using a "repertoire of disciplines" deployed by public intellectuals adroit in their fields but willing to think collaboratively about matters both "chronic" and "acute." The enemy of such inquiry is "reductionism" - astrophysical, biological, sociological, anthropological, psychological, economic, historicist, etc., but most of all touching his topic, theological reductionism. The latter is to be found in academic environs, in the pieties of ordinary folk and in the pontifications of national leaders, a "theology" that may itself reject its ancestral formulations, but still privilege them for defining what is important and what is not. This malady is not limited to the West but ranges over religions and cultures across the world. Manifesting theological reductionism in the field at hand is the content to be found in "exclusivist," "inclusivist" and "pluralist" theologies, and this three-fold typology that identifies the options as such, one that dominates this field of inquiry. Exclusivists, both "ignorant" and "sophisticated," work with unquestioned norms that relieve them from exploration of, or engagement with, alternative worldviews. Such can include "[c]ulturai elites who like to be spiritual but not religious [and] are often liberal exclusivists" (116). Inclusivists are those who take up into their scheme of things whatever they find to be coherent with their own norms, reconfiguring them accordingly, whether it be Muslims appropriating selectively from Judaism and Christianity or the Vatican regarding within its framework "Protestant and Orthodox as 'separated brothers and sisters'"(H7)." But inclusivists, too, can affirm other religions by reducing them to

WHICH WAY TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS?

329

a common core of mystical experience or philosophical categories. Pluralists want to say that religions "are all true somehow... [and] serious disagreements are not about matters of truth" (118). But pluralism "is absurd at an even more obvious level" (118). In this it shares the fault of the typology as such. The mistake has to do with an "essentialism" which assumes that religions have a stable discernible identity, "as if they were homogeneous bounded entities that can be represented by the token 'a religion' or 'a tradition'" (119). Such an assumption is "pernicious" for religions are not static bodies of ideas or practices, but "living existential realities, constituting moving targets for analysis" (119). While learning from their mistakes, we have to "abandon the formalistic categories...and take a new approach to a theology of religions" (119). A new kind of theology of religions looks for the "boundaries" of the world religions, first, by an historical study of "core texts and motifs," tracing their pilgrimage through twists and turns as they interact with manifold religious and cultural contexts, and are shaped and reshaped along the way. Such an inquiry, employing a variety of disciplines, would help to clarify the identity of the phenomenon that currently presents itself to us as a given "religion."2 This methodology gives the lie to the rampant essentialist assumptions, notably those to the fore in the three-fold typology. Second, a new approach needs "to develop fair and stable categories" (121) for the comparison of elements in religions under consideration, avoiding the current Enlightenment cum Jewish-Christian models current in much of academia, no small task requiring the movement from "vague" hypotheses, through instantiations, to comparison of elements that might cross religious boundaries. 3 Third, a new approach should not shrink from developing a "procedure for identifying how theologies can be true or false" (122). Truth and falsity, with the help of analytical tools from Charles Peirce on symbol theory, have to do with whether or not interpretations of religious symbols engage their objects and carry "what is important or valuable in the religious object over into the interpreter..." (125). Thus the truth of a given symbol is related to a particular "social context and personal existential situation" (127). Using this divining rod, we "can abandon the nonsense of saying that, for instance, Christianity is wholly true. Instead we should ask, what kind of Christianity makes a valid truth claim in the specific context under consideration" (128). To discern that we need rigorous anthropological, sociological, psychological, neurophysiological, and historical inquiry as well as the tools of

330

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

theology. A tall order this new approach, but one required by the failure of current constructs. Now, some appreciative words. I commend Neville for rejecting the "simplistic" typology that has gone virtually unchallenged in the field of theology of religions. I say virtually, because a few others have questioned it. A prominent current example is Mark Heim, a specialist in this subject, a critique to be found in his The Depths of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology ofReligious Ends} In a much more modest way, I've done it too by way of an alternate typology.5 Along with that, and borrowing the typology for a minute as Neville does, kudos for his exposure of what he calls "liberal exclusivists," those who want to be spiritual though scorn the given religions, but who are as imperial in their own way as the religious right. However, I've not yet heard the three types, and the typology itself, called "pernicious," for it takes a feisty theologian to do that, and few of those we have. Again, I believe Neville is right that this taxonomy of positions and the positions themselves, and the "theologies" of business, government or the academy are perspectival, or, in his words, "the terms of their own religion constitute the leading string by which they register the religion of others" (115). And specifically, the "common theology" that, tacitly, works out of a Western and Christian ethos, even when the proponent of, say, a pluralist view, consciously rejects those identities. Also, I commend Neville for bringing his knowledge of the varied world religions, in all their evolving complexity, to the discussion of the subject of a theology of religions, and for being a facilitator of dialogue between and among world religions, with the help of multiple academic disciplines. And I applaud his proposal to study the history of the interpretation of core texts and motifs of varied religions, their interaction with other traditions and other historical contexts, and thus their consequent development, and the importance of symbols in that investigation. And I appreciate his Niebuhr-like recognition of the academic theologian's "propensity to self-deception," and thus the need for the theological other in evaluating our own symbol systems, which, in Christian context, I take to be one of the points of ecumenical co-inquiry. But now to the questions: 1) Taking on the typology of conventional wisdom requires accurate description of the types and their representatives. Neville, I don't think you have some of them right. For example, is John Hick an "inclusivist" as you say? How do you reconcile that with his self-

WHICH WAY TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS?

331

description as propounder of the "pluralist hypothesis"?6 Further, your definition of "pluralism" in a theology of religions construct is one that, a) "says they are all true somehow... b) that each religion gets to define truth on its own terms... c) that every tradition with a significant history must have a handle on some important religious truth..." (118). It seems to me that descriptions (a) and (c) can be reconciled, (c) being a species of the genus (a), (c) being the familiar each hand touching a different part of the elephant, needing them all to get the full picture. But (b) sounds like something more, a "you do your thing and I'll do mine" pluralism presupposing either a modern common core view like Hick's or a postmodern epistemic relativism. And, I wonder too, where you would fit Karl Barth whom you have studied extensively since your Frei/Lindbeck days at Yale? Given his judgment that revelation occurs only in Jesus Christ, and thus, in your words "other religions can simply be ignored for all religious purposes" (116), he seems to fit your description of an "unsophisticated exclusivism." Don't you need to find another sub-type here for your characterization of exclusivism to account for the twentieth century's best known theologian, especially so given his "article of hope" (not "article of faith") that every human being, including those of other religions will be part of a "universal reconciliation"? 7 And again, is there an apple among the oranges in your citing of Vatican IPs description of "Protestant and Orthodox as 'separated brothers and sisters'" as a form of "inclusivism" in a theology of religions? The former is an intra-Christian ecumenical issue, not the interfaith question to which a theology of religions is addressed. (Today, as in the case of the recent Vatican declaration, Dominus Iesus, the debate would be about the distinction between Protestant and Orthodox, the latter's status as "Church" granted by virtue of apostolic succession, absent in the former.) I think you need to clear things up in these various cases to make your proposal more connected to current categories.8 2) Now a pretty big question: How has your own proposal to depart from a theology of religions that imposes, covertly or explicitly, its own premises on its construct escaped that same rejected approach? Having studied at the University of Chicago with the Charles Hartshorne and Charles Morris, especially relevant being Morris' course, "Pragmatism: Mead, Dewey, James and Peirce," it was not

332

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

hard to see the influence of Peirce on your proposal. My question: how is your alternative proposal, a pragmatic contextuality regarding the truth of religious traditions - with academic inquiry as arbiter of what constitutes both the nature and truth of a given religion today - not the same kind of perspectivally controlled theology of religions that you criticize? If it is, what would save it from being a form of "sophisticated exclusivism" if this "new approach" dismisses the other three as "pernicious"? Those are the fighting words we associate with exclusivism. Further, given the functional affectivity and moral relevance that enters the picture of what constitutes "truth" in a particular context, I might add (with a smile), why not acknowledge the formative influence of your own Methodism, where "a heart strangely warmed" and "sanctification" are defining characteristics, so reflected in your interest in symbols that, in your Wesleyan words "are aimed to transform the soul over time...."? But wouldn't Wesley's assumptions about transformative symbol be closer to the symbol theory of Wilbur Urban's classical work Language and Reality in which he distinguishes between the "symbolic truth" of a religious symbol with the affective power that comes from putting us in touch with the referent and "the truth of the symbol" which is the expansion of the symbol in abstract theological language about the referent? 9 I'm thinking here of how Urban would hold that propositions ("the truth of the symbol") are possible that access the "determinate nature of ultimate reality," to use a characterization of Wesley (!) Wildman in another essay in this volume. And one more Methodist stigmata: Given the "Methodist quadrilateral" and its conception of theological authority, with its retention of the Anglican trilaterale "reason" along with Scripture and tradition, plus the added "experience" mentioned above, we have another fit with the Neville program, in this case with the accent on intellectual warrants for religious hypotheses. 3) If it is true that an identifiable perspective is inescapable in constructing a theology of religions, why would your own Christian premises not be properly a partner with your pragmatism in formulating a theology of religions? If you can say you are both Christian and Confucian, why not both a Methodist and a contextual pragmatist (the former, in both cases norming the latter, I would hope)? My guess your answer would be, "What Christianity?" and "What Methodism?" given the endless diversity of construals in time and space to which you have pointed, your warnings about "essentialism" and the illusion of "religions as homogeneous bounded entities" (119).

WHICH WAY TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS?

333

My answer draws on the remarkable bi-lateral and multilateral spurts in Christian ecumenism that are part of our present context. The new feature of such is the honest recognition of the heterogeneity to which you point. But with it goes a judgment that the differences are not, as such, destructive of continuity in Christian identity. Rather, they are potentially contributory to a trajectory that constitutes the expression of that identity, charisms (often wrongly claiming ultimacy as in Paul's Corinthian body), emerging in varied times and places that are needed to make up the fullness of Christian faith, and mutually corrective of one another's reductionisms. Hence the intriguing current ecumenical formulas of "mutual affirmation and mutual admonition," and "reconciled diversity." These fresh interpretations of diversity do assume an enrichable core Christian identity, as, for example, in the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. Here is an assertion of commonality of teaching, but teaching done from differing angles of vision, at one time thought to be church-dividing and even faithseparating, but now reconsidered as aspects of the doctrine to which the other must attend, and thus mutually fructifying. The same is true of the Lutheran-Reformed Formula of Agreement, and the multi-lateral Consultation on Church Union, which now becomes Churches Uniting in Christ, with its consensus on core teaching and its belief in the enriching diversity of its nine communions, including your own Methodist Church. My question: Why not an upfront Christian theology of religions (including its Methodist charism), with its core premises, rather than a Western pragmatism with its core premises, for your proposal of a new theology of religions?10 To illustrate my point, let's playfully apply your proposal to return to core texts and then move forward in the present toward what we might call an "ecumenical Christian theology of religions." I would begin with the "ecumenical creeds" that emerged in the early centuries, the Apostles and the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, which still command ecumenical attention and loyalties that run from the official standards of Churches - Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox - to the World Council of Churches' "Confessing the One Faith" study and statement, based on the latter creed.11 And, apropos contemporary contextuality, I would work with my own ecumenicallyoriented denomination, the United Church of Christ (UCC), born in 1957 and as yet the only Church in the United States to bring together in "mutual affirmation and mutual admonition" very disparate Protestant streams - Congregational, Christian, Evangelical (part

334

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Lutheran) and Reformed - one that defines itself thus as a "united and uniting" body. The trajectory of the ecumenical creeds arrives in the UCC in an official Statement of Faith that its drafter identifies as a telling of "the Great Story."12 While the creeds can be characterized in theater imagery as a drama in three acts - creation, reconciliation, redemption - an economy that rises from the ontology of the triune God, the Statement uses the literary device of narrative, befitting the narrativity of our era in both event and interpretive timeliness.13 Thus the ecumenical creedal three acts translate into an ecumenical Church's seven chapters in a Grand Narrative with some important fill-ins that reflect the development of doctrine, including several germane to an ecumenical theology of religions today. We trace now the tale. The UCC Statement of Faith begins the account of the doing of God in the very being of God, the economic manifesting the immanent Trinity, as in the creeds: "We believe in God, the eternal Spirit, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."14 God, as this triune Life Together, wills a world of life together. To that End the story aims. Chapter 1, "God calls the worlds into being." Creation is made for the mutualities of humanity, nature and God. Chapter 2, the fall, the No to God's Yes, and thus the Statement's lament over our "aimlessness and sin," and a testimony to the God who "judges all humanity and all nations." Chapter 3, in spite of the world's plight, "God seeks in holy love to save." While not spelled out in the Statement as such, this counterpoint to the fall of a preserving grace is named in both Jewish and Christian theological lore, "the covenant with Noah." What gifts it brings! Truth, beauty, goodness, holiness enough to keep the story going toward its Center and End. Chapter 4, a "righteous will declared through prophets..." Something here about a special covenant with the Jewish people, but not enough even in a denomination among the earliest to declare itself "antisupersessionist" later enlarging in a Synod resolution the meaning of this chapter.15 Chapter 5, and so to the Center of the story where life together takes on a life fallen apart: "In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, God has come to us, and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death, and reconciling the whole creation to its Creator." Chapter 6, "God bestow upon us the Holy Spirit." Here much about both the church and its mission, the "gospel... forgiveness of sin and fullness of grace, courage in the struggle for justice and peace." Chapter 7, "eternal life in your realm which has no end. Blessing and honor, glory and power be unto

WHICH WAY TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS?

335

you!" How then from this to a narrative ecumenical theology of religions? We begin with the prolog of the triune God busy in all that happens in the Story, a prolog that is put there, paradoxically, by the central chapter. The Spirit of the Son of the Father (a Moltmann formulation) is at work wherever God saves. In the preserving grace of Noah's covenant, the Son saves humanity from all the untruth, evil, ugliness, and unholiness that gets in the way of the story going. Included in this covenant light that arcs over creation is a rainbow of religions that embody these gifts from heaven. But the rainbow settles down on one spot, the scandalous particularity of a chosen people, but presses deeper in and through the cross-beam of one Jew. Something so central happens that the light figure changes to a rising Sun, Easter announcing an End to the quest for life together, and bringing a people to be with that good news. Chapter 7 is that closure, but one to be understood in the light of God seeking "to save all people." How could that be? In the UCC tradition stands the "Andover theory" from the Congregational side and the Mercersburg theology from the Reformed side. Both came to the conclusion that an inclusive God seeking a total life together would not give up on anyone. So enter in the final chapter, the Hound of Heaven, with warrants in I Peter 3 and 4 and a patristic tradition, who relentlessly purses the hind. No one will be denied the Christ who descends even to the dead, the Word that alone saves from ultimate sin, a deeper plight than the foursome dealt with by preserving grace. But human hinds have a mind of their own, not to be consumed by a divine implacability. They are free to be, or not to be, together, so the hound god figure breaks down here. But there is also a Chapter 4 to be remembered, for, according to a tough-minded Paul with his sola fide, it is Abrahamic faith that also saves, the knowledge of the source of the same only remaining for the eschatological encounter with Christ.16 Well, here are some steps, seven of them, toward a theology of religions rooted in one ecclesial existence, with some borrowing of a narrative idiom from our present context. Now, how about rendering explicit the implicit ecclesiality of your proposal, sure, partnered with your pragmatism, but knowing who is senior and who junior? I've tried, with these Methodist nudges and the like, to inject a little levity in an otherwise too-somber arena of inquiry. I do so, again out of my own UCC heritage with its premier theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, in mind. He spoke in a famous sermon about

336

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

humor as a way of dealing with life's incongruities. Thus laughter is found in the vestibule of the temple, but only faith and prayer in the inner sanctum, there to deal with the ultimate incongruities. 17 One of those enigmas in the inner regions to be faithfully and prayerfully addressed is how to honor the variety of religious commitments across the globe while at the same time confessing Christ as Lord, especially so in this time when the conflict of religions could tear our old world to pieces. I honor Dean Neville's pilgrimage toward the sanctuary, ready, I hope, to stop along the way in the vestibule. And I join him as a comrade on that journey.

NOTES 1

My chapter is an enlargement of remarks made on that occasion, 13 February 2003, as respondent to that lecture named "Toward a Theology of World Religions: The Existential Threats." Citations will be made parenthetically in the text and refer to the published version: Robert Cummings Neville, "Toward a Theology of World Religions: The Existential Threats," in Anna Lànnstròm, ed., The Stranger's Religion: Fascination and Fear (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 113-30. 2 An exercise in such is Robert Cummings Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-modern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 3 An approach documented in Robert Cummings Neville, ed., The Human Condition, Ultimate Realities, and Religious Truth (all three volumes, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 4 S. Mark Heim, The Depths of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2001), 3-13. 5 Gabriel Fackre, "Christ and Religious Pluralism: the Current Debate," Pro Ecclesia 7:4 (Fall 1998): 389-95. See also my "An Evangelical Narrative Christology for a Religiously Plural World," in Sung Wook Chung, ed., Alister E. McGrath and Evangelical Theology: A Dynamic Engagement (London: Paternoster Press, 2003), 21334. 6 For an analysis of Hick on this subject see "The Pluralist Hypothesis," in Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995), 15-43. See also John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 7 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I V / 3 / 1 , trans, and eds., G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T & T. Clark, 1961), 478. 8 Speaking of the current discussion of a theology of religions, I did not see much engagement in the body of the text or footnotes with the vast current literature on this subject. My question, how come? Just one example: Mentioned already is Neville's Boston Theological Institute colleague, Mark Heim's The Depths of the Riches, given last year's "best academic book" award by the Association of Theological Booksellers, with a thesis that is, from his earlier work, Salvations, forward near the center of today's discussion of a theology of religions. Then there is the lively

WHICH WAY TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS?

