Graham Ward: A Minor Annotated Bibliography, Part I
June 14, 2010
This last semester, in order to fulfill some of my Liberal Arts requirements, I took a sociology class on “Cities and Social Change.” A large part of the class is dedicated to a substantive final paper. As I look for chances to combine my schooling with my theological interests, not formally studying theology at this time, I decided to write my paper on the work of Church of England theologian Graham Ward; more specifically his three volume work on Cities. These three are Cities of God, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, and The Politics of Discipleship.
I drew on several other sources as well including the two volumes that he edited and which I reviewed on this blog, The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader and The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology. Especially useful was the introduction to The Postmodern God which engages with a theology of cyberspace. Additionally I read through portions of Christ and Culture and Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory.
It was my original intention to compose a roughly 30 page systematic summary of his cities work but found out (later than I should have liked) that the paper was to be much shorter so I had to completely redo it. In the end I focused specifically on the “Disappearance of the Body in the Postmodern City and the Theological Difference.” Even here I had only space and time to interact mostly with Cities of God, though I also took a fair amount from Discipleship and skipped nearly entirely over Cultural Transformation. I certainly learned a lot about paper writing as I tried to make this my first “real” academic paper. I think I did pretty poorly to be honest.
But what I can do is give a couple notes about approaching Ward and a bit about those books which I was able to work through. We’ll start with his Cities ‘Trilogy.’
Cities of God is a work in the (in)famous Radical Orthodoxy Series published on Routledge. It is divided in three parts. In part one Ward gives genealogies of both “The Modern City – Cities of Eternal Aspiration,” and “The Postmodern City – Cities of Eternal Desire.” In them he traces the fragmentation and social atomism of the body and, if you tie in a future chapter (as I think he should have) – “Communities of Desire” – with this part it ends up making what is to me a persuasive case for Ward’s reading of both cities.
In part two Ward proceeds to outline an “Analogical Worldview” which he thinks that Christian theology can offer. This analogical worldview heals atomism and fragmentation by a sketch of how we are made whole in the Body of Christ. It is here that he also outlines a theological account of the body, drawing in surprising ways on Karl Barth, and a Christian picture of desire.
In Part three, by examining several contemporary ‘angelologies,’ Ward reframes his previous discussion with reference to “Theology and the Practices of Contemporary Living.”
I was surprised to have mixed feelings about this book. I came into it quite sympathetic but I felt at the end as if he opened up more problems and unexplored rabbit holes than he did provide what seemed to me to be sufficient answers. He didn’t maintain a coherent argument throughout; for instance at least one chapter had already been released as an independent essay. Ward was his strongest when he was describing the cultural maladies that beset us in our contemporary urban context.
If one was to approach Ward’s work on cities I would first direct them to The Politics of Discipleship where he plays on many of the same themes as Cities but has obviously spent more time reflecting on weaknesses inherent in this book. I will give a few more critiques after the next two books in the series.
Review: “The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology”
March 28, 2010
- “The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology”
- Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell (November 30, 2004)
- ISBN-10: 1405127198
- ISBN-13: 978-1405127196
My thanks to Blackwell for the review copy!
Church of England clergyman Graham Ward, professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics at the University of Manchester is most notably (notoriously?) known in academic circles as being heavily involved in the so-called “Radical Orthodoxy” movement. But what isn’t often noticed is that Ward has also over the years invested much scholarly energy in bringing continental critical theory into conversation with theology. As I mentioned previously he has written an introductory book of sorts well worth the cost (the book is unjustifiably expensive). That book provides a solid foundation to build on from which one cannot go wrong by then investing time and energy in the collection of essays which he edited, ‘The Postmodern God,” that I reviewed here.
Ward considers “The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology” a continuation of that work and I believe it is best read in conversation with the Postmodern God. Postmodern Theology is another collection of essays dealing in many and various ways with the perceived shift in theological method and exploration in lieu of the demise of the Western narrative of cultural, intellectual and moral progress. This Companion extends the second part of the Postmodern God creating an even more comprehensive picture of how contemporary theology is creating new vistas and destroying old hegemonies.
The Companion is organized into seven categories or parts. In his introduction Ward notes that he was having a difficult time knowing how to organize the essays and had all but decided to simply put them in alphabetical order according to author but at the prodding of Robert Gibbs he reconsidered and came up with seven categories with which to organize the work. The categories are able to allow for the different emphasis’ and approaches of each author to rub up against each other, fill out or critique potential weaknesses, expand potential insights and create overall a more coherent picture of this branch of contemporary theology most in touch with continental thought. The organization can therefore be only a pointer and should not be thought to determine the essays prematurely. As with my previous review, given the nature of the collection and the sheer volume of the book, I will refrain from summarizing each essay but will point to the general structure of the book and its content.
