Greatest Living Christian Rhetoritician?
July 16, 2009
In many circles of scholastic theology, the theological discourse can take on an entirely dry and mathmatical flavor. As if, in perfect neutrality and impartiality, one is disclosing the secrets of the world. However ‘true’ some of these types of treatise’s might be, it can be understandable that I might lose interest. I’m certain of the fact that had I been tested as a child I would have been diagnosed with ADD.
I myself enjoy bombastic rhetoric. Rhetoric need not imply sophistry or veiled-falsehood. It can be coupled with precise argumentation and imagination and it can put joy into reading scholarly works. This is why Gordon D Fee can be much more enjoyable to read than many other exegetes. The man doesn’t pull any punches.
In the theological/philosophical world of today we have been blessed with a movement bravely entitled “Radical Orthodoxy.” Feasting as they do on modern Continental thought and mocking the false safety of analytical philosophy, RO, and many who could broadly fall under its banner, have given us royal treats in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Graham Ward, Stanley Hauerwas and David Bentley Hart (among others).
But who among them can claim to reign supreme as lord of language?
There is of course Stanley Hauerwas. A feisty Texan-high church methodist (though I do believe he is Episcopalian these days) known for his powerful testimony against liberalism and for the Church. He has given us such treasures as
(in reference to “Atonement theories”)“If you need a theory to worship Jesus go worship your fucking theory” and
“Fighting violence with bombs is like screwing for virginity”
But I don’t think he can take the cake.
We might also point to the honorable ‘high-church Anglican’ John Milbank, student of the ABC Rowan Williams. Turning randomly into his “Theology and Social Theory” (an absolute must read) we can see him at work.
“Parsonian sociology attempts to conjoin the ‘liberal Protestant meta-narrative’ as articulated by Weber and Troeltsch. . . with the evolution of Herbert Spencer which was part of his English adaptation of Comtean positivism. In the Parsonian niew, society evolves through a process of gradual differentiation into separate social sub-systems: gradually art is distinguished from religion, religion from politics, economics from private ethical behaviour and so forth. The upshot of this process is (as for Weber) that it is now possible for something to be beautiful without being good or true, and possible for there to be a valid exercise of power without it having a bearing on either goodness or truth. At the same time, a realm of ‘pure’ science emerges which (as in Spinoza’s ideal of intellectual freedom) can pursue truth independently of coercive pressure, or of practical consequences.” TST, 2nd ed, Blackwell p128
But still he cannot out-maneuver the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. From his stunning “The Beauty of the Infinite” to his devestating “Atheist Delusions,” Hart, it is often complained, cannot be read without the Oxford English Dictionary as his vocabulary is composed of so many odd and normally unused words (not counting his own neo-logisms) that it takes ages just to get through a book. Be that as it may, he is never shy on vitrolic attacks on bad ideas and unbounded praise of the God who is God-in-Trinity. Here are two quotes taken at random from his “The Beauty of the Infinite”
“But Nietzsche also reminds theology how great is its rhetorical burden. The story of being that Christianity tells, of creation as a word of peace whose ultimate promise is also peace, looks so very frail standing alongside the imposing figures of “history” and “nature,” in their blood-dyed robes, trailing their clouds of contingency, cruelty, and ambiguity; the protological and eschatalogical tensions within the Christian story leave it vulnerable to the accusation of irresponsible idealism, or of an unwillingness to rein its narrative in when its messianic horizon threatens to engulf the clarity of “realist” thinking in a night of mythical abstraction (theology, not always unaware of this, even occasionally attempts to construct one or another kind of political “realism” of its own, even though this can be accomplished only through a series of tactical apostasies).127 – please note that that is one single sentence!