337

current evangelical dialogue about the same, including Gerald McDermott's Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2000), which has an appreciation for Confucianism kindred to your own, and who argues that Jonathan Edwards did too. So too, the new detailed inquiries on the topic by Paul Knitter, Introducing Theologies of Religion (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2002), and Paul Griffith's Problems of Religious Diversity (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001). Why not engage these points of view for the sake of the mutual enrichment for which you rightly argue. 9 Wilbur Urban, Language and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1939), 443ff. and passim. 10 I would suggest that evidence of the beginnings of such are discernible in Robert Cummings Neville, A Theology Primer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); see Gabriel Fackre, "In Quest of the Comprehensive: The Systematics Revival," Religious Studies Review 20:1 (1994): 7-12. 11 Confessing the One Faith: An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic Faith as it is Confessed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381), Faith and Order Paper No. 153 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1991). 12 Roger Shinn, Confessing Our Faith: An Interpretation of the Statement ofFaith of the United Church of Christ (New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1990), 1-32. 13 So explored in Fackre, "Narrative Theology: An Overview," Interpretation 37:4 (1983): 340-52. 14 Book of Worship: United Church of Christ (New York: Office of Church Leadership, UCC, 1986) ,512. This is the original text. Two later versions of the Statement render it in more inclusive language. Citations are drawn from one or another. 15 See the issue of New Conversations 12:3 (1990), "God's Unbroken Covenant with the Jews," which gives both the 1987 General Synod resolution avowing antisupersessionism, and papers on a 1990 "Message" of a theological panel on JewishChristian relations that interpreted it. 16 In a two-year long inquiry done by a theological panel of the United Church of Christ on the issue of anti-supersessionism, Jewish philosopher, Michael Wyschogrod, a consultant to the panel, and the writer a member of the panel, were in the closest agreement on this point, with one exception. Wyschogrod asserted that Fackre would probably be smiled upon by his Maker not because of the saving Work ofJesus Christ but, (if he were faithful to it) by pursuing the light given by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to those outside the special covenant but graced by Noah's rainbow. Fackre felt the same about the smile of God on Wyschogrod, except for the learning of Who's Who as the source of it. 17 Reinhold Niebuhr, "Humor and Faith," in Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times: Sermons for Today and Tomorrow (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), 111-31.

24

Theology's Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy

James H. Cone

Silence in theface of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer1 We will have to repent... not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. - Martin Luther King, Jr.2

I

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr., were two of the most outspoken Christian theologians against injustice and suffering in the twentieth century. Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran, was hanged in a Nazi prison at Flossenburg in Bavaria, 9 April 1945. King, an African-American Baptist, was assassinated while fighting for garbage workers in Memphis, Tennessee, 4 April 1968. Both were 39 years old at the time of their deaths. What distinguished Bonhoeffer and King from most theologians was their refusal to

340

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

keep silent about the great moral issues of their time and situation and their ability to use these injustices in their societies to challenge religious meaning. They opposed Nazi and American racism fiercely - knowing that it would probably lead to their death. "When Christ calls a man," Bonhoeffer said, "he bids him come and die." 3 King was just as prophetic and courageous: "If physical death is the price I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from the permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more redemptive." 4 The lives and writings of Bonhoeffer and King tell us far more about what it means to be a Christian and a theologian than all the great tomes in the history of theology. Their martyrdom placed Christian identity at the foot of the cross ofJesus and in the midst of oppressed people fighting for justice and freedom. We need more theologians like Bonhoeffer and King - more scholars in religion with the courage to speak out against wrong, especially the evil of white supremacy. No one can deny that racism is a major killer in the modern world. Yet there has been considerable resistance to seeing it as a profound problem for the religion of Christianity. During the course of five centuries, Europeans and white North Americans systematically confiscated lands and committed genocide against untold numbers of indigenous people around the world. When whites "discovered" something they wanted, whether land or labor, they took it with very little thought of the consequences for the lives of the people already there. "Can any nation . . . discover what belonged to someone else?" asked the seventeenth century Dutch Jurist Hugo Grotius (15831645).5 Few Europeans asked such questions but instead exploited lands and peoples unhindered by philosophy, religion or ethics. In fact, these disciplines assisted them in justifying their violence as they viewed themselves as God's chosen people to subdue the indigenous people and their land. Author Eduardo Galeano claims that 150 years of Spanish and Portuguese colonization in Central and South America reduced the indigenous population from 90 million to 3.3 million.6 During the twenty-three year reign of terror of King Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo (1885-1908), scholarly estimates suggest that approximately ten million Congolese met unnatural deaths - "fully half of the territory's population." 7 Then, in one brief moment, the Nazis committed an unspeakable racist crime: the industrialized mass murder of six million Jews in Europe. Physical death is only one aspect of racism that raises serious theological questions. Spiritual death is another, and it is just as

THEOLOGY'S GREAT SIN

341

destructive, if n o t m o r e so, for it destroys the soul of b o t h the racists a n d their victims. Racism is h a t r e d g o n e amok. It is violence against one's spiritual self. T h r o u g h cultural a n d religious imperialism, E u r o p e a n s imposed their racist value-system o n people of color a n d thereby forced t h e m to think that the only way to be h u m a n a n d civilized was to be white a n d Christian. It n o t only makes the oppressed want to be something o t h e r t h a n they are b u t also to b e c o m e like their oppressors. Malcolm X called it self-hate - the worst mental sickness imaginable. T h e poison of white supremacy is so widespread a n d deeply internalized by its victims that many are unaware of their illness a n d others who are often d o n o t have the cultural a n d intellectual resources to heal their w o u n d e d spirits. In my travels a r o u n d the world, I am amazed at how m u c h people of color want to be white. They want to look like whites, talk like whites, a n d even pray like whites. Many are still worshipping a white God a n d a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus - still singing, "Wash m e a n d I will be whiter than snow." As J a m e s Baldwin p u t it: "It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that o n e c a n n o t deny the humanity of a n o t h e r without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, o n e sees oneself." 8 We are all b o u n d together, inseparably linked to a c o m m o n humanity. What we d o to o n e another, we d o to ourselves. T h a t was why Martin King was committed absolutely to nonviolence. Anything less, h e believed, was self-inflicted violence against one's soul. " T h r o u g h violence you may m u r d e r the hater, b u t you d o n o t m u r d e r hate. In fact, violence increases hate.... It [begets] what it seeks to destroy." 9 King struggled mightily to r e d e e m the soul of America so that people of all colors a n d religious orientations could create the beloved community. Racism is particularly alive a n d well in America. It is America's original sin a n d as it is institutionalized at all levels of society, it is its most persistent a n d intractable evil. T h o u g h racism inflicts massive suffering, few American theologians have even b o t h e r e d to address white supremacy as a moral evil a n d as a radical contradiction of o u r humanity a n d religious identities. White theologians a n d philosophers write n u m e r o u s articles a n d books o n theodicy, asking why God permits massive suffering, b u t they hardly ever m e n t i o n the h o r r e n d o u s crimes whites have committed against people of color in the m o d e r n world. Why d o white theologians ignore racism? This is a h a u n t i n g question - especially since a few white scholars in o t h e r disciplines (such as sociology, literature, history, a n d anthropology)

342

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

do engage racism. Why not theologians? Shouldn't they be the first to attack this evil? When I began writing about racism in American theology, the churches and the society more than thirty years ago, I really thought that, after being confronted with the sin of their silence, white theologians would repent and then proceed to incorporate a radical race critique in their theological and religious reflections. Most were sympathetic with the Civil Rights movement and some even participated in the marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Whenever King asked for help, white ministers vacated their pulpits and even a few theologians suspended classes or cut short summer vocations and joined him in the fight for racial justice. Also, the rise of Latin American liberation and feminist theologies and the deepening of the Jewish-Christian dialogue on the Holocaust created a liberating theological atmosphere for a serious and sustained engagement of racism. Some dialogue did occur on race and gender between white feminist and womanist and mujerista theologians. There were also spirited dialogues on race and class among white Latin Americans and people of color in the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). We are all familiar with the many heated exchanges in white churches as blacks created caucuses and called for Black Power and white church people wondered why their black brothers and sisters felt so powerless and angry after the breakdown of segregation in God's house. It took some while for whites to realize that blacks and other people of color did not want to be integrated out of power with a few white-selected colored tokens as window dressing. Even Martin King called for a period of "temporary segregation in order to get to the integrated society."10 In contrast to these small but important efforts in the churches and other contexts, white North American and European male theologians hardly ever mentioned the sin of racism in their public lectures and writings during the 1960's and 70's. They wrote mostly about the "death of God" controversy and the secular spirit that created it. It was as if they were intellectually blind and could not see that white supremacy was America's central theological problem. They engaged Latin Americans on class contradictions, talked to feminists about gender issues, and dialogued with Jews about Christianity and Anti-Semitism. However, when the time came to talk about theology and racism, they initially could not believe that we had the audacity to engage them in a serious intellectual discussion about theology and its task. What could blacks possibly know about theology? When we

343

THEOLOGY'S GREAT SIN

refused to be intimidated by their intellectual arrogance, they tried to convince us that race was of secondary importance to class and would be automatically eliminated when justice is achieved in the political economy. When we rejected that view as faulty and racist, they walked away as if we were too emotional and not intelligent enough to understand their sophisticated, theoretical analysis. Of course, not all white theologians were silent about white supremacy. The late Fred Herzog was a prominent exception, and it was not easy for him to critique racism in the white theological establishment. He spoke to me many times about the pain of his isolation and the rejection by his white male colleagues. When Herzog switched his theological focus from race to class, concentrating on Latin American liberation theology, as others like Robert McAfee Brown and Harvey Cox did, his white colleagues became much more open to engaging his discourse about liberation theology. As long as liberation-talk ignores racial oppression, white religion scholars are much more inclined to take it seriously. I believe that there are white religion scholars today who are aware that all is not well on the racial front. They know that white supremacy is a horrendous evil that must be destroyed before humanity can create a world free of white arrogance. We may debate strategies for fighting white supremacy but there can be no debate about whether the antiracist struggle is a worthy and necessary calling of a religious institution and its theology. Before I get into strategies, it is important to make a distinction between personal prejudices and structural racism. Dealing with people's personal prejudices should not be the major concern. It is emotionally too exhausting and achieves very little in dismantling racism. I am not very concerned what people think about me as long as their personal prejudices are not institutionalized. The issue is always structural. While I may not get people to like me, it is important that the law prevent them from harming me on the basis of their prejudices. II Before we can get whites to confront racism, we need to know why they avoid it. Why don't white religion scholars write and speak about racism? This is a complex and difficult question because the reasons vary among individuals and groups in different parts of the

344

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

country. There are probably as many reasons as there are people. I will advance my perspective on this issue and invite whites and people of color to participate with me in an exploration of white silence on racism. We all have some insight into this problem. My reflections focus mainly on white theologians, ministers, and the churches. Hopefully what we say will have meaning for people in other institutions as well. 1) Most importantly, whites do not talk about racism because they do not have to talk about it. They have most of the power in the world - economic, political, social, cultural, intellectual, and religious. There is little that blacks and other people of color can do to change the power relations in the churches, seminaries, and society. Powerful people do not talk, except on their own terms and almost never at the behest of others. All the powerless can do is to disrupt - make life uncomfortable for the ruling elites. That was why Martin King called the urban riots and Black Power the "language of the unheard." The quality of white life is hardly ever affected by what blacks think or do. The reverse is not the case. Everything whites think and do impact profoundly the lives of blacks on a daily basis. We can never escape white power and its cruelty. That is why blacks are usually open to talking to whites in the hope of relieving their pain but the latter seldom offer a like response, because they perceive little or nothing to gain. Power corrupts, and as Lord Acton said, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." When this idea is applied to the relations between whites as a group and people of color, it is possible to get a glimpse of how deep white supremacy is embedded in the American way of life. "The sinfulness of man," wrote Reinhold Niebuhr, "makes it inevitable that a dominant class, group, and sex [and race should be added here] should seek to define a relationship, which guarantees its dominance, as permanently normative."11 How can we destroy white supremacy and create a more just society when whites as a group hold most of the power? The rise of Black Power in white churches and other institutions was profoundly alienating, gut wrenching, and divisive in every segment of our communities. How do whites avoid arbitrary group power or condescending patronage? How do blacks avoid racial essentialism, talking and acting as if biology alone defines truth? Again I quote Niebuhr, but this time on the blindness of the oppressed: "Every victim of injustice makes the mistake of supposing that the sin from which he suffers is a peculiar vice of his oppressor."12

THEOLOGY'S GREAT SIN

345

T h a t the oppressed are sinners too is a very i m p o r t a n t p o i n t to make b u t often h a r d to hear, especially when it is m a d e by the oppressor. T h e ever-present violence in p o o r communities is at least partly d u e to the sins of the oppressed. We must never assume that God is o n the side of the oppressed because they are sinless b u t r a t h e r because of God's solidarity with weakness a n d h u r t - the inability of p o o r people to defend themselves against violent oppressors. W h e n black theology first a p p e a r e d the few white theologians who addressed it often q u o t e d N i e b u h r to us a b o u t the sins of the oppressed. Because I questioned their motives, I q u o t e d N i e b u h r back at them. Socio-economic conditions actually determine to a large degree that some men are tempted to pride and injustice, while others are encouraged to humility. The biblical analysis agrees to the known facts of history. Capitalists are not greater sinners than poor laborers by any natural depravity. But it is a fact that those who hold great economic and political power are more guilty of pride against God and of injustice against the weak than those who lack power and prestige.... White men sin against Negroes in Africa and America more than Negroes sin against white

2) White theologians avoid racial dialogue because talk a b o u t white supremacy arouses d e e p feelings of guilt. Guilt is a heavy b u r d e n to bear. Most Americans have at least a general idea of the terrible history of white supremacy a n d that alone can create a p r o f o u n d guilt when blacks a n d others tell their stories of suffering a n d pain. Whites know that they have r e a p e d the material harvest of white d o m i n a t i o n in the m o d e r n world. T h e material wealth of E u r o p e a n d N o r t h America was acquired a n d e n h a n c e d t h r o u g h the systematic exploitation of lands a n d peoples in Africa, Asia, a n d N o r t h a n d South America. A critical exploration of the theological m e a n i n g of slavery, colonialism, segregation, lynching, a n d genocide can create a terrible guilt. As Reinhold N i e b u h r said: "If...the white m a n were to expiate his sins committed against the darker races, few white m e n would have the right to live." 14 Whites d o n o t like to think of themselves as evil people or that their place in the world is d u e to the colonization of Indians, the enslavement of blacks, a n d the exploitation of people of color h e r e a n d a r o u n d the world. Whites like to think of themselves as h a r d

346

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

working, honorable, decent and fair-minded people. They resent being labeled thieves, murders, slaveholders, and racists. There are whites who say that they do not owe blacks anything because they did not enslave anybody, did not segregate or lynch anybody, and are not white supremacists. They claim to be colorblind and thus treat everybody alike. At an individual level, there is some common sense truth about that observation. But if you benefit from the past and present injustices committed against blacks, you are partly and indirectly accountable as an American citizen and as a member of the institutions that perpetuate racism. We cannot just embrace what is good about America and ignore the bad. We must accept the responsibility to do everything we can to correct America's past and present wrongs. 3) Another reason why whites avoid race topics with African Americans is because they do not want to engage black rage. Whites do not mind talking as long as blacks don't get too emotional, too carried away with their stories of hurt. I must admit that it is hard to talk about the legacies of white supremacy and not speak with passion and anger about the long history of black suffering. It is not a pleasant thing to talk about, especially for people of color who have experienced white cruelty. I would not recommend race as a topic of conversation during a relaxed social evening of blacks and whites. Things could get a little heated and spoil a fun evening. Whites who talk with me about white supremacy need to be informed and sensitive to the common humanity we all share. All I ask of whites is to put themselves in black people's place in this society and the world, and then ask themselves what they would say or do if they were in black people's place. Would you be angry about 246 years of slavery and 100 years of lynching and segregation? What would you say about the incarceration of one million of your people in prisons - one-half of the penal population - while your people represents only 12 percent of the U.S. census? Would you get angry if your racial group used 13 percent of the drugs but did 74 percent of the prison time for simple possession?15 Would you caution the oppressed in your community to speak about their pain with calm and patience? What would you say about your sons who are shot dead by the police because their color alone makes them prime criminal suspects? What would you say about ministers and theologians who preach and teach about justice and love but ignore the sociopolitical oppression of your people? Black anger upsets only whites who choose to ignore catastrophic black suffering.

THEOLOGY'S GREAT SIN

347

But even whites who acknowledge black suffering often insist that we talk a b o u t o u r pain with appropriate civility a n d restrained emotions. T h a t was why they preferred Martin King to Malcolm X. Malcolm spoke with too m u c h rage for their social taste. H e m a d e whites feel uncomfortable because h e confronted t h e m with their terrible crimes against black humanity. Addressing the question a b o u t w h e t h e r h e spoke with too m u c h emotion, Malcolm responded: When a man is hanging on a tree and he cries out, should he cry out unemotionally? When a man is sitting on a hot stove and he tells you how it feels to be there, is he supposed to speak without emotions? This is what you tell black people in this country when they begin to cry out against the injustices they're suffering. As long as they describe these injustices in a way that makes you believe you have another 100 years to rectify the situation, then you don't call that emotion. But when a man is on a hot stove, he says, "I'm coming up. I'm getting up. Violently or nonviolently doesn't even enter the picture - I'm coming up you understand." 16 Malcolm called his style telling the "naked truth" a b o u t the white m a n . H e knew whites did n o t like to h e a r blunt truth. "I love to talk a b o u t them," h e proclaimed to a H a r l e m rally. "Talk a b o u t t h e m like dogs. A n d they should be able to take it. Now they know how we feel. Why, when I was a little boy they called m e nigger so m u c h I t h o u g h t that was my name." 1 7 Malcolm believed that whites n e e d e d to know how blacks really felt a n d h e did n o t think that civil rights leaders like King were forthcoming in this regard. They were too compromising. They sugarcoated the truth so whites would n o t feel so bad about what they did to us. W h e n Malcolm felt that black leaders were letting whites off the hook, h e t u r n e d his a n g e r on t h e m a n d accused t h e m of making it easy for whites because they cared m o r e about white emotional comfort than the suffering of the black poor. Because the spirit a n d language of black theology was closer to Malcolm than Martin, white theologians were reluctant to engage us. They got nervous a n d m a d e their way for the exit every time a militant black theologian came n e a r them. I must admit I was pretty h a r d o n t h e m a n d that partly accounts for their silence. But I was n o t going to p a m p e r privileged whites. How could o u r relationship be comfortable a n d easy-going, lovey-dovey when black people were dying in the streets?