Part I deals with “Aesthetics.” The reader is lucky enough to be presented with the thoughts of some who are not widely known in anglo-american circles, not least among them Mieke Bal, an academic from the Netherlands who has an insanely wide field of research from unique biblical readings to reflections on the paintings of Rembrandt, but also well known figures like Gerard Loughlin. Most of these essays reflect on art, be it paintings, movies or texts.
Part II moves into “Ethics” and features much material that most explicitly deals with traditional dogmatic themes (not that such themes are absent in the other essays, but most in this section will be most clearly understood by even those not familiar with continental thought). Given my own interests this proved to be my favorite section and is alone good enough recommend the book. The authors are well known in Christian circles and feature mostly “postliberal” and “radical orthodox” voices. Stanley Hauerwas and William Placher make appearances as do Milbank, Pickstock and Ward; Gavin D’ Costa and Mark I. Wallace fill out this part.
Part III relates to “Gender.” Several American women mark this section such as Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Serene Jones. The whole part is filled with female voices and the essays are excellent. Among the pieces, Virginia Burrus contributes a splendid essay which deals with the figure of Macrina in St. Gregory of Nyssa’s Dialogue on the Soul and Resurrection and Jones examines what feminist theorists can gain from feminist theologians.
Part IV, with only three essays, is among the shorter sections but contains distinctly Jewish voices such as Peter Ochs and Edith Wyschogrod (I would have loved an audio companion telling me how to pronounce her last name). Ochs essay is helpful for someone like me in that it elucidates the larger Jewish theological spectrum about which I know nothing. I have a theory that that John Piper might have a different opinion than me of Wyschogrod’s essay “Intending Transcendence: Desiring God.”
Part V is concerned with phenomenology and is a phenomenal section of this volume (I’m willing to bet I’m the first to make the semantic connection between these two words). Most of the authors are French Roman Catholics well schooled in Husserl, Heideggar and Derrida. The most famous is Jean-Luc Marion (see especially his “God Without Being”) but there is a brief essay by the largely untranslated Jean-Yves LaCoste and a biblical essay by Richard Kearney, being one of several essays in this book dealing with the Transfiguration. Marion’s essay considers the “Formal Reason for the Infinite” and posits that the very conditions for knowing are themselves Christological. Joseph S. O’Leary’s essay on religious pluralism is also worth an explicit mention. Again, really good.
Parts VI and VII represent what has been called the “postmodern liberalism.” VI entitled “Heideggarians” and VII “Derrideans.” Thomas J. J. Altizer of “Death of God” fame makes an appearance followed immediately by Laurence Paul Hemming on prayer, a more stark difference in product and approach I cannot think, but this goes to show how loose these categories are. The famous hermeneuticist Gianni Vattimo closes this part with an appropriately themed essay on how the Christian message dissolves metaphysics.
The “Derrideans” finish out the book. John D. Caputo is at the top of his game in his “The Poetics of the Impossible and the Kingdom of God” and the remaining essays by Walter Lowe (Is there a Postmodern Gospel?) and Carl Raschke, both widely regarded contemporary theologians, bring the party out with a bang. There is unfortunately also an essay by Don Cuppitt, a “radical” theologian whose influence thankfully was as small as it was short lived, being consigned mostly to the annals of British oddity.
As with it’s sister volume, Ward contributes an introductory essay to the whole edition and all the authors are introduced with brief bio’s, though considering the number of authors the bio’s are justifiably shorter yet surprisingly packed with vital and concise information.
All things considered this book’s greatest strength is also it’s greatest weakness. The material covered, the methods used, the insights gathered, are all so broad as to render the book frustrating when considering the implications in any depth. But it has so many great little essays I cannot but recommend this book. One potential use is as a reference book. A person would have to scrounge around a lot of journals, books and original language material to gather some of these essays. It makes for great “bathroom” reading material, an essay here and essay there for fun, challenge and edification.
But it works best I think as it was designed; as a “Companion” to the Postmodern God Reader. If you consume all or even most of the essays in these two books you’ve set yourself a very broad foundational understanding in the varied braches of contemporary critical theology from which you can go anywhere. This would be especially useful for upper (upper) undergraduate and graduate level readers who are still trying to figure out what the hell they want to study for the rest of their lives.