“What is truth?” – “If Christ, the eternal Word, is the Father’s “supreme rhetoric,” then the truth of his evangel is of a very particular kind. As soon as one ventures appreciably past the bounds of logic’s unadorned and uncontroversial claims (and sometimes before one gets that far), one finds that what is called truth is usually a consensus wrested from diversity amid a war of persuasions, the victor’s crown of laurels laid upon the brow of whichever dialectical antagonist has better (for the time being) succeeded in rendering invisible his argument’s own ambiguities and contradictions (has better, that is, concealed the more purely rhetorical moments of his argument in the folds of his apparently unanswerable “logic”); and into the tumult of history Christ comes as a persuasion among persuasions, a Word made entirely flesh, entirely form, whose appeal lies wholly at the surface…”331
Take up and read.
Religious Pluralism & The Social Sciences
January 30, 2009
Rublev: Rowan Williams
“One day, God walked in, pale from the grey steppe,
slit-eyed against the wind, and stopped,
said, Colour me, breathe your blood into my mouth.I said, Here is the blood of all our people,
these are their bruises, blue and purple,
gold, brown, and pale green wash of death.These (god) are the chromatic pains of flesh,
I said, I trust, I make you blush,
O I shall stain you with the scars of birthFor ever. I shall root you in the wood,
under the sun shall bake you bread
of beechmast, never let you forthto the white desert, to the starving sand.
But we shall sit and speak around
one table, share one food, one earth.”
My mom recently commented that I do not post as much as I used to. That is because I’m back in school and have substantially more homework than I did last semester and over Christmas break. But I wanted to throw in my initial two cents in on Jeremy’s posts so far on religious pluralism.
Unfortunately it will not be quite as thorough as I should like it to be, but I will still attempt to (very) briefly demonstrate why I believe the foundations for his pluralist position is in fact the “out-of-date” or “not-relevant” system.
It is not insignificant that Jeremy has thus far begun and ended his system not at all based on any religion, or even his own personal religious experience; but rather on the backs of social scientists. He gives us a grand and sweeping account of the “history of religions” and then turns to religious scientists to determine the definition(s?!) of religion.
“The problem of Meta-narrative in the “history of religions”
The large and sweeping problem off the bat is that the account of the history of religions is itself a meta-narrative of history. It says, in essense that religious history is going somewhere - “First there was primitive religion, then the axial age, then Islam emphasised compassion, now pluralism, etc…” – and that is not where it is now nor is it where it has been.
Part of deconstructing is attempting, insofar as it is possible and aparently truthful, to deconstruct even ones own presuppositions, and it is this tendency which has led me, though appreciating insights which have come of thinking in terms of the words “pre-, modern, and post-modern (even post-post-modern!)” to ultimately come to reject the notion that history is neatly divideable up into epochs where thought was broadly uniform and the presuppositions the same; whereby we are able to box people and ideas up for critique en masse. I have learned in reading some of the classic western philosophy lately, is that it is a myth to posit that it was only in the “Enlightenment” where “reason” became the base authority. A look at Socrates, Plato, and the many skeptics in our “history of thought” reveals that the same motivation for Socrates to reject the many gods of his native Athens is the same reason that led to “Enlightenment” thinkers to reject the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Plato was just as convinced as Rousseau that reason as opposed to revelation could be counted on to give an objective, ontologically-true account of the (uni)versal reality apart from intervening spiritualities and deities to explain the unexplainable.
Which is why I think that it is simply inaccurate to speak in terms of what religions were doing or saying during specific “eras.” The very idea of “eras” is so frustrating since it is nothing but an interpretive tool on the page. The closest we might get to an accurate account of thought over time might be to speak of “schools” but not “eras.” Especially when said “eras” become a tool of oppressive violence to another’s belief system.