348

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Blacks invoking the race card also make whites uncomfortable. I must admit that blacks sometimes play the race card in inappropriate times a n d places. It is a quick conversation stopper. But whites should r e m e m b e r that blacks have the race card to play because America dealt it to them. It is n o t a card that we wanted. W h e n blacks play the race card, it is often a desperate attempt to get whites to listen to t h e m a n d to take their suffering seriously. Racism is a highly charged subject for blacks - similar to the strong reactions anti-Semitism generates a m o n g Jews. White Americans have some empathy for Jewish suffering. T h a t is why the U.S. supports Israel a n d built a h u g e Holocaust M u s e u m in Washington, D.C. Whites d o n o t have a similar empathy for black suffering, even t h o u g h o u r suffering is m u c h closer h o m e . T h a t is why there is n o slavery m u s e u m in Washington a n d n o reparations forthcoming for blacks. Such thoughts are a n a t h e m a to most white Americans. W h e n America is forced to consider black suffering, whites advance all kinds of technical a n d legal reasons to dismiss d o i n g anything a b o u t the crimes committed against black people. Consider the insightful c o m m e n t of Pamela A. Hairston of Washington, D . C , r e s p o n d i n g in a letter to the Christian Century o n the issue of reparations for African Americans: With the Homestead Act of 1862, Congress gave away more than 270 million acres of land to more than 2 million white Americans - 1 6 0 acres per person or family, free. This was enacted on January 1, 1863, the same day President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Another such act, the Southern Homestead Act, granted ex-slaves or freed men 40 acres, and some ex-slaves did receive a few acres, which were later given back to the Confederates. The ex-slaves were evicted. America preferred to keep the ex-slaves as sharecroppers. After 200-plus years of inhumane slavery and hard free labor they gave my ancestors nothing but 100-plus more years of hate, black codes, Jim Crow laws, the Klan, lynchings, poverty, oppression, segregation, and fear. Wouldn't black America - no, America as a whole - be a better nation if they had given the 40 acres as promised? Right now, I'd take an acre and a chicken.18 With this terrible history, why is it so difficult to get white people to acknowledge what America owes to black people?

THEOLOGY'S GREAT SIN

349

We all benefit and suffer from what happened in the past and we owe it to ourselves to learn from the good and to correct the bad. We cannot survive as a nation with huge economic divisions between rich and poor, deep social alienation between whites and people of color. We are one people. What happens to one happens to all. So, even if we are not directly responsible for past injustices, we are responsible for the present exploitation. It is our responsibility to create a new future for all. We need to ask, what kind of society do we want? Do we want a society that puts more blacks in prisons than in colleges? We are all responsible for this world, and as human beings, we will have to give an account of what we said and didn't say, what we did and didn't do about justice for all. Whites and blacks must learn to work together. Our future depends on it. But that can never happen creatively until whites truly believe that their humanity is at stake in the struggle for racial justice. Speaking on behalf of Jews, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, then President of American Jewish Congress, expressed this point eloquently at the 1963 March on Washington: "It is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us, it is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experiences." 19 There are few whites who really know how to express that sort of solidarity. 4) Whites do not say much about racial justice because they are not prepared for a radical redistribution of wealth and power. No group gives up power freely. Power must be taken against the will of those who have it. Fighting white supremacy means dismantling white privilege in the society, the churches and in theology. Progressive whites do not mind talking as long as it doesn't cost much, as long as the structures of power remain in tact. Although white Christians and other religious communities acknowledge their sinful condition and that their inordinate power as a group makes them more prone toward injustice in relation to other minority groups, they find it nearly impossible to do anything to relinquish their advantage. Individuals are often self-critical but groups are inevitably selfish and proud. No theologian has been more insightful on this point than Reinhold Niebuhr: "The group is more arrogant, hypocritical, self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual.... If we did for ourselves what we do for our country, what rascals we would be."20

350

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

III When and how should whites break their silence? There are many whites who want to affect change but do not know when and how to do it. There are a few white theologians who want to break silence and do something about bringing more justice and love in America and the world. I urge white theologians, ministers, and other morally concerned persons to break their silence immediately and continuously. It is immoral to see evil and not fight it. As Rabbi Prinz put it: "Bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and most tragic problem is silence." Theologians and ministers, churches, synagogues and associations must not remain onlookers - that is, "silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality, and in the face of mass murder." 21 We must speak out loud and clear against the evil of racism, not for the sake of the black poor but for ourselves, for our churches and theologies, for America and the world and most of all for humanity. Talking about how to destroy white supremacy is a daily task and not just for consultations and conferences. If we only talk about white supremacy at special occasions set aside for that, the problem will never be solved. Blacks do not have the luxury of just dealing with racism in church meetings. If that were true, it would not be so bad. No day passes in which blacks don't have to deal with white supremacy. It is found everywhere - in the churches, seminaries, publishing houses, in government, and all around the world. There is no escape. If whites get tired of talking about race, just imagine how people of color feel. The development of a hard-hitting antiracist theology by white religion scholars is long overdue. What would an antiracist theology look like? It would be first a theology that comes out of an antiracist political struggle. Talk is cheap if there is no action to back it up. We must do something concrete about dismantling white supremacy. I know this task is not easy but a very difficult endeavor. Yet, do not be discouraged. Despair only supports the enemy. Working together with each other and with the Great Spirit of the universe, we can accomplish more than we ever dreamed. I want to commend people who are fighting structural racism. Keep working at it, "don't get weary," as the black spiritual says, "there is a great camp meeting in the Promised Land." That song is not primarily about the geography of heaven but rather a message of hope in dire circumstances. Blacks,

THEOLOGY'S GREAT SIN

351

with their backs against the wall of slavery, were saying that evil will not have the last word about their humanity. We have a future not made with white hands. Begin the antiracist struggle where you are. If you are in the churches, get together with other committed persons and analyze ecclesiastical structures and disclose how they reinforce racism. If you are in a seminary, university or college, start there and connect your struggle with others. If you are in a publishing house, start talking with those who are interested in making it more inclusive of people of color. While it is useful to bring in outside resource persons to assist you, there is no substitution for hard work. Work at a pace as if you were going to do it for the rest of your life. There is joy injustice work because it enhances your humanity. Justice work in any situation is the most satisfying activity one can do. I just love it and would not take anything for the opportunity to be involved in it. If you do not love racial justice work, then do not do it. We need and want people who are human beings first - which means taking the same risks for the stranger that they take for their own kind. One of the most important things whites can do in fighting white supremacy is to support black empowerment in the society, church and theology. Black empowerment is blacks thinking, speaking, and doing for themselves. The black church and black theology are black empowerment in religion. To create an antiracist theology, white theologians must engage the histories, cultures, and theologies of people of color. It is not enough to condemn racism. The voices of people of color must be found in your theology. You do not have to agree with their perspectives but you do have to understand them and incorporate their meanings in your theological discourse. This is what whites almost never do. There are almost no references to black scholars or other people of color in any of the writings of major white male theologians. Even when white theologians talk about race, as Reinhold Niebuhr did occasionally throughout his career, there are no citations from black intellectuals who informed his thinking. How can anybody write about race in an informed way and not engage the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Howard Thurman? In America, we have a lot of racist theologies. Let us hope that white theologians, ministers, and other concerned human beings will end their silence about the evil consequences of racism so they can join people of color in their fight against white supremacy and

352

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

connect the struggles in the U.S. with the fight for justice around the world. "What we all want," proclaimed W. E. B. Du Bois, "is a decent world, where a [person] does not have to have a white skin to be recognized as a [human being]." 22

NOTES 1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, cited in Explorations 12:1 (1998): 3. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986), 296. 3 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Christian Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 79. 4 Cited in James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm &f America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991), 315. 5 Cited in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 17. 6 Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (London: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 50. 7 See Adam Hochschild, "Hearts of Darkness: Adventures of the Slave Trade," San Francisco Examiner Magazine, 16 August 1998,13. This essay is an excerpt from his excellent book, King Leopold's Ghosts: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). Louis Turner, Multinational Companies and the Third World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), 27, estimates that five to eight million were killed in the Congo. 8 James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Dell, 1967), 66. 9 Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 62. 10 Martin Luther King, Jr., "Conversation With Martin Luther King," Conservative Judaism 12:3 (Spring 1968): 8. 11 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, Vol. I (New York: Charles Scribners, 1941), 282. 12 Ibid., 226. 13 Ibid., 225-26. 14 Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Assurance of Grace," in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses, ed. Robert M. Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 65. 15 See World: The Journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association, 14:2 ( M a r c h / A p r i l 2000): 61. 16 Cited in Peter Goldman, "Malcolm X: Witness for the Prosecution," in John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: 2

THEOLOGY'S GREAT SIN

353

University of Illinois Press, 1982), 305-30, quote from 315. 17 Malcolm X, "Unity Rally Speech," Harlem, NY, 10 August 1963; from audiotape in author's possession. 18 See "Letters: Acts of Reparation," Christian Century (6 December 2000): 1283. 19 Rabbi Joachim Prinz, cited in New York Times, 29 August 1963, 21. 20 Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 208 and 209. 21 Prinz, cited in New York Times, 29 August 1963, 21. 22 Cited in David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000), 543.

PART FOUR

Neville's Response

24

Thanks and Conversation: Responding to My Theological Colleagues

Robert Cummings Neville

The generosity of the editors and authors of this book overwhelms me. The very idea on the editors' part to put together a Festschrift shows a great generosity of spirit. I humbly thank Amos Yong and Peter Heltzel. I thank each of the authors as well for their generous contribution of essays. Those who take me to task and teach me something are most prized. You all have my deep gratitude. Rather than respond to each of the essays seriatim, the editors have suggested that I respond to themes that cut across several essays. Wesley J. Wildman's essay not only is the first in the book but also is the most comprehensive, along with Yong and Heltzel's, in its treatment of the many sides of my thinking. It also raises the most serious criticism. So I shall begin with Wildman's essay and discuss other essays according to the themes he introduces. One of the many astonishing virtues of Wildman's essay here is that it has rendered what is essentially a long private conversation between us into public discourse. I hope to be able to respond in an equally public way. Symbolic Engagement Wildman begins by pointing up my theological focus on "symbolic

358

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

engagement." This language is relatively new for me, beginning with The Truth of Broken Symbols (1996) and coming forward to the subtitle of Symbols of Jesus (2001). The idea, however, comes straight from the pragmatic theory of interpretation, which has influenced me from the beginning. "Engagement" is my version of Dewey's "transaction" and "interaction." None of those terms, Dewey's or mine, is quite right to indicate the intended paradigm shift away from the more common notion of knowledge as representational. Warren Frisina's very kind chapter contains a beautiful exposition of my theory of interpretation that indicates its character as nonrepresentational. 1 The chapter elegantly expresses the pragmatic conception of interaction with reality on which I base my theory of truth, and his four points about pragmatic semiotics are right on target: interpretation is active, value-driven, perspectival, and theoretical in form. His discussion of the importance of vagueness is extremely helpful. Frisina's chapter nicely complements Wildman's careful discussion of how interpretive knowledge needs to be both objective and subjective in relevant senses and how it goes awry when one side or the other is weakened. They both clearly state the ways in which knowing is hypothetical and fallible, but not for that reason cautious or tentative: we live by our knowledge. The stress Frisina and Wildman place on value in my thinking is welcome. Wildman rightly describes it as a debt to Plato. I would not be as quick as Wildman to say that, for Platonists, particular forms "engage" the Good. Rather, as I develop the point, particulars have the form they do because that form allows them to embody the value they do. When interpreters engage particulars they grasp (in certain respects) the value in the particulars by carrying it over into their interpretive lives, perhaps with radically different forms. The causal language I use to characterize truth as the carryover of value from the object to the interpreter in the respect in which the interpretive signs stand for the object does well to make Frisina's point about non-representational knowing. Wildman's summary of the carryover theory is splendid. Yet I am happy indeed for Steve Odin's careful and insightful analysis of my theory of imaginative synthesis that develops the exact logic of value in form. My discussion in Reconstruction of Thinking is so technical that few have been able to get its point, and I'm grateful to Odin for expressing it so eloquently.2 The careful analyses of imagination and interpretation in that book and Recovery of the Measure go a fair way toward rendering "engagement" a detailed

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

359

account, so that it is not merely an axiom as Wildman suggests. Nevertheless I have not been able to move from the detailed analyses to the metaphoric language of engagement with much continuity, and so without digging into the technical details the language of engagement functions as an axiom from which much else flows. Odin's analysis is particularly important for understanding my notion of finite/infinite contrasts that define religion, perhaps even the divine nature, in my view. For many years I have tried to call attention to two forms of reference Charles Peirce distinguished in his theory of interpretation, the iconic and the indexical (he also distinguished these from what he called "symbolic" or conventional reference that is limited to extension within a language). Iconic reference says that the reality referred to is like what the signs in the referring interpretation say. Wittgenstein's picture theory is an extreme defense of iconic reference, although all description, meant literally, is iconic. Indexical reference, in respect of which I follow Peirce, is an actual causal operation whereby the sign brings about a reorientation in the interpreter so that, in my language, the value in the object is carried across into the interpreter in the respect in which the signs stand for the object. With indexical reference the signs can be fantastic indeed, without the interpreter intending them to be literal icons of their objects, so long as they provide the causal connection for true engagement. 3 Most deep religious symbols are indexical as well as perhaps iconic, and they have to be lived with for individuals and communities to be transformed so that they actually function to carry across something true. Just about every major religion has conceptions of heaven, for instance, as a place different from our place that individuals can go to in another time. God of course is not in a "place" for most of these religions, and an infinite extension of afterlife will never get an individual to the ultimate non-place of God. But interpreting ultimate matters with conceptions of immortality might very well enable people to pick up on what is important to "get to God." Livia Kohn's brilliant and superbly humorous chapter on immortality shows what happens when the indexical element in reference is hidden in favor of the iconic. Immortality in the literal Daoist symbology simply collapses when pressed hard as iconic reference. As she says, the cosmos would run out of space if people didn't really die sometime. It would be interesting to see her comments on James Miller's representation of immortality in the Daoist cosmic economy, and also to see how

360

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

he would meet her own critical arguments. I wager her critique could be extended to conceptions of immortality in other religious traditions. Popular religion, for most people, is a practice within which "first naivete" obtains, as Paul Ricoeur would say. Arguments such as Kohn's destroy that first naivete, and this can happen with very many of the classical religious symbols. The interesting question is whether, once one understands that certain symbols do not refer literally, a "second naivete" can be obtained so that individuals can wholeheartedly use those symbols for engaging reality. The answer to that question depends in part on whether one can determine with some thoroughness just how the causal indexicality of the symbols might work. I have argued that immortality, properly understood in indexical reference, is a good sign for the eternal relation between God and people. Kohn does not make such a move, and Wildman suggests that popular religion would see that move as merely a denial of literal immortality in which it has a deep investment. Francis Clooney, S.J., by contrast, is delighted with the indexical function of religious symbols, and I have learned much from him for many years along these lines. His fascinating chapter here about Mary, Mother ofJesus, is a brilliant extension of my rather clunky Western symbols of Jesus into the context of Indian Christians for whom mothers of God are understood in terms of their native cultures. I am abashed at my own limitations in regard to his chapter, however, because as Protestant I have little resonance with Mary as a symbol even in a Western Christian context. What gains Protestantism made in plain speaking about religious matters are ruefully balanced by losses in symbolic richness. My emphasis on the indexical quality of religious symbols perhaps is a Protestant attempt to develop a method to recover Catholic symbolic culture.

Creation I am grateful to Wildman for his careful and perceptive treatment of my notion of creation ex nihilo. His emphasis on how extreme and austere it is delights me, because at last someone recognizes that, though my thoughts are but developments of classical elements of the tradition, they take that tradition in new directions. He is very right to emphasize my claim that the world is particular and singular. I want to comment on two points he makes. First, he notes that my original argument for the idea of creation

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

361

ex nihilo came in God the Creator with a discussion of the problem of the one and many; the form of my argument, he rightly says, was that the creation ex nihilo theory solves the problem of the one and many better than the metaphysical alternatives, and he agrees that my theory solves the one and many problem most neatly. Wildman claims, however, that using the call for a solution to the problem of the one and many as the principal criterion to select among metaphysical options is itself only an option. One could very well insist, as he does, that the principal criterion should be to be able to defend the goodness of the divine nature; he also points out that disciplined faithfulness to human experience could be the principal criterion. In the former case, Whitehead's theology would be superior to mine, and in the latter case Mahayana Buddhism. He graciously calls me a conceptual artist in making a choice for any principal criterion. In our discussions, and in his teaching of our common students, he says that this is a matter of taste on my part, and that his choice for the goodness of an antecedent divine nature reflects his taste. The notion of taste and artistry is tricky here, however. Of course, any thinker begins with a personal trajectory of background, readings, and instincts. Yet if there is something right about the symbolic interpretive engagement model that we share, in the course of time tastes should be accommodated to the value of the tasted and the arbitrariness in artistic beginning points should be stabilized and corrected through the process of critical testing from many angles. In the case of the status of the problem of the one and many, I do not believe that to dismiss it as a principal criterion of metaphysics is an option. If a metaphysical theory does not have a satisfactory solution to the problem of the one and many, its conception of intelligibility is radically incoherent or arbitrary. The problem of the one and many lies at the heart of the very conception of intelligibility, which requires diversity in unity. Although several principal criteria for metaphysics might exist, it is not an option to do without a solution to the one and many problem. A case in point is the suggestion of my good friend and model for my life as a Christian, John B. Cobb, Jr. Cobb recommends a theology that has a plurality of ultimate foci: an indeterminate ground (which is the way he characterizes my view), a particular God of the biblical sort, and the concrete totality of this world, all of which have exemplification in many of the world's religions. Cobb's suggestion raises the question of the one and many in a radical form.