Still (sort of) A Friend Of
There was a time when I thought of myself as “Emergent.” Indeed, as I have posted before, I have certain significant sympathies with some “Emergent” ideas and thinkers; I’m no Mark Driscoll’ian re-verter to a pre-emergent state. But I’ve most certainly become strongly convinced of Catholic Christianity as received in the patristic horizon and find the unconsumated Derridean “trace” and “never-being” of the Church in some Emergent thought to be rhetorically violent.
Indeed I’ve seen some recent examples of anti-intellectualism that have rather frustrated me. Rather than “naming names” and contributing to the endless use of the internet to anonymously defame people I’m going to stick to the concepts and explain why I think they constitute in some cases a will-to-power and in others a nascent anti-intellectualism.
There have been some using an old narrative to provide a critique of the Church which is quite overused. In regards to how the Church uses and abuses power is very relevant and incisive, but with regards to how the Church reflects theologically, is fundamentally flawed. This old narrative is the one about the “Greek Fall” of the church. The story goes like this: Once upon a time the church was a tiny band of common and egalitarian followers of Jesus who thought “biblically.” Then Nicaea and Constantine happened (yes, the narrative is this simplistic-hence why it is too easy) which “Constantinianized” the church, who lost the “real” “biblical” story and transformed it’s thought into foreign and evil “Greek” “metaphysical” categories of thought. This “Greek Fall” of the church has continued to this day and is finally becoming overthrown by the grassroots emergence thinkers most of whom read a lot of Caputo and Moltmann.
Now I will certainly allow that the way in which the legalization and officialization of Christianity occured gave space for long historical abuses of power. But anyone who thinks that churches and bishops and Christians never abused authority before Constantine is someone who just hasn’t taken any time to read patristic (or New Testament!!!) literature. Similarly, so-called “Greek” thought is used all throughout the New Testament. There are those who use the “GF” narrative sometimes and easily to move from “Greek” ideas in the early church are bad to “Greek” ideas in the New Testament are bad.
There are many problems with this but I’ll keep to one in particular that has me riled up. Cultural mediation goes all the way down. Before NT authors were “using” Greek “ideas” OT authors were using Greek “ideas,” and before that they were using a whole slew of Ancient Near Eastern “ideas.” There is no pure Hebrew narrative and there is no single “biblical” narrative outside of the traditioning communities. We cannot reach back, peel off Greek, or Akkadian, or Babylonian layers and reach some “biblical” “un-philosophical” and “pure” narrative. The logic and the argument fails to convince. People; Narratives; Scriptures; Educations – none of them come in a vacuum.
…Now to another recent incident. There is a longstanding allergy to “systematic theology” in some Emergent thought. At one time I shared such an allergy. I would still reject any presumption to create a systematic theology that sought to close off and totalize it’s narrative but what I’ve come to believe is that what initially may have been a judicious use of Lyotard has turned to a misunderstanding of what he was getting at; or at least how I take Lyotard.
The problem with a “meta-narrative” is not the size and scope of the story being told but the manner in which its truth claims are presented as authoritative. The problem with “modern” narratives is that they laid claim to authority by use of a second story, that of “reason,” to substantiate all knowledge claims. In post-foundational epistemologies to which I am sympathetic, there is no way to reach outside of a narrative to justify and lend authority to the narrative. It’s truthfulness is judged by how well it explains all phenomena that it claims to comprehend and how widely and deeply it’s claims are assumed by authoritative story-telling communities. Such stories can be as large as they can manage and still not be “systematics” in a “modern” fashion provided they allow for critique, for dialectic, for growth and resist totalization and oppression of other voices on a priori grounds.
Now not everybody needs to systematize their theology. But the refusal to dialogue with those who draw out seemingly logical strains implicit in ones own theology, be it “systematic” or not, is to hide behind an anti-intellectual screen at best and if ones own theology constitutes a critique then at worst it constitutes a will-to-power. It hides ones foundations beyond critique while secretly using those same foundations to critique others. It is especially evil when one uses a philosopher such as Derrida or Caputo to critique other philosophies and theologies and then when asked to defend ones beliefs to hide behind anti-systematics.
These problems seem to repeat themselves over and over again in different ways to me as I keep in touch with some “emergent” thinkers. This is the inevitable rhetorical violence of using significantly “academic” insights to create and sustain a “populist” movement. I guess we’re all still waiting for emergence to grow up, as indeed the whole of creation is waiting for all the church to “grow up,” so I don’t say this as self-righteous gloat but as a goad, part of the dialectical pruning and salvation of the Church and the whole world.
