We See in a Glass Darkly

So, what's my dissertation about? Thanks for asking. And I'll try to tell you without your eyes rolling back in your head.

First, its about theology, or how we think and talk about God. If God is living and active, engaging the world, then there should be some evidence of that. From this perspective, theology is about God, not just the history of ideas about God. And if this is the case, then theology should be done in the world and for the world, not just in a library. That's one thing my dissertation is about.

Second, its about salvation. God's engagement with the world, from a Christian perspective, is a saving engagement. Thinking of salvation this way requires a larger view than what we typically have, and in my estimation it requires a more biblical view. Salvation in the Bible is bigger than an individual's status or eternal destiny. If we expand our view, then we will look at what God is up to differently. That's another thing my dissertation is about.

Third, its about what counts as data. Talk of God's involvement in the world is tricky business and much harm is done in the endeavor. An earthquake in Haiti or a hurricane in the gulf or the prosperity of a particular person or group are too casually assigned to God's agency in the world. We have, for a long time now, been conditioned to think of the world in relation to strict causation. If "a," then "b." This is a good way to think about some things, but not everything, and especially not complex things. As Paul says, we see in a glass darkly and need to develop both a particular perception and some modesty about our claims. How we attend to the world conditions what understandings we develop. I am suggesting that Paul's phrase "being saved" represents a particular way of engaging the world that produces a unique wisdom. It represents a particular type of practical reasoning that both uncovers and enacts a particular way of being with God in the world. This is another thing my dissertation is about.

Fourth, congregations are not typically good at this. Other kinds of practical reasoning tend to dominate congregational life--like problem solving or strategic planning. And these get in the way of an imagination rooted in God's saving engagement with the world. How would congregations actually develop competence in this way of viewing the world? So, my dissertation is about the work I'm actually doing with two congregations as we kind of experiment along these lines together. This is another thing my dissertation is about.

How's that sound? Thanks for asking.

Disclosing Truth: Some Preliminary Ideas

OK, bear with me here. Let me try some ideas out on you. If they don't make sense to you, don't take it personally. I'm not sure they make sense to me either. And I'm not sure where to begin (beginnings are so important in an argument).

But let's start with Martin Heidegger (I know, collective moan). Heidegger was a German philosopher who wrote a very important book, Being and Time, in 1927 (let's put aside for the moment that he later supported the National Socialist Party. I hate when that happens. In the words of Indiana Jones, "Nazis! I hate Nazis!"). Part of the importance of this book is that he challenged the way the Western philosophical tradition has thought of being going all the way back to the Greeks (we call a theory of being an ontology). Before Heidegger, Western notions of being or reality might be described as substantialist. (I know, I asked you to bear with me. This is what I meant). By this, people like Aristotle meant that the first things to talk about when describing being are substances. Qualities or relations follow after first discovering the essence of a substance.

By the time this ontology reaches a guy like Descartes, being is defined primarily in relation to subjects and objects (and this primarily in spatial, not temporal categories, but that won't be on the test). The rational, doubting subject becomes the center of ontology. What's the one thing Descartes couldn't doubt? The fact that he was doubting. Ergo, "I think, therefore, I am."

After Descartes, the question for philosophers is how is the subject related to the object--through reason or experience? Philosophers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant go different directions here, but they both start with a substantialist ontology. And if you think this is a simply an exercise in theoretical speculation, the way most of us think about our faith is totally substantialist. Trust me for now. You have skin in this game. I may come back to this in a later post.

Ok, here's the payoff (have you already gone back to watching Desperate Housewives?). If you think of reality in terms of subjects and objects, then truth usually gets thought of as an object waiting to be discovered. It is this self-contained little geography, this already defined continent of ideas or facts. We dis-cover it.

But Heidegger challenged all of that. For Heidegger there was something that preceded the knowing subject--being itself, what he called Da-sein (there-to be). Heidegger thought that once you split the world into subjects and objects, it was difficult truly to get at being. We are not simply rational subjects making sense of the characteristics or properties of objects. We don't stand at arms length from being, examining it. We are entangled in it. Being happens to us. We interpret our lives as they unfold. We know things through taking care, through empathy or being with, not just through detachment and empirical observation. Da-sein is not simply what we know about. It's what we know with.

Heidegger challenges substantialist notions of truth that he terms "derivative." From this point of view, we have truth when there is an agreement of a proposition with its object (I know, I know, hang with me here). But for Heidegger, if you move away from a substantialist ontology truth is defined as a being-true. It is not simply a proposition that you can separate from the rest of life. Truth is not so much discovered as disclosed through what Heidgger refers to as attunement, understanding, and discourse. Truth here is messier to get at, but in the end possesses more angles of reference than a substantialist notion of truth.

Now clearly, when we talk about truth, we tend to think of it as the Greeks did. But I wonder if this is the way the Bible talks about it. Before we even get to a notion of truth, let's think about our notion of God. Remember, it was the Greeks who defined God as a set of attributes (a substantialist perspective), i.e. omnipotent, omiscient, omnipresent. God is a distant object in Greek metaphysics. So much so that God could not be thought of as suffering, or even being affected by human life (we call this the impassability of God). Most of the early creeds, in my opinion, had a stake at protecting God the Father from the suffering of the Son to satisfy a Greek sensibility.

God here can become an impersonal force. Not so much a judge, but a judgment. But what if God were less a set of attributes, and more a community of persons tied together in suffering love. What if God's way with us was less as total subject (judging), and more as suffering companion (empathizing).

If the latter is the case, then the conditions of possibility for our knowledge of God and the truth would come through caring, suffering companionship with others. Truth would not simply be a deposit of doctrine somewhere, but the knowledge that comes from our taking care in the world through participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. This truth is something revealed, somthing disclosed, something discerned, something practical, and something provisional.

Ok, one last observation. What if salvation is not an object we possess, but a being-true. What if salvation were not only a fixed object, a status, a theory or abstraction. What if salvation consists also in a being saved, in a disclosing, in a revealing, a transformation with others. This, I believe is a far more biblical way of understanding salvation.

I'm not saying that Heidegger got it all right. What he did, however, was pull back the curtain on our massive investment in a substantialist ontology and suggest that there are other ways to get at this business of being. I'm still in the what-if stage with all of this. I have questions about all of this. Heidgger would invite us to do theology without a metaphysics. I like that. Is it completely possible? He invites us away from idealism and materialism with his phenomenological approach. Is it stout enough? But it is promising enough for me to put some weight on it and see, to see what it discloses.

(And for those of you with some PMC, Pat Keifert interest, you might be able to see now why Pat's book is called, We Are Here Now).