362

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

What is the ground for the togetherness of more than one ultimate? In some of his examples, for instance the distinction of Nirguna Brahman from Saguna Brahman, or Eckhart's Godhead versus God, one of the ultimates is really ultimate and grounds the other derivative ultimate. But in other examples, for instance Whitehead's substantial activity (indeterminate) and the principle of limitation, both ultimates are on the same level and are equally presupposed by the one-many mix of the world. In this latter case, the problem of the one and many just moves back a notch to question how there can be two equal ultimates working together. If my dialectical argument is right, it could only be by them both being created together ex nihilo, which in the important sense would be more ultimate than both. The other point of Wildman's on which I want to comment concerning creation ex nihilo is his contrast between the asymmetry in my view and the symmetry in his. For him, the fundamental condition of the universe is a "symmetric universal sameness or nothingness," which for him is the divine nature; he says that this symmetry is broken, fractured, disrupted in the creation. He likens creation to divine play and says that a "more mystically, mythologically, and sacramentally charged view of the God-world relation results from this view of symmetry breaking than Neville can manage with his view of a primordial asymmetry at the root of creation." The notions of symmetry and asymmetry in this context are so abstract that it is difficult to get a hand on them and easy to put our differences down to different tastes. Nevertheless, I would like to say several things in defense of the asymmetrical view. First, it better solves the problem of the one and many because Wildman's view would have to find a ground for the contrast between the symmetrical God and asymmetrical world. Second, as to mysticisms, his view is an example of the return-toorigins theology so beautifully analyzed by Thomas J. J. Altizer in his chapter, and can tie in easily to the Neo-Platonic traditions of mystical spirituality; I will discuss Altizer's point in the next section. But why is Wildman's "more mystical" than the mysticism of my asymmetrical view that has at least four kinds? First, the mysticism of divine presence in each created thing, as in Hopkins' Scotistic haecceities; Second, the mysticism of the fiery creative act, as in Boehme and Berdyaev; Third, the mysticism of the Abyss of nonbeing that is made the source of creation by the creative act (true, nonbeing is not an antecedent substantial symmetry, rather a singular result of the creative act that creates the Abyss as the empty source); Fourth,

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

363

the mysticism of the eternal divine life in which all modes of time are embraced. That's not so bad if you are counting mystical points, as both Wildman and I do. The third point in response to Wildman's symmetry theory is that his has one edge on mythology and lacks another. Its strength is in the kind of mythology beloved of Mircea Eliade, that celebration of holy times and places from which we've fallen. Its weakness is that it has to downplay all the serious agency language in mythology that does much better with an ontology that treats asymmetrical creative agency as primary. Fourth, as to sacramentality, his symmetrical view has to pinch its cheeks very hard to make anything in the asymmetrical world sacramental because it is so broken away from the divine symmetry. At best it can say that the world is made of divine stuff, and thereby sacramental, but the world is given its integrity only by the negations created to give it particular character. My asymmetrical view says that the singular world is precisely the terminus of the divine creative act, inseparable from God, and fully expressive of the singularity of the creative act: God is literally in each created thing, and that's a powerful sacrament. Fifth and finally, both of our views acknowledge the singularity or asymmetry of the world and admit that this created world is thereby arbitrary and not to be explained by anything except the freedom in its creation. With respect to the world, that is a bottom line consideration. I do not see how anything is added by postulating a symmetrical God behind the creation of the world; how does it help to call that creation "symmetry-breaking?" Why not simply "asymmetrical making?" Furthermore, if the ground is symmetrical, it would not only be unintelligible and unmotivated to break itself in creating, but also just plain unlikely: what could possibly prompt symmetry to break? By what mechanism could it do so? Is there any answer short of a full-blown asymmetrical creative act of the sort I laud? If not, why refer to the symmetry at all? Is it only ontological nostalgia of the sort Altizer analyzes? (The theologies that say God, being symmetrical and loving, creates the world in order to have something to love, have not shown how a God needing an external object is truly symmetrical in Wildman's sense.)

364

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

God The discussion of creation is closely associated with that of the nature of God that Wildman, along with several other authors, identifies as a problem for my view. The complaint about my view is that the character of God that consists in being creator is abstract, and does not include anything interesting that derives from what is created. Am I stuck with the view that there is the world created plus the creator who is only abstract as creator? I think not and want to argue here through an analogy with human makers. 4 The "nature" of a person is constituted by a combination of three things, roughly distinguished. One is how the person is born with and how that has developed relative to any present adventure; in one sense of "nature," this is the only component worthy of the name given the Latin root of the world "nature." Perhaps the core of this component of a person's nature is the DNA. A second is the environment within which the person lives and with which the person interacts; environments of course have their own developments and shift as people move about. Most of the classifications defining a person's nature are environmental, for instance, family position, social location, job, schooling, community roles, and historical situation, as well as the ecological environment. A third component is what the person creates out of the first two in moral and artistic ways. Minimally creative acts might be little more than a reshuffling of given pieces, and yet whatever it is that distinguishes the pieces unshuffled from the subsequent shuffling comes not from the pieces but de novo ivom the person's creativity. More highly creative acts are those where some consciousness of options exists for shuffling the pieces, consciousness of the fact that new realities can be made by choice and action, and where creativity follows through a complicated line of instrumental creative acts. This third component is what the person makes out of the genes and circumstances life deals, and we understand this component often in moral and aesthetic terms. Given that other people can have similar genes and circumstances, what is uniquely interesting about the person is how the person constitutes himself or herself. God the creator, on my view, has only the third component of nature, what the Creator makes. For reasons having to do with the problem of the one and the many, which Wildman generally accepts, I deny that God has a determinate genetic nature, including symmetry genes of the sort Wildman affirms. For reasons having to

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

365

d o with the d e p e n d e n c e of all d e t e r m i n a t e things o n God, I would deny that God has an environment; God does n o t even create the world a n d let it drift off so as to be an e n v i r o n m e n t for God. T h e created world has n o reality except as the i m m a n e n t terminus of the divine creative act, as natura naturata c a n n o t be separated from natura naturans. So the only c o m p o n e n t that the divine n a t u r e has is what it makes, or does, or gives itself. This self-constitution is the most interesting part of a person's nature, even t h o u g h h u m a n creativity is a tiny p r o p o r t i o n of the conditions d e t e r m i n i n g the person's life. God's n a t u r e is wholly interesting because it all comes from the divine creativity. Why is it so h a r d for Wildman a n d others to allow that what the Creator does constitutes a real a n d legitimate sense of divine nature? They have n o p r o b l e m saying that what a person does constitutes a real a n d legitimate sense of his or h e r n a t u r e . T h e best answer I can c o m e u p with is that, for him a n d his compatriots, in some stipulative sense "nature" just has to m e a n the first c o m p o n e n t , the antecedently given genetic n a t u r e , whatever else might tag along. H e n c e h e says that on my view I can say n o t h i n g a b o u t the divine n a t u r e except that, apart from creating, it is n o t h i n g a n d that, in creating, the divine n a t u r e is only the abstract fact of creation as such. I think that, for him, n o interesting d e t e r m i n a t e elements of the act of creation could c o u n t for the divine n a t u r e unless they follow in some sense from some genetic a n t e c e d e n t n a t u r e . This leads him to say: Neville's theory of creation gives him carte blanche license to specify the divine nature however he likes, subject only to consistency with the world as we encounter it. He might say that the primordial creative act determines God's nature to be that of a loving divine person, with intentions and capacities to act, much as we read about in many parts of the Hebrew Bible. He might say that God's nature is like Iblis in the Qur'an, the enemy of human beings. He might make of God a covenanter with a chosen people, an Aristotelian First Cause, a Thomistic Actus Purus, a Platonic Good, a Plotinian One, a Vedantin Nirguna Brahman (God beyond attributes), a Buddhistic emptiness, or a Chinese Tao (way) flowing with Te (power) through all created beings. T h e reason I d o not have this license free a n d simple is that the

366

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

case for all these candidate traits has to be made by interpreting the world, with all the metaphysical tentativeness and comparative suggestibility Wildman's list expresses. We don't have a large sample of the cosmos, but we do have the sample by which we determine orientations toward life, and the various religious traditions have histories of developing rich engaged symbologies. Why doesn't the content of the creative act, interpretively worked through to deal with candidates such as he cites, count as the divine nature in the sense of the third component? We judge people's moral natures by filtering out the genetic and environmental components as anything except conditions for responsible action, and look to see just what the people's responsible contributions are, what they create. Why not do that for the divine nature? This said, let me note three loci for the divine nature. First, the whole of creation is the immanent terminus of the creative act and therefore God's nature includes absolutely everything. In a sense, this is too much to be helpful if we are to be more specific about the divine nature. Nevertheless, every bit of the created order is a part of the divine nature, and hence is a sacramental connection to the whole of that nature. Second, the generic traits of creation, especially of what it means to be a determinate thing, constitute a locus of the divine nature that is universal, that through and in which everything is made; I've analyzed this in terms of harmony, conditional and essential features, and the forms, components, existential location, and value of harmonies, which in turn provide norms for human living (right form, deference to components, engagement of existential location, achievement of value). Third, because the created universe is singular, its history, particularly human history, is also expressive and constitutive of the divine nature. Although the so-called "historical religions" have generalized far too broadly about salvation history for the cosmos from interpretations of a bit of human history, God's nature still is in the history. These are all legitimate senses of defining the divine nature by what God does. Wildman is not the only one to make his complaint, however, and I fear that I have not grasped the power of his objection. I am deeply honored that three contributors have presented essays that are classic statements of their own theological positions on God: Thomas J. J. Altizer, Ray L. Hart, and Joseph A. Bracken, S.J. They are all friends with whom I have debated theology for many years and, because their essays here are epitomes of their views, I wish I had the space to discuss them at length. For the sake of

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

367

(relative) brevity, however, I can only mention some points where we agree and disagree. Of his many writings, Thomas Altizer's chapter here is the most profound and comprehensible exposition and justification of the background for his "Death of God" theology and emphases on kenosis and apocalyptic thinking that have made him such a towering presence in the theological world. The pivot of his essay is the sharp contrast he draws in early Christianity between primal gnosticism and apocalypticism. With a brilliant reading of the tradition, Altizer shows how the many forms of gnosticism represent the quest for the primordial, the source, the origin, from which we have fallen in some way or other and to which we long to return; Neo-Platonism is the forceful sophisticated version of gnostic longing for the primordial. As mentioned earlier, Wildman's theology of primordial symmetry is a special version of this and it orients a mysticism of return. Ray L. Hart's theology also emphasizes a mysticism of return, though with a twist I'll discuss in a moment. The contrast to gnosticism in this sense is apocalypticism, an orientation to the future in which God and the world will be fulfilled. The God of the past must die or empty itself in order that the divine fulfillment in the apocalypse might come about. Moreover, the apocalyptic orientation emphasizes the prophetic critique of current conditions and makes the ethical dimension of Christianity very important without denying its metaphysical base. Were it not for eternity, I would side with Altizer against my colleagues Hart and Wildman. Christianity has a future orientation and ethical emphasis that are far better captured by apocalypticism than by a piety of return to the primordial. Moreover, my emphasis on the divine creative act is clearly a bias toward the end or conclusion of the act with its haecceities; if we were to return to the primordial, I think we would find nothing. But of course I think only an eternal divine creative act makes sense and can explain how the separate times of temporal reality can be together. The togetherness of past, present, and future is not temporal in the sense of being within time. Rather time is their eternal togetherness that comprises the life of God as the fully realized completion of the divine creative act. The eternal life of God is never at a time, although all times are within that eternal life, and the times are in that life in all their configurations as future, present, and past. So the questions of primordial origins and apocalyptic endings are not serious for me. They are very interesting empirical questions for which we look to science to answer. The religiously important times are our own and the span of history

368

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

that gives us meaning. I treat apocalyptic imagery as symbolic of eternal fulfillment, and Altizer resolutely opposes this, insisting on an historical reading of apocalypse. Neo-Platonism, Wildman, and Hart treat primordial imagery as symbolizing an ontological rather than temporal priority, and it is slightly unfair to contrast their positions as past-oriented rather than future-oriented. But in the cases of Neo-Platonism and Wildman, the religious quest signifies a movement from the messy life of asymmetry to identification with an ontologically primordial symmetry. Or if religion is not a journey away from here to symmetry, it is at least a nostalgia for the symmetry that is foundational goodness. For my part, God is eternally in the asymmetrical outcomes of creation, and the religious quest is for the value of our singular parts of that outcome in ultimate perspective; for me, there is no question of getting to God from where we are, only of getting more God into where we are and seeing our place in the divine immensity. John Thatamanil notes that mine is a non-dual theory. Ray Hart's essay is a brilliant expression of the ontological theology he has been working on since his seminal invention of "systematic symbolics" in Unfinished Man and the Imagination? The essay is extraordinarily rich in its detail and also filled with promissory suggestions in many directions. Let me comment, however, only on its most striking feature, namely, the claim that theology is theogony. We understand God, to the extent we can at all, only in terms of God making God. Or as Hart puts it, the utterly primordial and utterly indeterminate Godhead creates the determinate God that creates and otherwise relates to the world in the ways religions depict and enact. In one sense I am totally enthusiastic about the move from Godhead to God because it is so similar to my theology of the creative divine act that results not only in the world but in the divine nature as creator of this world. But I would say that the indeterminateness of the source of the act and the determinateness of the divine nature (and world) as well as the act itself all are contained in the act, in a sense as its eternal results. Hart wants to say that the indeterminateness of the Godhead has an ontological priority and substantiality that engages with nothingness in order to produce the determinate God. I have three questions for Hart. The first is my standard one about the one and many. Are the indeterminate Godhead and determinate God determinately different from one another? If so, they need a more ultimate ground of that determinate difference, according to my standard argument. Is the theogonic act an act of

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

369

the indeterminate Godhead functioning as agent? If so, is there a division within the Godhead between its pure indeterminacy and the agency of its theogonic act? If there is such a division, then a more ultimate ground is required to connect them. If there is not such a division, then I believe the Godhead is nothing more than a divine creative act of my theory's sort and the language of "Godhead" should be abandoned because it suggests too much substantiality in an indeterminacy that could exist on its own without the free theogonic act. The second question is why there should be a distinction between theogony resulting in God and the Godhead/God's creation of the world. How could God in Hart's sense be determinate without a determinate world, and doesn't the same act create both together? Could God without the world be determinate in any sense other than potential determinateness relative to a potential world? What is God's determinateness if not the very creating of the world? Hart, of course, wants to defend the more traditional view than mine that Godhead/ God can be complete without the world, and determinate in the God element, and still be free to create the world or not. Could there be a difference between the determinateness of God in a Godhead/God that does not create the world and the determinateness of God in one that does? I believe that a singular act of freedom determines both God and the world. The third question arises in connection with Hart's very intriguing discussion of the nothing with which the Godhead grapples in the theogonic act. I understand and affirm three senses of nothing and want to ask about two others. Because the divine creative act produces a singular world, all the possible worlds alternative to that are negated, or are nothing. Because the world and divine nature are determinate, there are negations defining the determinateness - this created thing is not that created thing. Because without the creative act things would cease or not be, a nothingness or nonworld is the alternative to the created world (and divine nature) as such. All these senses of nothingness, on my view, are real because of the divine creative act. Does Hart in addition believe that there is a paradoxically "positive" nothingness through which the theogonic act must move, giving it not just limitation but a kind of evil underbelly? His language of the Godhead struggling with evil suggests this. Finally, is this positively evil character intrinsic to God? It would seem so if God has the task of working out his own evil or negativity within the world that must redeem God. The key to Hart's

370

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

view on nothingness, I believe, is his notion of desire, the Godhead's desire that results in God and the Godhead/God's desire that results in the world. Is the prosecution of desire an overcoming of the nothingness of a lack? Is the creation of the world a prosecuted desire on Godhead/God's part to overcome the evil resulting from the struggle with nothing in theogony? I would say rather that the creation of the world and divine nature is the making of positive realities bounded by differences from one another and bearing value in their harmonies, not the expression of a need within the act of creation but a free gift, as Christian theologians like to say. Joseph Bracken is one of the most original thinkers among process theologians and has developed a magnificent system that essentially accepts Whitehead's cosmology, with modifications, and develops a conception of God that gives fair representation to a classic Christian doctrine of the Trinity. We share very many points in common. He reads me as being a bit too much like Ray Hart in that he ascribes to my view an ontological substantiality to indeterminacy (I admit that there are passages in my writings that lend themselves to this interpretation). In these comments I want to focus on Bracken's own ingenious contribution to the concept of God. Like me, Bracken objects to process theology's distinction of creativity from God, the distinction that is so important to maintain in John Cobb's theology. Bracken says that creativity in Whitehead's sense is to be identified with God, or rather with the unitary divine nature. In addition, divine creativity has three "persons" within it, each something like a personally ordered society of actual occasions in Whitehead's sense. If this were all there is to the concept of God, we would have a situation like Hartshorne's in which there are societies of divine occasions and societies of worldly occasions, except made worse by the addition of a third society of occasions; Bracken and I agree that Hartshorne's view, like Whitehead's, falters on the problem of the one and many. Bracken's truly original contribution is to say that the interaction of the three divine personally ordered societies itself creates a structured society powered by creativity that is the full unified divine life. Whitehead had given ontological priority to actual occasions over societies. Bracken says that the personally ordered societies are themselves constituted by their togetherness with each other. Each would be impossible without the other, and the structured society of the three together enjoys acts of creativity in its whole self; its creativity is not reduced to the creativity separately operative in constituent actual occasions. God is thus a divine