Review: “The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader”
March 2, 2010
“The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward”
- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell (January 13, 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0631201416
- ISBN-13: 978-0631201410
Thanks to Blackwell for the review copy!
I know, I know. We’re all sick to death of the term “Postmodern.” I’ve found the term to be drastically decreasing in it’s utility. I think that it can still carry meaning in reference to particular genealogies of “the modern” but I think we’ve all heard one too many people spout off about “postmodern” philosophy that haven’t but read a book by Tony Jones: Perhaps the daring may have read some Peter Rollins but generally the word has been tossed around ad nauseum both for attack and dismissal and uncritical acceptance.
It is for this very reason that this book is very useful. The Postmodern God is a reader in “postmodern theology” edited by Graham Ward, professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics at Manchester University.
The book is roughly divided into two parts. The first being a collection of essays by various influential and authoritative authors loosely identified as “postmodern,” relating to specifically “theological” topics; the second part is another collection of essays by more recent theologians who build in diverse ways off of the foundational works of authors featured in the first part.
There is a short biographical preface to each of the essays by the “primary” authors which not only introduces the author’s bio but gives a concise sketch of the larger “projects” which they undertook. I found these introductions to be spectacularly useful as I approached this book in self-study. If I had read just the essays I would have had a rough time knowing which authors works to pursue more for my own interests. Piecing these introductions together one gets a loose historical narrative of the development of early “postmodern” thought and how each author fits into the intellectual spectrum. In this way I was able to see for myself how, for instance, the work of Roland Barthes will be important for me as one who wishes to train in historical theology.
In addition to this, Graham Ward has written an introductory essay which is worth the price of the whole volume. In it he gives shape to what “postmodern” means (to him) and gives a vision for what he believes are necessary correctives to “liberal” and “nihilistic” postmodernities. Ward sees the information age as the logical and nihilistic pinnacle of the “modern” obsession with making men into gods. The internet eliminates all boundaries of time and space thereby creating a false omnipotence: On can access chat rooms in Argentina, databanks in Saudi Arabia, images of every place including a picture of the very house one is in. Everything and everybody is immediately and unmediatedly present to the cogito who controls and manipulates all according to h/er whim. Ward goes on to trace how postmodernity manifests itself in culture and gives a concise historical intro to the entire volume from Nietzsche to Cupitt.
It think that it would be rather laborious to sum up each of the essays but I will list the contents so that you can understand how wide the net is cast in this fine collection:
Part I
Georges Bateille: From Theory of Religion
Jacques Lacan: The Death of God
Emmanuel Levinas: God and Philosophy
Roland Barthes: Wrestling with the Angel: Textual Analysis of Gen 32.23-32
Rene’ Girard: The God of Victims
Michel Foucault: From The History of Sexuality
Michel de Certeau: How is Christianity Thinkable Today? & White Ecstasy
Jacques Derrida: From How to Avoid Speaking – think Peter Rollins
Luce Irigaray: Equal to Whom?
Julia Kristeva: From In the Beginning was Love
As you can see this features a wonderfully diverse crew: Feminists like Irigaray and Kristeva; philosophers like Levinas, Derrida and Foucault; and Catholic thinkers like Girard and de Certeau. Each of the essays are filled with potential insight and sparring material. They relate to everything from epistemology to “thick descriptions” of phenomenon. A veritable cornocopia of critical thought.
The second part features essays by John Milbank, Jean-Luc Marion, Catherine Pickstock, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Rebecca S. Chopp, Gilian Rose and Edith Wyschogrod. Notable among them for me were Wyschogorod’s essay from her excellent book “Saints and Postmodernism” and also Milbank’s “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-two Responses to Unasked Questions” originally published in Modern Theology- is an absolute must-read introduction to his larger “project.” It’s as clear as you’re ever going to get him to be, his language is much less obtuse and abstract than it normally is and it is a joy to read.
This volume is an outstanding introduction to “postmodern theology” that is both well conceived and well executed. It can stand alone, but it can also be coupled with another Blackwell collection of essays that I will be reviewing very soon, the Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology. I will also tip my hat to another Ward book that is very helpful, aptly entitled Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory. Though expensive I’ve found it the easiest to read of any “intro” book to these sorts of topics.
In passing I should also mention that Graham Ward is a priest in the Church of England and a prize for us Anglicans. I am currently composing a comprehensive essay examining his erotic ecclesiology through his “Cities Project.” Expect that at the beginning of the summer.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