“The problem of the secular in the “history of religions”
As Shawn Wamsley just asserted commenting on Jeremy’s second post, narratives cannot be universalized to be demonstrably true outside of their own meta-narratives. The bare fact of the matter is that the assertions of accouts of the history of religions are done amongst the intellectual elite in the houses of learning still living under the mistaken assumption that they can give an objective account both of history and of “religions”; of what it is, of where it is going, what it means, and what we should do about it. It defines religion, (which it cannot do succinctly enough so it must resort to multiple definitions of religion), it defines the distinguishing marks of religion, it defines the “eternal core” of those religions, and it decides what we as a society must do about it. If there is one thing I learned in Cultural Anthropology and Environmental Science, it is not a lot about other cultures or about anthropogenic global warming, but about the idealogical core of the social sciences and their own meta-narratives.
(I hope this does not to sound too nasty)
At the end of the day, I believe modern-western religious pluralism is nothing but the bastard child of secularism and its exultation of “reason” over the rest of the world.
(Lest that seem to make me a fundamentalist, consider that Walter Brueggemann himself, no conservative by any estimation, consistently says that it is secularism which is at the heart of the decline in the Mainline.) What it is is an account of the history and truthfulness of religions as critiqued by its own presumption. Though some social scientists might recognize the reality of “the trancendent (as defined by them),” ultimately it says to the great faiths “Thanks for getting us this far, we’ll take it from here. Moreover, we will personally decide what it is which actually counts for something from your religion, and in time, if you attend enough of our Universities, you will come to see it our way.” It says what “god(s)” (as we define or don’t define the term) really wants. But, religious pluralism bases this not on a belief in the revealing work of “god” but its own “objective” accounts of the faiths.
“The irrelevency of the social sciences, broadly conceived”
Jeremy posited that given the nature of our knowing about the world and about religions; and given that we are in an unavoidable pluralistic context, “exclusivist” religion is “no longer relevant” This seems to be an important phrase for Jeremy since he will not assert that “exclusivist” faith is itself “wrong.” This allows him a greater shield against the critique often leveled against religious monists and pluralists alike that their own system is “exclusive in its own way.” Yet, the foundations for his pluralism is based on the violent exlusivism of the western social sciences.
Oddly enough, given the post-modern critique, and especially the “radical orthodox” critique continually developing in post-liberal anglo-catholicism (with which I continually find myself agreeing), it is Jeremy’s intellectual foundations which are “irrelevant” as they have been crumbling since at least the time of Derrida, Focoult, Rory and Gadamer among others.
Now all of this is not to say anything negative about Jeremy. Jeremy is actually one of the most compassionate and generous people I know (that is not an exageration); but as long as his reasoning for religious pluralism is dependent on the social sciences and not on the revealing love and activity of the Holy Trinity, then I am going to have to remain unconvinced.
Beer II.I – Beers of the Former British Empire – Pale Ales
January 30, 2009
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“How very good and pleasant it is when kindred drink together in unity!
It is like the precious ale on the head, running down upon the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down over the collar of his robe.
It is like the India Pale Ale of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion.
For there the Lord ordained his blessing, beer forevermore” – Psalm 133:1-3 – NRSV (with my changes in light of the original Hebrew text)
Beers can be divided at their broadest into two types…Ales and Lagers. This is due to the different kinds of yeast used and how they are fermented. Ales use a “top fermenting” yeast. The yeast mostly floats on top and is usually ferments between 70 and 80 degrees. Lagers use, you guessed it, “bottom fermenting” yeast. They are generally fermented between 50 to 65 degrees, often for longer periods of time.
We will examine some beer families, discuss flavor profiles, and in keeping with our commitment to break down the sacred/secular divide, we shall also discuss theological pairings as James did in his series on the sweet weed.
British Isle Beers: Ireland, Scotland and England
When describing “BSI (British, Irish, Scottish) beers” I like to imagine a number line where Pale Ale is 0 and the other beers go either positive or negative, indicating increasing and decreasing amounts of ingredients and complexity. Not that beers to the “left”( ie-Bitters, Milds, et al) are not complex in their own right, but they tend to feature less ingredients and so there are less waves of flavors to draw from. Let us also imagine there being blurry borders between beer styles, for instance it can be difficult to describe the distinct difference between a mild Pale Ale and an Extra Special Bitter, but we shall do our best.