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

371

communion or community. Bracken's re-conception of a "society" is a significant advance beyond Whitehead. Bracken is right in saying that his conception of God shows how creativity grounds both the unity and multiplicity of God (and also of the world), and thus exemplifies my own arguments about the one and many. My only reservation, and it is a significant one, is that God for him is temporal and dynamically active. This means that the moments of creative advance in God as structured society of three personally ordered societies are different from one another. What grounds the differences between times? Precisely because actual occasions and socially structured dynamisms take place in different times that have causal relations with one another, the many of the times is not grounded in a one of creativity. The acts of creativity, whereby a many are integrated and increased by one, are many. Therefore time itself, which Whitehead held (rightly) to be made of the acts of temporal things, has no one for its many. This problem led me to say that the act of creation is eternal, and not at any time. Another salient point of Bracken's theology deserves comment here, namely his claim that revelation gives the reason for affirming three divine persons. Wildman points out that I "reject the authority of traditions of revelation to deliver reliable knowledge of God in favor of reliance on human reason...." My initial response was to bristle at that sweeping claim because I have such an energetic theory of revelatory imagination to articulate baseline religious realities. But then I surely do not go so far as Bracken to simply require that there be three persons in the Trinity because my tradition of revelation says there are. Insofar as revelation in dogmatic form would insert such a conceptual requirement, I would not buy it. On the other hand, this is no problem for my connecting with Bracken's theology because I think there are good philosophic reasons having to do with God as creative act, source, and result to uphold something of a Trinitarian philosophical base in terms of which specifically Christian Trinitarianism can be interpreted. Unlike Bracken, however, I take the historical Jesus to be the starting point for a Christian Trinitarianism and thus have a much more complex interpretive model for conceiving the connection between God the Creator/Father, the Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, as developed in the first chapter of Symbols of Jesus. While more complex in relating the persons of the Trinity, my model is metaphysically simpler than Bracken's, and Wildman is right that I am metaphysically austere. Three personally ordered societies

372

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

within the structured society of God seems to me two too many, if not three too many: personally ordered societies are within time, which I think God is not. Religion This leads right to Wildman's very gentle but terrifying point that, given my conviction that theological ideas need to make sense in people's lives and are of pastoral significance, my theology is at once too difficult and too far from conventional beliefs (in any religion) to be of interest to any except erudite comparativists and austere metaphysicians. Because I now am pastor and preacher at Boston University's Marsh Chapel, this terror has weekly urgency. To be sure, more erudite comparativists and austere metaphysicians are likely to be found in a university church in Boston and its radio audience than in most other places; still, there aren't many. To address this problem I have developed two fundamental approaches, each of which is still very much in early stages of development. The first is to distinguish four levels of religious language: imaginative witness, interpretive doctrines, systematizing theories, and dialectical practice. By imaginative witness I mean the scriptures, liturgies, and other core expressions of religions. To call them imaginative is not to say that they are fictions; rather it says that creative acts of imagination gave classic expression to interpretations of events and conditions, and these expressions are carried on in the practice of the religious communities deriving from them. The basic "revelations" of religion are at the level of imaginative witness. Interpretive doctrines parse the imaginative witnesses and render central ideas as claims about religious realities with cases made for why they are true. Most if not all religious people live with their lives shaped by the imaginative witnesses and their intellects formed in part by interpretive doctrines; not everyone gets very clear about the doctrines, but many do. Systematizing theories or systematic theologies put the claims together, sorting them into kinds and testing them by whatever means might correct them. I hold that the systematizing process should include learning what is relevant from the sciences, the arts, practical disciplines such as law, "other religions" or comparative religions, and secular knowledge. By dialectical practice I mean the testing of the system by living with it in all possible contexts, allowing it to shape life and be corrected

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

373

by resistance within the shaping. For me, as a Platonist (as Wildman would say), theoretical reason is instrumental to practical reason, and finds its ultimate tests there. Perhaps only erudite comparativists and austere metaphysicians would be comfortable at the levels of system and dialectical practice, and dialectical practice might require that one be a scholar-official too. My hope is that religious leadership would recognize the need to integrate practical religious life through all these levels, making sure that comparativists and metaphysicians function where they belong, and encouraging people of all sorts to become acquainted with the changes in perspective that take place when moving from one level to another. The second approach I've taken to Wildman's problem is the theory of symbolism in the theology of symbolic engagements. Mark Heim's beautiful exposition of this in his chapter is something for which I am deeply grateful. It is not only a clear exposition but it situates the symbolic strategy within a larger theological context. Heim makes it clear that analysis of the truth of a symbol in a certain context requires moving with control through the levels of imaginative witness, interpretive claims, systematic theory, and dialectical practice, although he did not use those terms. This is manifest in his brilliant criticism of my interpretation of the atonement symbols in Symbols of Jesus. On my reading, he says, those symbols claim that the sacrifice ofJesus on the cross is part of a kind of natural scapegoating that is necessary to deal with universal blood guilt. On the contrary, he says, when the crucifixion is read in conjunction with the other elements of the gospels, it symbolically claims that such scapegoating is wrong, that Jesus' sacrifice was once and for all, and that we do not need even to treat Jesus as a scapegoat. Heim is right that Jesus' sacrifice was once and for all and that no further scapegoating should take place. I did not sufficiently stress this in Symbols of Jesus, in part because I separated out the atonement symbols from so many other symbol systems treated in later chapters; I did make the point, however, in The Truth of Broken Symbols. Heim is right that there is much more to the symbols of the crucifixion than those having to do with atonement. I'm not persuaded, however, that Christians do not also have to revisit the crucifixion in their piety in order to deal with blood guilt. To probate this issue between us, Heim and I would have to work through imaginative witness, interpretive claims, systematic theory that would include comparative religions, scientific analyses, appropriation of art (Rene Girard's main mode of argument), and all the rest, leading to dialectical practice. While not every religious

374

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

person would follow out that argument, responsible theologians could, with the result that liturgy and preaching dealing with the symbols of the atonement could be given responsible theological direction. Jennifer Hockenberry's delightful essay rightly notes that I am a Christian philosopher and so embody many of the elements of that tradition. She worries that I exclude ideas that cannot also be found in other religions, and this is not quite right: by no means are all universal religious ideas true, or parochial ones false. Religious ideas are true when they carry across what is important in their objects to the interpreters in the respects in which the ideas stand for the objects. This is always contextual. So I would say that Christian claims that are true in some contexts might be false in others. Hockenberry's reading of my work, however, assumes that symbols are not means of engagement but just the contrary, substitutes. I don't for a minute deny the incarnation of the logos in Jesus Christ, or in an analogous sense the incarnate presence of Jesus Christ in the church and in individuals. But I do use a theory of truth as the carryover of value and a theory of imagination in symbolic engagement to explain what that incarnation is, as in the chapter on Jesus as Friend in Symbols of Jesus. In all humility, I suggest that this is a way forward from the patristic discussions, including Augustine's, which got stuck with the language of substance that prevents the intelligible harmony of two "substantially different" things. My suspicion is that Hockenberry is committed, not to the truth of the imaginative witness to and interpretive doctrine of incarnation, but to the ancient metaphysics that tried to systematize that. We can do better. Kurt Anders Richardson is the author here who has most emphasized the real engagement with Jesus through grappling with the full texts of the Bible and the various forms of the presence of Jesus in religious life. He is right that I am a pietist in some (or many) senses, though not in others, and that Jesus as Friend pulls together many aspects of the atonement, cosmic, Trinitarian, ethical, and historical elements of Christology. We both find the early twentieth century distinctions between liberalism and conservatism to be unhelpful and obfuscatory. I agree enthusiastically with Richardson's emphasis on the importance of scripture, and perhaps would emphasize a bit more than he does the importance of reading the various Christian traditions to understand our present realities. The traditions, too, mediate the reality of Jesus. I would emphasize much more than he the importance of understanding the Christian traditions in

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

375

relation to other religions, for much the same reasons. Richardson is right, in my view, to reject the attempt to deduce the Christian faith from historical knowledge of Jesus and his environs. Nevertheless, accurate and objective (to the extent possible) historical knowledge of Christian origins is necessary in order carefully to track the development of the biblical and traditional presentations of Jesus through which we can engage him. Especially is it important to track the entrances of new elements, for instance Greek metaphysics, and the exits, for instance gnosticism, in order to understand our own freedom and obligations. Not only need we understand how much Patristic metaphysics is necessary for today (I think very little), we need also to be responsible in the urgent work of the diverse inculturations and contextualizations of Christianity in cultures outside the Jerusalem-Antioch-Constantinople-Rome-Berlin-Boston (smile) axis. If we were to employ all the means possible responsibly to interpret critically the Christian tradition from its founding events and imaginative witnesses (the biblical writers) through its many traditions to our current proliferation of sites in which Christ and the church are incarnate, Richardson's distinction between portability and dissemination models would be embraced in a more complex and unified model. Richardson finds it odd that I discuss the symbol of Jesus' resurrection and its interpretations rather than straightforwardly affirming it as historical fact. I suspect this dis-ease with my symbolic approach also lies behind Hockenberry's rush to retrieve Patristic metaphysics, and Wildman points out that ordinary Christians won't easily be satisfied with reading the resurrection for its religious rather than historical meaning. I find Richardson's objection odd in turn, because he too does not want to base Christianity on the historical Jesus, rather on the vast complex Jesus met in the Bible and tradition. It is not historically important whether Jesus gave his famous sermon on the mount (Matthew) or the plain (Luke), or both places (he would not be the first preacher to use the same sermon more than once). Is it historically important whether Jesus said "blessed are the peacemakers" or "blessed are the cheesemakers" (the Monty Python version) so long as the people all heard "peacemakers?" Yes, but the importance would not lie in the sounds; it would lie in Jesus' intent, and the coherence of that with the rest of his preaching as grasped by his followers. (If a tape recorder definitely indicated "cheesemakers," and no slip of the tongue could explain it, theologians might have to re-examine his other remarks about wine, fish, bread, and figs to

376

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

see whether there is a delicatessen dimension to Jesus' preaching that our traditions have not sufficiently recognized; chances are we would still say no.) In the case of the resurrection, the issue, I believe, is not its uninterpreted historicity but rather its salvific power as a symbol for engaging God and the religious dimensions of the human condition. In Symbols of Jesus I discuss several senses in which Jesus is alive today, and also several senses in which he is "ascended" and not present except in representation by the Holy Spirit. To say as many conservative thinkers do that the physical resuscitation ofJesus from death is the test of God's power over sin and death is to posit too puny a test case for God's power. A better and more relevant test is whether God has the power to create in the church saved people, "new beings." That this power was in fact exercised in history in Jesus and his reception and further incarnation in his movement is the relevant complex historical event to note. I recognize that this answer will not satisfy many conservative Christians for whom a kind of metaphysical physical resurrection is an article of faith, and to this extent Wildman is right that my theology will be unpersuasive. To many other Christians, however, the historicity I insist upon for the singular saving event of Jesus Christ is far more than most liberals would allow. I thank Richardson for picking up these issues.

Ethics If I were a plain liberal, I would accept Kant's rejection of the metaphysics required for theology and transfer Christianity's case to ethics. But as Wildman and others point out, I reject Kant's critique of metaphysics for reasons of the pragmatic alternative, and I do not believe that Christianity is primarily an ethical system. Nevertheless, as Wildman also points out, as a Platonist of sorts value is constitutive of the very being of determinate things, in my view. I am extremely gratified, therefore, to see the essays by Rolf Bouma, Andrew Irvine, and again Steve Odin. Rolf Bouma's chapter has an extremely illuminating discussion of my value theory, properly emphasizing the critique of the fact-value distinction and my way of getting around the arid objection that one cannot derive "ought" from "is." I am delighted that he puts my theory in comparative contrast with other ethical theorists wrestling with the same problem. Bouma's choice of ecological ethics to make the point is excellent, because humanoriented ethics, such as Kant's deontology or the personalism

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

377

r e p r e s e n t e d h e r e so ably by Rufus Burrow, Jr., can glide over the question of w h e t h e r natural things have value. B o u m a is exactly right that I hold that to be a thing is to be a h a r m o n y that has value, a n d provide a theory explaining this. I would say that even h u m a n oriented ethics should take its normative orientation from the array of values in the entire s u r r o u n d i n g world, n o t j u s t h u m a n interests. W h a t needs to be a d d e d to the part of my theory B o u m a so nicely describes (and defends) is an u n d e r s t a n d i n g of how the values in things b e c o m e noticed by h u m a n beings, articulated in theories that allow for comparison, a n d p u t into practice within the institutions of society for decision-making a n d the flexible carrying o u t of policy (the focus of my book, Normative Cultures). B o u m a focuses o n my theory in Recovery of the Measure, which e m b e d s interpretive intentionality in a philosophy of n a t u r e (of h a r m o n i e s ) . Steve O d i n traces the roots of value-recognition in imagination, as I developed the point in Reconstruction of Thinking. Andrew Irvine's essay takes off from b o t h the objective interpretation of value as resident in h a r m o n y a n d the theory of imagination to discuss value in poetry. H e has a subtle discussion of how my general Platonism c o n c e r n i n g value still leads to a different evaluation of poetry from what Plato himself gave. Plato is famous for "banning" the poets from the city because they excite passion without dialectical criticism. I myself think that poetry is necessary as "imaginative witness," in particular for the articulation of the singulars that c a n n o t be described in general terms a n d the representation of alien perspectives that o u r customary terms necessarily marginalize. Irvine's discussion of this is extremely sensitive a n d right on. I would object on Plato's behalf that his real view is that poetry is necessary for the city so long as it is also involved in critical dialectic, a n d Plato himself was a c o n s u m m a t e poet. T h e special power in Irvine's essay is the point that the terrorists of 9 / 1 1 a n d o t h e r horrific incidents were themselves moved by an infinite religious passion to which we are blind without a poetic dislocation that allows us to e n t e r their perspective. I agree, a n d agree further with his moral that we n e e d to hurry with o u r poetry to m o r e intensive comparative studies that allow us to engage others outside o u r ken. His p o i n t coalesces with Steve Odin's a b o u t the i m p o r t a n c e of value in imagination for d o i n g comparative work, a point for which I am grateful to both. A p p r o a c h i n g the terrorism of 9 / 1 1 with poetry, however carefully qualified, produces a certain cognitive a n d emotional dissonance. T h e dissonance is vastly magnified in Rufus Burrow's essay o n

378

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

borderline ethics. Whereas Bouma and Irvine had been my students and developed their ethical views in dialectical relation to mine (Odin was a student also, many years ago), Burrow is an alumnus of the School of Theology at Boston University from the great days of Boston Personalism. A faithful Personalist, Burrow centers his ethics on the enhancement of personhood and has imbibed the rich set of categories for personal and social dimensions of personhood that comes from his tradition. Among these is an imperative never to do harm to persons, which is usually developed into a policy of aggressive pacifism most famously associated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston Personalism is deeply committed to serious structural social change, all through non-violent if nevertheless obstructionist means. Burrow's profound existential problem is that he sees the culture of violence and murder among young Afrikan American males (as he writes it) to require violence if it is to be amended. I am persuaded that he is right about this, even though this means that both "sides" lose. Instead of a win-win ethics, or a win-lose ethics, this is a loselose ethics, with the imperative being to lose the least. Disrupting the culture of violence and murder is to lose less, even if it requires violent means, than allowing it to continue. Burrow's argument, with which I agree, marks a shift from the rule-oriented ethics of traditional Boston Personalism to something more like a reluctant situation ethics. With regard to my own ethical language, Burrow's analysis underscores the point that the language of "harmony" should not always be given a positive interpretation. Some harmonies are frightfully destructive, such as the harmony of the youth culture of violence and murder. Violent interventions to disrupt that culture are also harmonies, but destructive ones that might be pursued only because the alternative is worse. My own analysis is that nearly any harmony has ambiguous value - good for some things and bad for others. James H. Cone's essay has an even bitterer edge than Burrow's. Surely he is right about the evils of racism in America and American religion, and about the mainline (white) theological tradition riding on the culture that also embodied racism. His bitterness comes from the fact that white theologians (with a few exceptions such as Fred Herzog) have not joined in the critique of racism, and that this constitutes a continuing white supremacy. He claims that white theologians of the 1960s and 70s mainly ignored racism. This was true of most of my own writings in the 1960s. In God the Creator (1968) I supposed that aiding the plight of African Americans was the duty

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

379

of everyone but used that to illustrate the conflict of that with other duties. In The Cosmology ofFreedom (1974), however, the main division on social freedom turned at nearly every point on the issues of racism and segregation, the plurality of cultures and the "right to have a heritage" that racism denied African Americans; racism as a problem was at the heart of the analysis of the social situation. In Soldier Sage Saint (1978) I discussed Martin Luther King, Jr., as a spiritual hero. Cone is right that black and white theologians have somewhat different genres for their theological writings. The place to see white theologians' discussion of racism is not in the genres associated with black writers for whom that is the central topic. It is rather in the more traditional white genres, and I doubt that Cone has read my work in those genres. His point, of course, is that those genres are of dubious legitimacy until the race problem is solved. That can only be partly true, however, because there are many other equally deep social problems that require practical attention, and there is indeed a place for theory. I thank Cone for submitting this clarion essay to a volume so dedicated to a traditional white genre of religious thought.

Theology in a Global Public Another way of looking at the point of Cone's essay is that the concerns and entire genre of black theology in America are marginalized by the main American Christian theological tradition. This of course is also the case for the other liberation theology movements, as well as all the other religions. Only with Judaism has Christianity had a consistent engagement, and with Judaism Christianity has used its power to dictate the terms of the engagement until very recently. All this leads up to the value of developing a theology with a global public. There is no global public within which theological conversation can take place now, only islands of comparative dialogue and conversation. The creation of the public requires the creation of the theological practice, and vice versa. Amos Yong and Peter Heltzel not only have edited this book, the payoff of which is a defense of theology in a global public, but they have contributed the defining analytical survey of the topic. They provide astute analyses of (1) globalization in many senses, and my response to it, (2) the modern scientific worldview, (3) increasing awareness of religious pluralism, and (4) postmodernism. They

380

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

integrate these into a conception of postmodern economic and cultural globalization with a sharp analysis of Western imperialism. Their conclusion, with which I of course agree, is that Christian theology needs a comparative global perspective in order to flourish in these conditions, especially if it is to get over its parochialism. Very much of my technical work in comparative theory as well as the practice of dialogue has been oriented to this goal. My good friend Gabriel Fackre goes farther in his essay and makes some practical suggestions for a Christian theology of world religions. After adding great complexity and sophistication to my somewhat simple rejection of the classificatory power of the categories of inclusivism, exclusivism, and pluralism, he asks how my attempt to find a relatively neutral comparative field to recognize other religions escapes the biases of my own beginnings. Of course it doesn't. Those biases can never be wholly removed. But they can be identified in dialogue with others, and attempts can be made to correct them. My best case is that my structure of the comparative field avoids the biases that can be identified. This is done by carefully making the comparative categories more flexible and vague so that they do not distort. Surely my Wesleyan background that Fackre so clearly identifies includes a drive toward comprehensiveness and fairness. Fackre is worried that my approach to comparison which disputes clear boundaries among religious traditions and rather tracks the histories of core texts and motifs is too soft a pragmatism. Fackre's own positive suggestions for the development of a theology of world religions is centered on the assertion that an identifiable core of Christian belief does exist, and presumably other traditions can have more clearly identifiable characteristics too. His examples come from the history of creeds within Christianity down to the recent ecumenical statements of contemporary dialogue groups, in some of which he has been a major player. Those examples are good illustrations of the point I made above about Kurt Richardson's essay, that a careful knowledge of the history of Christian traditions is necessary to define present realities. I would perhaps be a little less confident than Fackre that we can take these statements to be entirely normative. Rather, each has led to confusions and error as well as to clarifications, truth, and concord. These all need to be sorted in careful ways. So there can be no real combination of Christianity and Confucianism, only of some particular kind of Christianity with some particular kind of Confucianism. The conceptual point of a theology

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

381

of world religions is to note with clarity how the different strands of the religions relate to one another ad intra and ad extra. Rodney L. Petersen's excellent essay adds a note of urgency to the discussions of Fackre, and of Yong and Heltzel: want it or not, global citizenship is being forced upon us, especially those of us in nations whose economy and military one-sidedly affect the rest of the world, although everyone anywhere who is affected is a citizen of a society with global contours. Petersen's essay goes beyond Yong and Heltzel's and Fackre's in its acknowledgment that a theology of world religions is not just a Christian enterprise. Although I am a Christian theologian, it is not as a Christian that I work to create a global public. Petersen's fine analysis of the role of the religious "other" shows this to be a symmetrical relation. Moreover, he is very right to emphasize the particularity of engaged otherness. Just as I can manage cross-cultural engagement in depth only between Christianity and Confucianism, so all other developments of global citizenship need to be particular, not merely general proclamations. I like Petersen's point that rituals of global religious citizenship can lead to more concrete work. Petersen is surely correct and prophetic about the new sense citizenship takes on when it becomes global, and not national or cultural. This is the point at which to acknowledge my colleague John Berthrong's wonderful essay about our joint adventure East and West. He is right about my early education being entirely Western, with the "turn East" initiated by Thomas Berry. I love the way he sees my progressive education in things Chinese. For fifteen years, however, we have been very close colleagues (scholar-officials administering the Boston University School of Theology) and he neglects to say that he has been my primary teacher of things Chinese (apart from the taiqi). Berthrong is a properly trained Sinologist and made his "turn East" as a raw youth. Where I perhaps helped him was to transform his Sinological and comparative knowledge of the University of Chicago descriptive sort into a normative theological and philosophical project that we share, called Boston Confucianism in some contexts, and global Christianity in others. We both draw upon Chinese and Western sources to say what we believe to be true about the current situation and ultimate reality. I am particularly appreciative of his (and Wildman's) reference to the Cross-Cultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project as laying the groundwork for contemporary cross-cultural normative philosophy and theology (I am, as Berthrong says, too pre-modern to distinguish theology

382

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

and philosophy helpfully). Besides Berthrong and me, that project included, among the authors of this book, Francis Clooney, S.J., Syed Nomanul Haq, Livia Kohn, James Miller, John Thatamanil, and Wesley Wildman. I now turn to remark on four essays that operate in the global public from the primary standpoint of other religions than Christianity and Confucianism, those by Noman Haq from the perspective of Islam, James Miller from that of Daoism, Harold H. Oliver from that of Buddhism, and John J. Thatamanil from that of Advaita Vedanta. From the beginning of my "turn East" through the Cross-Culturai Comparative Religious Ideas Project I have attempted to shift my platform from that of a Western philosophical Christian looking at others to that of someone who participates in many traditions and appropriates them all in selective, critical fashion, making cases empirically. Of course I remain a self-identified Christian and that has shaped my trajectory; I still write sometimes for Christian theologians who are conscious of being exclusive of other traditions. I have become a self-identified Confucian. From the other traditions I have learned and drawn many things, but without the scholarly and participatory taste to identify with them in any serious way (if one is a Confucian, one is also a Daoist in many respects, and so that is an exception). So it is extremely gratifying that Syed Nomanul Haq takes my platform, my approach, or my attitude, to be helpful for defining and sorting disputes internal to the intellectual traditions of Islam. I am surprised (because of my ignorance) but very pleased to be in the camp of A. I. Sabra, Dimitri Gutas, and others in breaking away from essentialism in the understanding of Islam, with its orientalizing background, to emphasize comparative work that is local and contextual, on the one hand, and cross-cultural or cross-traditional on the other. I salute Haq for his mastery of the "core texts and motifs" approach and also for his wonderful employment of many disciplines in the understanding of the many faces of Islam in its many engagements with the rest of the world. If only the American government and media would have as sophisticated a view as his of this, the world would be a far safer place for peoples of all faiths. Whereas Haq resonates with my method and spirit of comparative analysis, James Miller picks up on theology of symbolic engagement, although he does not call it that. He claims that Daoism is less to be understood in terms of the inner play of its core texts and motifs than in terms of its multitude of references to "a non-personal

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

383

unitary creative power that is understood as transcending its various temporal and spatial instantiations." I am not sure that Daoism is unique in this, since I would make similar claims for Confucianism and Christianity, noting that they have different ways of articulating this power. The rhetorical tropes of creation ex nihilo are in considerable dissonance with those of the Dao, although I am not sure that they are far apart when they are rearticulated in a vague enough category to explain the dissonance. Miller points out that in Durkheim's theory of religion the power exhibited by religious adepts and institutions derives from society, whereas in Daoism (at least) the power distributed in and by the religion is cosmic power, only lightly grasped by social symbols. I suspect that all religions treat their power as cosmic rather than socially derived, save perhaps Mimamsa that founds the gods on sacrifices. The naive reaction of Christians to Durkheim was to call him a reductionist, denying the first-order claims of theology. Miller has argued, successfully I think, that the naive reaction was rather sophisticated, and right. Many questions remain, of course, about defining the cosmos in terms of "cosmic powers." Miller rightly distinguishes the Daoist cosmogony from the Neo-Platonic. Yet his approach to an economy of cosmic powers offers new angles of vision even on a somewhat Neo-Platonic thinker such as Augustine: Miller can read Augustine's worries about the resurrected body much more straightforwardly than most other Christian theologians. I agree thoroughly with his call for theologies, Christian and others, to abandon what seems now to be an artificial distinction between the material reality of cosmic forces and some wholly non-material spiritual realm. This is another way of lauding the promise of naturalism in theology and philosophy, a point that goes back to Frisina's discussion. Harold H. Oliver recalls the wonderful debates we had in the student-run Friday Afternoon Theology (FAT - there were rich refreshments) sessions. He would try to persuade me (and the student and faculty audience) that all relations are internal, and hence there is only one thing. I would counter that relations need to have terms (essential features) harmonized with their internality to other terms (conditional features), and hence there are necessarily many things. I would accuse him of not being able to acknowledge the reality of time and change, and he would say, 'Yes, time and change are not real, only the experience of them is real." I would laugh and say a Buddhist such as himself shouldn't give such reality to evanescent experience and he would explain that my concern

384

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

for the fleetingness of experience was precisely my karmic problem. And so on. It was a classic debate. Oliver's paper here is a technical critique of an argument I made some years ago in reference to Nagarjuna. I am less concerned now than I was in that original context to prove that my creation ex nihilo theory finds a better "middle way" between eternalism and nihilism than Nagarjuna's theory ofpratitya samutpada. My claim was rhetorical overkill, attempting to steal Nagarjuna's definition of the prize to award to my theoretical construct, and I concede Oliver's critical points in that regard. His more basic question, however, has to do with the relation between cosmological and ontological considerations: pratitya samutpada seems to be a cosmological notion whereas creation ex nihilo is ontological. In my view, as noted by many authors here, a determinate thing is a harmony of essential and conditional features. In many places I have characterized the cosmological causal interactions of things as a function of the conditional features by which they relate to one another; by contrast, since things do not have conditional features without essential features that integrate them existentially, the relations of the essential features of one thing to the essential features of other things are not cosmological but ontological. I argued that the possibility of cosmological togetherness depends on a deeper ontological togetherness that allows whole harmonies of both essential and conditional features to be together. Then I claimed through a variety of arguments that the conception of a divine creative act best accounts for ontological togetherness. To this Oliver objects because, as a Buddhist, he wants to eliminate essential features (which look like own-being). Rehearsing the argument above, I point out that this denies the real experience of diversity and change and that the business of philosophy is to "save the appearances." His response is that the appearances should be left as appearances, not saved in any other way. In this way he defends a classic non-dualism. This brings me at last to the paper of John J. Thatamanil, a student of both Oliver and mine (and of course many others). A brilliant philosopher of Advaita Vedanta whose dissertation skillfully compared Sankara to Paul Tillich, Thatamanil in this paper develops Sankara's non-dualism and notes the conundrum that an uneasy dualism remains between Brahman, which is the true identity of every self, and the self in its apparent world where it has to act. Things get especially tricky when both Brahman and the apparent human agent self are interpreted in action terms. Quoting Eckhart,

THANKS AND CONVERSATION

385

"Acting and becoming are one, God and I are one in operation: he acts and I become." For Sankara, can the self be non-dual with Brahman and still be free without freedom being merely illusory? Paul Tillich comes very close to non-dualism in his claim that God is the ground of the self and not separable from it. But in order to defend human freedom, Tillich says that human beings fall out of their non-dual relation with God into existence, which is separate from essence. At this point, Thatamanil appeals to my theory of creation ex nihilo according to which the cosmological world has no separation from its divine ground, being the terminus of the divine creative act, but within which human beings can be free. Within the cosmological flow, free agents decide events that otherwise are open and indeterminate; that is an empirical observation, and can be accounted for by a cosmology consistent with the claim that every element in it is part of the terminus of the divine creative act. This is something of what is meant by saying that God creates time and space, with all their dynamic temporal relations. Thatamanil concludes that my theory is ontologically non-dual and yet accounts for real finite freedom within the life of God. This is exactly right, and is at the center of my soteriology (as in Eternity and Time's Row). It is also a resolution to at least part of Oliver's problem: the cosmological diversity is wholly consistent with, and non-dual in relation to, the ontological creative act. Thatamanil rightly notes that my own preoccupations are the Confucian (and Methodist) ones of attending to the "repairing of the broken world." Oliver would not like that, I fear, for some versions of Buddhist nonattachment run contrary to Christian and Confucian ministrations. Other forms of Buddhism, and some readings of Advaita Vedanta, precisely because of the non-dualism between ultimacy and the suchness and haecceities of life, say that throwing ourselves into the ambiguities and needs of finite life is the best, most liberated, and richest way of celebrating non-dualism. Christians put it starkly: commitment to the engaged life of crucifixion is the way to the life of resurrection. Having rejoiced, now, in the fact my theory of creation ex nihilo can be given a non-dualist interpretation, I want to respond with full appreciation to Wildman's claim that my project is an extension of Schleiermacher's project, namely, "a theology that consists entirely of propositions about states of human religious self-consciousness or about the world, and is entirely free of propositions about the divine nature." I would restate the project slightly: "a theology that consists

386

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

entirely of interpretations whose objects are religious practices and thoughts, the natural and social world, and the determinate divine nature constituted by the creating of the world, and whose ultimate reference is the finite/infinite contrast embodied in the divine creative act." Recognized as a non-dualism, the full reality of God the creator is encompassed in that description. Once again I thank the contributors to this volume for a tapestry of exercises in contemporary theology and philosophy. It is a great pleasure to be part of the tapestry.

NOTES 1

Frisina makes the same point at greater length in his wonderful volume, The Unity ofKnowledge and Action: Toward a Non-representational Theory ofKnowledge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). One of my brightest students said he both loved and hated this book. He loved it because it provided the vocabulary and interpretive perspective to say what he was struggling to say, and hated it because Warren had already written it. 2 Odin's recent Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001) provides a far more extensive and historically rich interpretation of this and related points. What a delight for a teacher to see the flourishing of classmate-students such as Frisina and Odin, brilliant lights of the then new State University of New York College at Purchase. Their classmate Jay Schulkin has also developed an astonishingly productive career as a philosopher-scientist. 3 1 wish Jennifer Hockenberry had stressed this more in her essay, because she seems to think of the fantastical character of religious symbols as a fault. 4 This analogy is technically tied in to my theory of creation ex nihilo in chapter 1 of Symbols of Jesus. 5 Ray L. Hart, Unfinished Man and the Imagination: Toward an Ontology and a Rhetoric of Revelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968).

Robert Cummìngs Neville: Select List of Publications

Books God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Reprinted with corrections and a new Preface; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. The Cosmology of Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. New edition; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Soldier, Sage, Saint. New York: Fordham University Press, 1978. Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology. New York: The Seabury Press, 1980. New edition; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. Reconstruction of Thinking. Volume 1 of The Axiology of Thinking. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981. The Tao and theDaimon: Segments ofa Religious Inquiry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982. The Puritan Smile. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Recovery of the Measure. Volume 2 of The Axiology of Thinking. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Behind the Masks of God: An Essay toward Comparative Theology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Translated into Chinese with a Preface by Chen Yunquan 1997. A Theology Primer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. The Highroad around Modernism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Eternity and Times Flow. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Normative Cultures. Volume 3 of The Axiology of Thinking. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. The Truth of Broken Symbols. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. The God Who Beckons: Theology in the Form of Sermons. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999. Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

388

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Religion in Late Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Books Edited With Willard Gaylin and Joel Meister. Operating on the Mind: The Psychosurgery Conflict. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Associate Editor for the Behavioral and Neurological Sciences. Encyclopedia ofBioethics. Warren Reich, ed.-in-chief. New York: Macmillan-Free Press, 1978. T'ai-Chi Ch'uan: Body and Mind in Harmony: The Integration of Meaning and Method. By Sophia Delza. Revised edition with a Foreword by Robert Cummings Neville. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. New Essays in Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. The T'ai-Chi Ch'uan Experience: Reflections and Perceptions on Body-Mind Harmony. By Sophia Delza. Edited with a Foreword by Robert Cummings Neville. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Evangelism: Crossing Boundaries. An issue of The Circuit Rider. February 1997. With Thomas P. Kasulis. The Recovery of Philosophy in America: Essays in Honor of John Edwin Smith. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. The Human Condition. By the Cross-Cultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project. Foreword by Peter L. Berger. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Ultimate Realities. By the Cross-Cultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project. Foreword by Tu Wei-ming. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Religious Truth. By the Cross-Cultural Comparative Religious Ideas Project. Foreword by Jonathan Z. Smith. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Book Series Edited SUNY Series in Philosophy, 1981-1991. SUNY Series in Systematic Philosophy, 1981-1992. SUNY Series in Religious Studies, 1983-1990. Articles and Essays "Man's Ends." Review of Metaphysics. 16:1, 1962: 26-44. "Ehman's Idealism." Review of Metaphysics. 17:4, 1964: 617-22. "Some Historical Problems about the Transcendence of God." Journal of

NEVILLE PUBLICATIONS

389

Religion. 47, 1967: 1-9. "A Critical Study of Edward G. Ballard's Socratic Ignorance: An Essay on Platonic Self-Knowledge." International Philosophical Quarterly. 7, 1967: 340-56. "Reply." The Christian Scholar. 50:3, 1967: 324-25. "Intuition." International Philosophical Quarterly. 7, 1967: 556-90. "Improving What We Are." Fordham Magazine. 2, March 1968: 18-23. "Can God Create Men and Address Them Too?" Harvard Theological Review. 61, 1968: 603-23. "Current Issues in Christian Ecumenism." World Order. Winter 1968-69. "Creation and the Trinity." Theological Studies. 30, 1969: 3-26. "Nine Books By and About Teilhard." Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 37, 1969: 71-82. "Father Gibson's Pop Culture." Commonweal. 31 October 1969. "Neoclassical Metaphysics and Christianity: A Critical Study of Ogden's Reality of God? International Philosophical Quarterly. 9, 1969: 605-24. "Whitehead on the One and the Many." Southern Journal of Philosophy. 7, Winter 1969-70: 387-93. "The Impossibility of Whitehead's God for Theology." Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. 35, 1970: 130-40. "The Faith of Easter." The Lamp. 58, March 1970. "The Social Importance of Philosophy." Abraxas. 1:1, 1970: 31-45. "Paul Weiss's Philosophy in Process." Review of Metaphysics. 24, 1970: 276301. "Genetic Succession, Time and Becoming." Process Studies. 1:3, 1971: 19498. "The Cumulative Impact of Behavior Control." Hastings Center Report. 2, September 1971: 12-13. "Where Do the Poets Fit In?: A Study of B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity." Hastings Center Report. 3, December 1971: 6-8. "Experience and Philosophy: A Review of Hartshorne's Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method." Process Studies. 2, 1972: 49-67. "Response to Ford's 'Neville on the One and the Many'." Southern Journal of Philosophy. 10:1, Spring 1972: 85-86. "Contemporary Schools of Metascienceby Gerard Radnitzky: A Critical Review." International Philosophical Quarterly. 12:1, 1972: 131 -36. "Knowledge and Being: Comments on Griesbach and Reck." The Review of Metaphysics. 25, 1972: 40-46. "The Limits of Freedom and the Technologies of Behavior Control." The Human Context. Winter 1972: 433-46. "Creativity and Fatigue in Public Life." In Robert E. Meagher, ed. Toothing Stones: Rethinking the Political. Chicago: The Swallow Press 1972: 144-58. "A Metaphysical Argument for a Wholly Empirical Theology." In Robert J. Roth, S.J., ed. God: Knowable and Unknowable. New York: Fordham University Press, 1972: 215-40.