Starting from the left of this imaginary beer line we can begin with the “Mild Ale” “Milds” are generally a deep maroon color from slow roasted malts. They are “mildly” hopped so that the predominate flavor is the sweet malt. “Milds” tend to have a low alchohol% and so can be drunk with abandon without becoming abandoned of ones wits. This pairs well anything by or about St. Francis of Assisi or St. Thomas Aquinas, those gentle genius’s…An Ox and an apostle- to-the-animals. . . so mild
Enter the Bitter! The “Bitter” ale is a paradox, much like The Trinity, much like good theology. You see, it is not actually bitter at all! Well, it is in comparison to Milds and Scots, wherefrom came its namesake, but a “Bitter” can usually be counted on to go down easily, be warm in the malt – malts that are neither too smooth, nor too bright – and have a fruity but gentle hop flavor. A true “session” beer, a Bitter can go well with many kinds of food, from Asian stir-fry to Fish and Chips, and it can be drunk several pints over without being put-over a bar stool. If you should find an “Extra Special Bitter,” you should know that “Extra Special” refers to more hops and more malt. It is the same for an “Extra Pale Ale.” A Bitter will be less acidic than a Pale Ale but not as fruity as an India Pale Ale. I tend to contemplate a Social Trinity with a good Bitter, especially if you are contemplating it with a Southern Baptist, who, for all their bitter fundamentalism, have never been able to be teetolaters.
In the “0″ position we have my “center” beer. . . The Pale Ale. The “pale” refers to the color and roast of the malts. A Pale Ale will have a heavier malt and hop load than a Bitter; it will have more malt than an IPA but less hops. In the Twin Cities we are blessed enough to have one of the single greatest examples of this style: “Summit Extra Pale Ale” Its widespread popularity means that even if you are in a dive’iest of bars, where they have an “assortment” of american lagers, they are bound to have Summit EPA on draft. This beer, as I said, is a massively influential “transition beer,” many a domestic drinker has been exposed to the wonders of hops by this beer, which also pairs well with many foods, and is available for $20 for 2-12 packs at Costco. Consider this a beer for all occasions and thinkers. From Origen to Volf, one always needs a “standby” to fill in for occasions where everyone can be happy.
Further now to the right of center, one of my favorite styles, the India Pale Ale. Historically speaking this was an ale light on the malt, but massively infused with hops in order to be able to withstand the journey from England to India (hence India Pale Ale). Though many American brewers experiement (quite well) with varying levels and roasts of malts, one should expect the beer to be a bright orange and have bright malt flavors. This beer is all about the hops. The huge amount of hops make this beer rather high in alcohol content, and many a sailor has lost the north star because of this. Now American and English versions do differ in certain respects. If American beers are good at anything (and they are good at everything), they are the world champions of understanding and utilizing hops. We have singularly turned the IPA into a transcultural phenomenon. More than a few beer snobs count this style their favorite. While the flavor can of course be spectacular, it is the aroma that make this ale the King of american craft beers. Depending on the hop variety it can be grapefruity, pineappley, always citrusy, always fruity, and not a little bitter. In the drinking, one often has hints of orange and spices. One of the worlds greatest beers (no I am not exagerating) is the IPA, Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, from the Kalamazoo Brewing Co. Have it with asian food, have it with fish, have it on a hot summer day, have it always; but especially when reading Voyage of the Dawntreader, Moby Dick, contemplating the early creed ICTHUS, or anything else fish related.
Related is the DoubleIPA, sometimes called an Imperial IPA. That’s right, a double. Basically you take the same pale malt base, add the amount of hops for a normal IPA, and double it. Thus squeezing your balls in a rapturous vice of hop-heaven. This is not a beer to be trifled with or to be take lightly. Again, Bell’s does not disappoint, check out their Hopslam and hope you survive the encounter. One should read post-critical theology as this beer can highten your mental capacity: try Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank and Rowan Williams
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