390

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

"Statutory Law and the Future ofjustice." The AmericanJournalofJurisprudence. 3,1972:92-110. With Harold F. Moore and William Sullivan. "The Contours of Responsibility: A New Model." Man and World. 5:4, 1972: 392-421. With Peter Steinfels. "Blood Money: Should a Rich Nation Buy Plasma from the Poor." Hastings Center Report. 2:6, December 1972: 8-10. "The Physical Manipulation of the Brain: A Conference Report." Edited. A Hastings Center Report. 1973. Republished in Dissent, Summer 1973. With Vernon H. Mark. "Brain Surgery in Aggressive Epileptics: Social and Ethical Implication." Journal of the American Medical Association. 225, 12 November 1973: 765-72. "Behavior Control: Need for New Myths." Engage/Social Action. 1:10, October 1973: 28-37. "Controlling Behavior through Drugs." Edited with an introduction. Hastings Center Studies. 2:1, 1974: 65-112. "Specialties and Worlds." Hastings Center Studies. 2:1, January 1974: 53-64. "Pots and Black Ketdes: A Philosopher's Perspective on Psychosurgery." Boston University Law Review. 54, April 1974. "Vanity and Time." The Cord. April 1974. "A Study of Charles E. Winquist, The Transcendental Imagination." Process Studies. 5:1, 1975: 49-60. "Teaching the Meno and the Reformation of Character." Teaching Philosophy. 1:2,1975:119-21. "Gene Therapy and the Ethics of Genetic Therapeutics." In Marc Lappe and Robert S. Morison, eds. Ethical and Scientific Issues Posed by Human Uses of Molecular Genetics. New York: New York Academy of Science, 1976: 153-61. "Freedom's Bondage." Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. 41, 1976: 1-13. "In Defense of Process." In Paul Weiss, ed. First Considerations. Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977: 208-22. "Pluralism and Finality in Structures of Existence." In David Ray Griffin and Thomas J. J. Altizer, eds. John Cobb's Theology in Process. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977: 67-83. "Defining Death." In William Bier, S.J., ed. Human Life: Problems of Birth of Living and ofDying. New York: Fordham University Press, 1977: 181-91. "Environments of the Mind" In H. T. Engelhardt, Jr. and S. F. Spicker, eds. Mental Health: Philosophical Perspectives. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1977: 169-76. "Suffering, Guilt and Responsibility " Journal ofDharma. 2:3, 1977: 248-59. "Wang Yang-Ming's Inquiry on the Great Learning." Process Studies. 7:4, 1977: 217-37. Encyclopedia articles in Warren Reich, ed. Encyclopedia of Bioethics. New York: Macmillan-Free Press, 1978: "Behavior Control," 85-93; "Drug Use Abuse and Dependence," 326-33; and "Psychosurgery," 1387-91.

NEVILLE PUBLICATIONS

391

"The Taste of Death." In Florence M. Hetzler and Austin H. Kutscher, eds. Philosophical Aspects of Thanatology. 2 vols. New York: Arno Press, 1978: vol. I, 177-89. "Sterilization of the Retarded: In Whose Interest? The Philosophical Arguments." Hastings Center Report. 8:3, June 1978: 33-37. "Critical Study of Psychosurgery and the Medical Control of Violence: Autonomy and Deviance by Samuel I. Shuman." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. 48:4, 1978: 732-36. "Philosophic Perspectives on Freedom of Inquiry." University of Southern California Law Review. 51:5, 1978: 1115-29. "On the National Commission: A Puritan Critique of Consensus Ethics." Hastings Center Report. 9:2, April 1979: 22-27. "Reply to Philip H. Rhinelander's 'Critique of the Puritan Ethic'." Hastings Center Report. 9:6, December 1979: 49-50. "Authority and Experience in Religious Ethics." Logos. 1:1, 1980: 79-92. "Metaphysics." Social Research. 47 :4, 1980: 686-703. "From Nothing to Being: The Notion of Creation in Chinese and Western Thought." Philosophy East and West. 30:1, 1980: 21-34. "Various Meanings of Privacy: A Philosophical Analysis." In William Bier, S.J., ed. Privacy: A Vanishing Value. New York: Fordham University Press, 1980: 22-33. "The Space of Freedom." Notebook. Fall 1980: 17-21. "Sterilization of the Mildly Mentally Retarded without Their Consent: The Philosophical Arguments." In Ruth Macklin and Willard Gaylin, eds. Mental Retardation and Sterilization: A Problem of Competency and Paternalism. New York: Plenum Press, 1981: 181-93. "The Holy Spirit as God." In Axel D. Steuer and James Wm. McClendon, Jr., eds. Is God God?Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990: 235-64. "Concerning Creativity and God: A Response." Process Studies. 11:1, 1981: 110. Cf. Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Lewis S. Ford. "Three Responses to Neville's Creativity and God'' Process Studies. 10:3-4, 1980: 73-88. "Missions on an Ecumenical Globe." Jeevadhara. 13:77, 1983: 335-42. With Jay Schulkin. "Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Drugs: Health Care Dilemmas." In Catherine P. Murphy and Howard Hunter, eds. Ethical Problems of the Nurse-Patient Relationship. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1983: 166-82. "Whitehead on the One and the Many." In Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline, eds. Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983: 257-71. "The State's Intervention in Individuals' Drug Use: A Normative Account." In Thomas H. Murray, Willard Gaylin, and Ruth Macklin, eds. Feeling Good and Doing Better. Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1984: 65-80. "Buddhism and Process Philosophy." In Kenneth K. Inada and Nolan P. Jacobson, eds. Buddhism and American Thinkers. Albany: State University

392

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

of New York Press, 1984: 121-42. "New Metaphysics for Eternal Experience: A Critical Review of Steve Odin's Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism." Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 11:2,1984:185-97. "The Valuable and the Meaningful: A Critical Study of Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations" Modern Age. 27:3-4, 1983: 322-25. "Body Mind and Health in Salvation." Listening. 19:2, 1984: 91-102. "Uncertain Phoenix: Adventures towards a Post-Cultural Sensibility." Process Studies. 14, 1984: 49-58. "Philosophy and the Question of God." International Philosophical Quarterly. 25:1, 1985: 51-62. "Wang Yang-ming and John Dewey on the Ontological Question. "Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 12, 1985: 283-95. "From legumes a la Grecque to bouillabaisse in Early Taoism." Philosophy East and West. 35, 1985: 431-43. "Hegel and Whitehead on Totality: The Failure of a Conception of System." In George R. Lucas, Jr., ed. Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986: 86-108. "The Scholar-Official As a Model for Ethics." Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 13:2, 1986: 185-201. "John E. Smith as Jeremiah." Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. 22:3, 1986: 258-71. "Comments on Girardot's 'Response'." Philosophy East and West. 36, 1986: 271-73. "A Thesis Concerning Truth." Process Studies. 5:2, 1986: 127-36. "On the Relation of Christian to Other Philosophies." In Alistair Kee and Eugene T Long, eds. Being and Truth: Essays in Honour of John Macquarrie. London: SCM Press, 1986: 276-92. "Achievement, Value and Structure." In Thomas Krettek, ed. Creativity and Common Sense: Essays in Honor of Paul Weiss. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987: 124-44. "God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion." Faith and Philosophy. 4, 1987: 221-24. "Contributions and Limitations of Process Philosophy." Process Studies. 16:4, 1987: 283-98. "Sketch of a System." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. New Essays in Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987: 253-74. "Units of Change - Units of Value." Philosophy East and West. 37:2, 1987: 131-34. Reprinted in J. Baird Callicott and Roger T Ames, eds. Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989: 145-49. "The Depths of God." Journal ofthe American Academy of Religion. 66:1, 1988: 1-24. "Motion in Causal Agency." The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. 2:3 New

NEVILLE PUBLICATIONS

393

Series, 1988: 175-91. "Beyond Production and Class: A Process Project in Economic Theory." In W. Widick Schroeder and Franklin I. Gamwell, eds. Economic Life: Process Interpretations and Critical Responses. Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1988: 141-63. "Between Chaos and Totalization." In Robert Allinson and Liu Shu-hsien, eds. Harmony and Strife. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1988: 49-58. "A Christian Response to Shu-hsien Liu and Pei-jung Fu." In Charles Weihsun Fu and Gerhard E. Spiegler, eds. Religious Issues and Interreligious Dialogues: An Analysis and Sourcebook ofDevelopments since 1945. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989: 555-70. "The Chinese Case in a Philosophy of World Religions." In Robert E. Allinson, ed. Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989: 48-74. "Confucian-Christian Dialogue." China Notes. 27:2, 1989: 524-28. "Freedom Tolerance and Puritan Commitment." In Leroy S. Rouner, ed. On Freedom. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989: 59-76. With Rufus Burrow, Jr. "Neville's Review of The Boston Personalist Tradition." The Personalist Forum. 5:2, 1989: 145-47. "Individuation in Christianity and Confucianism." Ching Feng. 32:1, 1989: 3-23. Reprinted in Peter K H. Lee, ed. Confucian-Christian Encounters in Historical and Contemporary Perspective. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991: 274-94. "The Call to and Practice of Ordained Ministry." Tower Notes. 1, Spring 1990. Republished as "The Apostolic Character of Ordained Ministry." Quarterly Review. 10, Winter 1990: 4-21. "Technology and the Richness of the World." In Frederick Ferre, ed. Technology and Religion. Vol. 10 of Research in Philosophy and Technology. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press 1990: 185-204. "World Community and Religion." In Ilyu munmyonggwa Won Bulgyo sasang [Civilization of Mankind and the Thought of Won Buddhism]. Korea: Won'gwangch'ulp'ansa [Won'gwang Publishing Co.], 1991: 1565-92. "Time Temporality and Ontology." In Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed. The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne. The Library of Living Philosophers 20. LaSalle 111.: Open Court Publishing Company, 1991: 377-95. "On the Architecture of No-Man's Land: A Response to Hartt and Gustafson." Soundings. 73:4, 1990: 701-18. "On Buddha's Answer to the Silence of God." Philosophy East and West. AVA, 1991: 557-70. "The End of Philosophy in the West." Sino-American Relations. 18:3, 1992: 62-80. "Body-Thinking in Chinese Philosophy." Journal of National Chung Cheng University. 3:1, 1992: 149-70. "Body-Thinking in Western Philosophy." Journal of National Chung Cheng

394

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

University. 3:1, 1992: 171-91. "The Puritan Ethic in Confucianism and Christianity." Pacific Theological Review. 25-26,1992-1993: 30-32. "The Role of Religious Studies in Theological Education." School of Theology at Claremont Occasional Paper Number. 82:4, December 1992: 1-8. "The Symbiotic Relation of Philosophy and Theology." In Patricia Cook, ed. Philosophical Imagination and Cultural Memory: Appropriating Historical Traditions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 149-64. "Chung-kuo che-hsueh te shen-t'i ssu-wei." Translation by Yang Ru-pin of "Body-Thinking in Chinese Philosophy." In Yan Ru-pin, ed. Chungkuo ku-tai ssu-hsiang chung te ch'i lun nai shen-t'i kuan [Ancient Chinese Interpretations of Matter-Energy and the Body]. Taipei Taiwan: Chu-liu Publishing Company, 1993: 193-212. "World Community and Religion." A shortened version in English of the article above. Journal of Ecumenical Studies. 29:3-4, Summer-Fall 1992: 368-82. "Religious Studies and Theological Studies." The 1992 Presidential Address to the American Academy of Religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 61:2,1993: 185-200. "Religious Learning beyond Secularism." In Barbara Darling-Smith, ed. Can Virtue Be Taught? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993: 155-73. "God the Witness." Sermon on Micah 1:2; 2:1-10; Luke 17:11-19; 2 Timothy 2:8-15, excerpted and commented on in Donald K. McKim. The Bible in Theology and Preaching: How Preachers Use Scripture. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994: 112-14. "Confucianism as a World Philosophy." Presidential Address for the 8th International Conference on Chinese Philosophy Beijing 1993. Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 21, 1994: 5-25. "Report on the Roundtable 'Chinese Philosophy at the Turn of the Century' at the Nineteenth World Congress of Philosophy, Moscow, Russia, 23 August 1993." Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 21, 1994: 67-69. "Confucian-Christian Incompatibilities." ChingFeng. 37:4, 1994: 195-216. "Feature Review: Discourse and Practice, edited by Frank Reynolds and David Tracy." Philosophy East and West. 45:1, 1995: 115-19. "The Classical Challenge." In Rodney L. Petersen, ed. Christianity and Civil Society: Theological Education for Public Life. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995: 150-60. "Truth and Tradition." In Neal F. Fisher, ed. Truth and Tradition: A Conversation about the Future of United Methodist Theological Education. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995: 37-58. "Bostonskoye konfutsianstvo - korni vostochnoi kulturyi no zapadnoi pochve" ["Boston Confucianism - The Roots of Eastern Culture on the Western Soil]. Translated with a commentary by A. Lomanov. Problemyi

NEVILLE PUBLICATIONS

395

Dalnego Vostoke [Far Eastern Affairs] 1, 1995: 136-49. "Religions Philosophies and Philosophy of Religion." In Eugene Long, ed. God, Reason and Religions on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of This Journal Special issue of InternationalJournal for Philosophy of Religion. 38, 1995: 165-81. "The Last Words of Sisera: A Libretto." Soundings: An InterdisciplinaryJournal. 78:3-4, 1995: 439-62. "Paul Weiss's Theology." Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed. The Philosophy of Paul Weiss. The Library of Living Philosophers 23. LaSalle 111.: Open Court, 1995: 389-414. "Some Confucian-Christian Comparisons." Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 22, 1995: 379-400. "The Temporal Illusion of Eternity: A Pragmatic Theory of Spiritual Insight." In Tilman Borsche and Johann Kreuzer, eds. Weisheit und Wissenschaft. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1995: 129-38. "A Confucian Construction of a Self-Deceivable Self." In Roger T Ames and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Self and Deception: A Cross-cultural Philosophical Enquiry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996: 201-17. "How Far We Are from a Confession: Tasks for Theological Education in Church and Society." Quarterly Review. 16:2, 1996: 117-25. "The Emergence of Historical Consciousness." In Peter H. Van Ness, ed. Spirituality and the Secular Quest. World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest 22. New York: Crossroad, 1996: 129-56. "Kitaiskaya Filosophiya v sovremennom mire" [Chinese Philosophy in the Contemporary World] Problemyi Dalnego Vostoka. 4:96, Fall 1996: 49-55. "Uniting Two Images" and "Evangelism Across Boundaries." Circuit Rider. February 1997. "Commentary on the AAS Panel: Shun Bloom Cheng and Birdwhistell." Philosophy East and West. 47:1, 1997: 67-74. "Reflections on Philosophic Recovery." In Thomas P. Kasulis and Robert Cummings Neville, eds. The Recovery of Philosophy in America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997: 1-10. "American Philosophy's Way around Modernism, and Postmodernism." In Thomas P. Kasulis and Robert Cummings Neville, eds. The Recovery of Philosophy in America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997: 251-68. "John E. Smith and Metaphysics." In Vincent M. Colapietro, ed. Reason, Experience and God: John E. Smith in Dialogue. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997: 71-81. "Political Tolerance in an Age of Renewed Religious Warfare." In Mehdi Amin Razavi and David Ambuel, eds. Philosophy, Religion and the Question of Intolerance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997: 28-40. "Comments on Ts There a Metaphysics of Community? A Continental Perspective on American Philosophy' by Hermann Deuser." TheJournal of Speculative Philosophy. New Series 11:2, 1997: 97-100.

396

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

"Reply to Serious Critics." American Journal of Theology and Philosophy. 18:3, 1997: 281-94; replying to "The Culture of Metaphysics: On saving Neville's Project, from Neville)," by David L. Hall; "Neville's Theology of Creation Covenant and Trinity," by Hermann Deuser; "Neville's 'Naturalism' and the Location of God," by Robert S. Corrington; and "Knowing the Mystery of God: Neville and Apophatic Theology," by Delwin Brown, all in the same volume. "A Paleopragmatic Philosophy of History of Philosophy." In Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby, eds. Pragmatism Neo-Pragmatism and Religion: Conversations with Richard Rorty. New York: Peter Lang, 1997: 43-60. "Is There an Essence of Human Nature?" In Leroy S. Rouner, ed. Is There a Human Nature. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1997: 92109. "A New Confucian Lament for Alienation." In Leroy S. Rouner, ed. Loneliness. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998: 258-72. "Lewis S. Ford's Theology: A Critical Appreciation." Process Studies. 27:1-2, 1998: 18-33. "The Contingency of Nature." In R. S. Cohen and A. I. Tauber, eds. Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension. Dordrecht, Holland, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998: 121-37. "Motif Analysis East and West." In Rolf Elberfeld, Johann Kreuzer, John Minford, and Guenter Wohlfart, eds. Komparative Philosophic Begegnung zwischen oestlichen und westlichen Denkwegen. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1998: 197-212. "Mar Thoma Family Conference Keynote Address." Mar Thoma Messenger. 17:3, July 1998: 6-10. "Going Global." Interview with Robert Neville by Anja Steinbauer. Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas. 22, Winter 1998: 8. "Orientation, Self, and Ecological Posture." In Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong, eds. Confucianism and Ecology. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Center for Study of World Religions, 1998: 265:71. "Knowing and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Epistemologa" Process Studies. 28:3-4, 1999: 356-58. "Christianity and Time." Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin. 12, 1999: 8-14. "Responding to My Critics." In J. Harley Chapman and Nancy K. Frankenberry, eds. Interpreting Neville. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999: 291-328. "Existential Conceptions of Love in Confucianism and Christianity." In Marko Zlomislic and David Goicoechea, eds. Jen Agape Tao with Tu Warning Binghamton, NY: Global Publications, 1999: 199-219. With Jaakko Hintikka, Ernest Sosa, Alan M. Olson and Stephen Dawson. "Series Introduction." In Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy. 12 vols. Bowling Green, Oh.: Philosophy Documentation Center and Bowling Green State University, 1999-2001.

NEVILLE PUBLICATIONS

397

"Eternity and the Time of Education." In Tom Rockmore, ed. Metaphysics: The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress ofPhilosophy. Vol. 2. Bowling Green, Oh.: Philosophy Documentation Center and Bowling Green State University, 1999: 237-43. "A Pragmatic Semiotic Theory of Religious Symbolism." In Lieven Boeve and Kurt Feyaerts, eds. Metaphor and God-talk. Bern: Peter Lang, 1999: 15-32. "The Compleat Metaphysician: A Conversation with Robert Cummings Neville." A Soundings interview by Ralph V. Norman. Soundings. 82:3-4, 1999: 339-56. "Philosophy at the Beginning of New Millennium." In Michael Tobias, J. Patrick Fitzgerald and David Rothenberg, eds. A Parliament of Minds. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000: 2-13. "Tu Weiming's Confucianism." International Review of Chinese Religion and Philosophy. 5, 2000: 163-94. "The Dialectic of Being in Cross-Culturai Perspective." In William Desmond and Joseph Grange, eds. Being and Dialectic: Metaphysics and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000: 179-95. "Interkulterelle Verstaendigung und die reale Moeglichkeit religioeser Wahrheit." In Engelbert Gross and Thomas Schreijaeck, eds. Religion im Dialog der Kulturen: Kontextuelle religioese Bildung und interkulterelle Kompetenz. Muenster: LIT, 2000: 15-22. "Methodology Practices and Discipline in Chinese and Western Philosophy." In Bo Mou, ed. Two Roads to Wisdom? Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions. LaSalle, 111.: Open Court, 2001: 27-44. "Perennial Philosophy in a Public Context." In Lewis Edwin Hahn, Randall E. Auxier and Lucian W. Stone, Jr., eds. The Philosophy ofSeyyed Hossein Nasr. The Library of Living Philosophers 28. LaSalle, 111.: Open Court, 2001: 169-89. "God in Nature: Symbolic Reference and Reframing the Question of Divine Action." In William Desmond, John Steffen and Koen Decoster, eds. Beyond Conflict and Reduction: Between Philosophy Science and Religion. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001: 67-95. "The Tao Encounters the West: Explorations in Comparative Philosophy." Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 69:1, 2001: 244-48. "Preface to the Comparative Religious Ideas Project." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. The Human Condition; Ultimate Realities', and Religious Truth. All three volumes, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: xvxxvi, xv-xxvi, and xiii-xxiv, respectively. With Wesley J. Wildman. "Introduction." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. The Human Condition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 1-7. With Wesley J. Wildman. "On Comparing Religious Ideas." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. The Human Condition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 9-20.

398

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

With Wesley J. Wildman. "Comparative Hypotheses: Cosmological Categories for the Human Condition." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. The Human Condition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 175-235. "Comparative Hypotheses: Personal and Social Categories for the Human Condition." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. The Human Condition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 237-65. With Wesley J. Wildman. "Introduction." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Ultimate Realities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 1-8. With Wesley J. Wildman. "Comparative Conclusions about Ultimate Realities." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Ultimate Realities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 151-85. With Wesley J. Wildman. "On Comparing Religious Ideas." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Ultimate Realities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 187-210. Second author with WesleyJ. Wildman. "How Our Approach to Comparison Relates to Others." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Ultimate Realities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 211-36. With WesleyJ. Wildman. "Introduction." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Religious Truth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 1-6. With WesleyJ. Wildman. "Religious Truth in the Six Traditions: A Summary." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Religious Truth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 145-69. With Wesley J. Wildman. "A Contemporary Understanding of Religious Truth." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Religious Truth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 172-201. Second author with WesleyJ. Wildman. "On the Nature of Religion: Lessons We Have Learned." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Religious Truth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 203-17. "Director's Conclusions to the Comparative Religious Ideas Project." In Robert Cummings Neville, ed. Religious Truth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001: 219-25. "Unity and Diversity in Theological Education: The Problem of Contextuality." In Hendrik R. Pieterse, ed. Serving God with Heart and Mind: A Festschrift in Honor of Roger W. Ireson. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001: 73-90. "The Contributions of C. S. Peirce to Contemporary Philosophy of Religion." Cognitio - Revista de Filosofia. 2, 2001: 134-60. "Neoplatonism in Contemporary Christian Spirituality." In R. Baine Harris, ed. Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought. 2 vols. Studies in Neoplatonism: Ancient and Modern 10-11. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002: vol. 2, 363-81. "Response to Thomas Berry's The Great Work.'" Worldviews. 5, 2001: 136-41. "Christian Theological Education and Other Religions." Focus. Winter 20012002:9-11.

399

NEVILLE PUBLICATIONS

"Two Forms of Comparative Philosophy." Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. 1:1, 2001: 1-13. "Phenomenology and Pragmatism." In Babette E. Babich, ed. Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh's Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor ofPatrick A. Heelan, S.J. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002: 323-34. "Daoist Relativism Ethical Choice and Normative Measure." Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 29:1, 2002: 5-20. "On the Complexity of Theological Literacy." In Rodney L. Petersen with Nancy M. Rourke, eds. Theological Literacy for the Twenty-First Century. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002: 39-54. "Contextualization and the Non-obvious Meaning of Religious Symbols: New Dimensions to the Problem of Truth." Neue Zeitschrift Fuer Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie. 44, 2002: 71-88. "Courage: Heroes and Anti-heroes." In Barbara Darling-Smith, ed. Courage. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002: 119-31; published also in Focus, Spring 2001: 7-10. "The Project of Boston Confucianism." In Bo Bou, ed. Comparative approaches to Chinese Philosophy. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003: 185-204. "Creation and Cosmology." In Timothy Walter Bartel, ed. Comparative Theology: Essays for Keith Ward. London: SPCK, 2003: 120-31. "A Peircean Theory of Religious Interpretation." In Pragmatism and Religion: Classical Sources and Original Essays. In Stuart Rosenbaum, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003: 277-302. "Biomedical Technology: A Theological Approach." In Peter D. Hershock, Marietta Stepaniants, and Roger T. Ames, eds. Technology and Cultural Values on the Edge of the Third Millennium. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003: 132-38. Encyclopedia articles in J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, ed.-in-chief. Encyclopedia of Religion and Science. 2 vols. New York: Macmillian Reference, 2003. "Imagination," 1:446-49; "Theology," 2:882; "Theology, Theories of," 2:882-88; "Value, Religious," 2:915-17. "Metaphysics in Contemporary Chinese Philosophy." The Journal of Chinese Philosophy. 30:3-4, 2003: 313-26. "The Church in Review: Is the True Mission of the United Methodist Church to Make Disciples ofJesus Christ?" Quarterly Review. 23:4, 2003: 425-31.

Forewords "Foreplay." To Kuang-ming Wu. Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1982. To Tu Wei-Ming. Confucian Thought: Selfhood As Creative Transformation. Albany New York: State University of New York Press, 1985. To Rodney L. Taylor. The Religious Dimensions of Confucianism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

400

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

To Cheng Chung-ying. New Dimensions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. To Paul A. Bogaard and Gordon Treash, eds. Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. To Joseph A. Bracken, S.J. The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link between East and West. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995. To Robert S. Corrington. Nature's Religion. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. To Paul Weiss. Surrogates. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. To Xinyan Jiang, ed. The Examined Life - Chinese Perspectives: Essays on Chinese Ethical Traditions. Binghamton, NY: Global Publications, 2002.

Contributors

Thomas J. J. Altizer is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, State University of New York at Stony Brook. John H. Berthrong is Associate Dean for Academic and Administrative Affairs and Associate Professor of Comparative Theology at the Boston University School of Theology. Rolf Bouma is Adjunct Professor, Program in the Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Joseph A. Bracken, S J., is Retired Professor of Theology and Emeritus Director of the Edward B. Brueggeman Center for Dialogue, Xavier University. Rufus Burrow, Jr., is Indiana Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of Theological Social Ethics, Christian Theological Seminary. Francis X. Clooney, S.J., is Professor of Theology, Boston College. John B. Cobb, Jr., is Emeritus Professor, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate School. James H. Cone is Charles A. Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary, New York. Gabriel Fackre is Abbot Professor of Christian Theology Emeritus, Andover Newton Theological School. Warren G. Frisina is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Hofstra University.

402

THEOLOGY IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Syed Nomanul Haq is Visiting Faculty, Department of the History of Art and of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Ray L. Hart is Professor of Theology and Philosophy of Religion and Dean ad interim of the Boston University School of Theology. S. Mark Heim is Samuel Abbot Professor of Christian Theology, Andover Newton Theological School. Peter G. Heltzel is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology, New York Theological Seminary. Jennifer Hockenbery is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Mount Mary College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Andrew Irvine is Director of Comparative Religion and Culture with the Friends World Program, Long Island University. Livia Kohn is Professor of Religion and East Asian Studies, Boston University. James Miller is Assistant Professor of East Asian Traditions, Queen's University. Robert Cummings Neville is Dean of Marsh Chapel and Professor of Religion, Philosophy and Theology, Boston University. Steve Odin is Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Harold H. Oliver is Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology, Boston University. Rodney L. Petersen is Executive Director of The Boston Theological Institute. Kurt Anders Richardson is Howard & Shirley Bentall Chair in Evangelical Thought, McMaster Divinity College, and Professor in the University Faculty of Theology, McMaster University.

CONTRIBUTORS

403

John J. Thatamanil is Assistant Professor of Theology, Vanderbilt Divinity School. Wesley J. Wildman is Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics, Boston University. Amos Yong is Associate Professor of Theology, Bethel College, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Name Index

Abduh, Mohammad, 131 Akbar,M.J., 130 Altizer,T.J.J., 19, 230 AFArabi, 121 Al-Ghazali, 121 Ambrose, 245 Anselm, 116 Aquinas, Thomas, 116, 142, 143, 154, 267, 274, 306, 317 Aristotle, 9, 10, 25, 102, 166, 244 Athanasius, 116 Augustine, 10, 116, 154, 196-98, 245, 246, 252, 268, 273, 278, 281-85, 374 Avicenna, 130, 131 Bachelard, Gaston, 249 Baldwin, James, 341, 351 Barr, James, 115 Barth, Karl, 56, 305, 331 Bentham, Jeremy, 102 Berdyaev, Nicolai, 362 Berger, Peter, 54, 70 Berry, Thomas, 137, 381 Birch, Charles, 102 Blake, William, 253, 256, 275 Bodhidharma, 154 Boehme, Jacob, 246, 249, 251, 253, 258,362 Boethius, 116,278 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 82, 339 Boulding, Elise, 51 Bowne, Borden Parker, 76 Bracken, Joseph, 215 Brightman, Edgar S., 78 Brumbaugh, Robert, 5 Bruno, Giordano, 249 Buber, Martin, 310 Bultmann, Rudolf, 35, 272

Calvin, John, 13, 142, 143 Casanova, José, 131, 132 Cheng, Chung-ying, 158 Ching, Julia, 144, 147 Chopra, Deepak, 183 Chou Tun-I, 156 Cobb, John B., Jr., 102, 156, 157, 230 Confucius, 24, 138, 144, 154 Cook, David, 53 Dante, 272 Deats, Paul, Jr., 76 Delza, Sophia, 138 Derrida, Jacques, 266, 268 Descartes, Rene, 9, 24, 25, 102, 140 Desmond, William, 250 Dewey, John, 39, 163, 358 Dilworth, David, 239 DuBois,W. E. B.,351 Durkheim, Emile, 46, 191, 383 Dyck, Arthur J., 97 Eckhart, Meister, 213, 214, 218, 249, 253, 254, 260, 265, 317, 362, 384 Eliade, Mircea, 38, 66, 73, 363 Eliot, T. S., 245 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 109 Eriugena, John Scotus, 251, 256, 265 Falk, Richard, 46, 47 Fletcher, Joseph, 78 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 108 Foucault, Michel, 298 Freud, Sigmund, 166 Friedman, Thomas, 72

406 Galeano, Eduardo, 340 Gaon, Saadya, 249 Garfield, Jay, 232, 237 Geertz, Clifford, 130 Gibbs, Jewelle Taylor, 87, 89 Girard, Rene, 296-98, 373 Goldziher, Ignaz, 128 Gole, Nilùfer, 72 Goodman, Lenn, 130 Gopin, Marc, 50 Gould, Thomas, 70, 71 Gregory of Nyssa, 116 Griffin, David Ray, 156, 157 Grotius, Hugo, 340 Gutas, Dmitri, 127-28, 382 Hairston, Pamela A., 348 Hartshorne, Charles, 331 Hauerwas, Stanley, 106, 139, 149 Havelock, Eric, 61, 69 Hegel, G. W. E, 9. 24, 25, 31, 269, 270, 274, 275 Heidegger, Martin, 266, 268, 270, 272, 273, 275 Heim, S. Mark, 330, 336 Herzog, Fred, 343, 378 Hick, John, 330 Hiebert, Paul, 56-57 Hildegard of Bingen, 278 Hopkins, Jeffrey, 232 Huntington, Samuel, 49 Hurston, Zora Neale, 351 Hurtado, Larry, 110 Huxley, Aldous, 180 Ibn Khaldun, 130 Irenaeus, 281 Jacobsen, Nils-Olof. 181 James, William, 7,13, 109 Jaspers, Karl, 79 Jeremias, Joachim, 114 John of the Cross, 253 John Paul II, 43 Johnson, Luke Timothy, 109

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

Jones, Judith, 311 Josephus, 247 Joyce, James, 272, 274-275 Juergensmeyer, Mark, 56, 72 Julian of Norwich, 278 Justin Martyr, 116 Kahler, Martin, 109 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 14, 19, 25, 152, 248, 280 Karamustafa, Ahmet, 129 Keller, Catherine, 225 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 49, 53, 77, 339, 342, 344, 347, 378 Kogon, Eugene, 86 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 260, 267 Lac tan this, 116 Langewiesche, William, 74 Laozi, 154, 190 Leahy, D. G., 272 Leibniz, Gottfried W., 9, 25, 149 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 268, 275 Lewis, Bernard, 130 Lindbeck, George, 109 Lincoln, Bruce, 67 Linzey, Andrew, 106 Liu Shuxian, 147-148 Locke, John, 140 Lu Dongbin, 190 Luther, Martin, 249 Malcolm X, 341, 347 Marx, Anthony W., 56 Marx, Karl, 165 Mengzi, 146 Midgley, Mary, 97,100 Milbankjohn, 117 Moltmann, Jurgen, 335 Moore, G. E., 96 Morris, Charles, 331 Mou Zongsan, 146, 147 Muelder, Walter G., 75, 107 Mutaliyar, M. Appacami, 203, 207, 210

407

NAME INDEX

Nagarjuna, 229-39, 384 Nelson, Lance, 217 Newman, John Henry, 249 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 117, 259 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 83, 337, 344, 345, 349, 351 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31, 270, 275, Ockham, William, 251 Oliver, Harold H., 227 Ong, Walter, 69, 70, 71 Oosthuizen, G. C , 41-42 Otto, Rudolf, 66, 250 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 114 Parmenides, 246 Paul, St., 270-73, 335 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 5-9, 39, 55, 101,141,163,165,189,329, 331, 359 Philo, 9 Placher, William, 226 Plato, 5, 6, 9, 24, 25, 60, 62, 63, 71, 139,245,246,253,263,281, 284, 358, 376 Plotinus, 25, 266, 267, 269, 273 Popper, Karl, 123 Prinz, Joachim, 349, 350 Pythagoras, 246 Rahner, Karl, 117,305 Ramakrishna, 154 Ricoeur, Paul, 360 Robb, Carol, 76 Rolston, Holmes, III, 105-06 Rorty, Richard, 7, 284 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 56 Royce, Josiah, 9 Sabra,A.L, 123, 125-28,382 Said, Edward, 73, 125, 127 Sankara, 214-22, 224, 225, 383, 384 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 77, 85, 260 Scharlemann, Robert, 114, 251, 384 Schelling, Friedrich, 13, 25

Schleiermacher, F. D. E., 16, 20, 21, 385 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 31 Schreiter, Robert, 54 Schweitzer, Albert, 102 Scotus, John Duns, 5, 10, 11, 16, 18,21 Sherburne, Donald, 156 Singer, Peter, 102 Skinner, B. E, 166 Smart, Ninian, 232 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 142, 144 Socrates, 59, 263 Spinoza, Benedict, 9, 16, 25, 143, 250, 269 Streng, Frederick, 232 Suchocki, Marjorie, 311 Tanner, Kathryn, 226 Tatian, 10 Taylor, Rodney, 144 Tertullian, 116 Thatamanil, John J., 73, 234, 358 Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, 10 Thoreau, David, 109, 243 Thielicke, Helmut, 78-85, 87, 88 Thurman, Howard, 49, 351 Tillich, Paul, 19, 37, 92, 109, 214, 219-24, 316, 320, 384 Toulmin, Stephen, 63, 70, 71 Tracy, David, 47-48 Troeltsch, Ernst, 35 TuWeiming, 144, 147 Urban, Wilbur, 332 Wagner, Richard, 31 Wang Yangming, 145, 146 Webb, Stephen, 106, 382 Weigel, George, 53 Weiss, Paul, 8, 9, Wells-Barnett, Ida, 351 Wesley, Charles, 143 Whitehead, Alfred North, 9, 25,138, 148, 152, 156, 157, 166, 230,

408 281, 303, 304, 306, 307, 310-13, 317, 318, 321, 322, 361, 362 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 55, 233, 262, 280,359 Wright, Richard, 351 Wyschogrod, Michael, 337 Xunzi, 146, 147 Zhang Sanfeng, 190 Zheng Zhongying, 147 Zhou Dunyi, 148 ZhuXi, 146, 148, 150

THEOLOGY IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT