On the Mystery

Discerning Divinity In Process

Catherine Keller

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780800662769
• eBook ISBN: 9781451404999
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

CHAPTER 1

Come, My Way

Theology as Process

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:

Such a Way, as gives us breath:

Such a Truth, as ends all strife:

Such a Life, as killeth death.

—GEORGE HERBERT¹

Boarding Call

Looked like I was going to miss my connection.

I was delayed in St. Louis based on bad weather in the east. I needed to get north, in order to fly south.… So there was nothing to do but go gather some comfort food. I asked an older gentleman, who seemed gracious and also stranded, if I could leave my bag next to him. Thanking him when I returned, I mentioned that if I did miss the flight, I’d arrive late to my own lecture in Texas. He sympathized, saying he’d miss the class he was scheduled to teach that evening. I politely asked what he teaches; and did a double-take when he said “theology.” I don’t believe I’ve ever bumped into another “theologian” outside of a religious or educational gathering. This spurred real curiosity. I couldn’t help but notice, however, the wariness that began to shadow his respectful manner. No warmth of airport connection could conceal the operative codes: we inhabited opposite ends of a split Protestant spectrum. I didn’t need to wave any feminist banner for his pleasant drawl to harden, his eyes to shift downward. He mentioned his admiration for my most conservative former colleague. I affirmed that colleague’s hard work on the early church fathers. And I mentioned that his theology asserts a more absolute sense of orthodoxy than the early Christian traditions warrant.

He then put with great care the proposition that haunts this book. “I suppose there’re two camps on this. There are those who think that the truth-claim of the tradition is just relative, and those who think that truth is absolute and unchanging.”

“Yes, we sure get trapped in that either/or,” I replied, willing my tone to convey respect. I glanced down to collect my thought. “But those aren’t the only alternatives. There is a third way!” As I looked up, ready to share this friendly revelation—to my shock he had simply vanished. Without any gesture of farewell, he had spun and rushed to get in line. Boarding had just been announced. I spotted him already camouflaged among the passengers, gaze pointedly forward. He really wanted out of this conversation. He really did not want to hear of any third way.

But I’d like to share it with you.

The Absolute and the Dissolute

Most of us do not want to stay trapped in the binary alternatives, in these camps, these predictable polarities of right vs. left, red vs. blue, us vs. you. But conservative Christians are with good reason worried that loss of absolute truth leads to loss of God, which leads to loss of the meaning and purpose of life, which leads to emptiness and chaos for individuals and their societies. But any vocal secularist will, also with good reason, point out all the undeniable violence, delusion, and repression produced by religious absolutes. There doesn’t seem to be a firm middle ground in this argument, or at least none that has much appeal: theological moderates, liberals, or progressives (who may look alike from the absolutist viewpoint) have absorbed much of the secular worldview. They want the best of both faith tradition and secular liberalism. Yet their public voices, and often their private ones as well, often lack the force and timbre of conviction.

The third way I want to explore with you under the sign of “theology” is not a middle ground. That would just leave the two poles in place. It is not a compromise, an Aristotelian mean between two extremes, a laid-back moderation, or a strategy to swing votes. It really is something else, something emerging. Something on the way. On this way we can afford to sympathize with the concerns of absolutists and of relativists. Indeed, we cannot afford not to. We are always already in relation to them. Relation does not entail relativism, which dissolves difference. Relationality implies the practice of discernment, which means to distinguish, to attend to difference, and to exercise good judgment. Despite the binary either/ors that back us into corners, there are always more than two differences.

On the way of this book the dispiriting polarization will often appear in the guise of religious absolutism and secular relativism. The fact that this antagonism is terribly familiar in Western culture, indeed in much of the global metropolis, doesn’t lessen its polarizing grip. Sometimes it breaks into debate; usually it operates subliminally, like a bipolar condition, between us—and also within us.

To make this condition more conscious, let us stage a dialogue between its voices. One party is saying: “There is only one Truth; it is timeless and beyond doubt. We are blessed to possess it. But we are willing to share it for free.”

The other is retorting—“Truth? Your belief is just one perspective among many.”

“Then it isn’t the truth!”

“Let’s not talk about ‘truth’; let’s talk about truth-claims; and who has the power to make them.”

“You are saying that truth is just socially constructed.”

“Of course, like any perspective.”

“That is just relativism.”

“You don’t think your views are relative to your experiences? You just happen to have the absolute truth?”

“God is the truth, and God is not relative.”

“And you own the truth about God?”

“This will offend you: but God gave us His Word!”

“And those who don’t ‘get’ it will go to hell? What kind of God is that?”

“One who holds us accountable!”

“To what—to your parochial patriarchal projections?”

Of course such a dialogue is just a cartoon. We’d better interrupt our conversationalists before they resort to “BANG POW!!#?!”

The camps circle their wagons. Timeless truth vs. a truth-free time! The absolute vs. the dissolute! The more the one trumpets a single and exclusive Truth, the more the other dissolves it—leaving us with a void to be filled by some hollow Reason and its “value-free” science. And the more the latter reduces truth to a modern nothing-but (nothing but sex, nothing but power, nothing but profit, nothing but language, nothing but social construction, nothing but natural law, nothing but genes in a pool or atoms in a void), the harder the former clings to its God-given truth.

Of course, secular thought itself is hardly reducible to this stereotype. It rightly supports its claims not by appeal to the revelation of a timeless Truth but to a critical assessment of shifting empirical and historical evidence. These claims are necessarily relative to—not therefore reducible to—the perspective of the observer who makes them. Relativity, which we must strictly distinguish from relativism, just describes the reality of a relational universe. The human observer belongs to that universe. Therefore all human truth-claims are relative to context and perspective. But why would it follow that truth, or value, is nothing but that perspective?

Similarly, religious thought within and beyond Christianity cannot be reduced to the delusion of an absolute perspective—which is no perspective at all. As we will see throughout this book, there have been theologians from the start resisting the temptation to identify their best human perspective with divine revelation. There are numerous theological perspectives sensitive to their own relativity, without sliding toward relativism. But articulating this third way within theology remains a lively challenge, and the primary motive of this book.

In the present exploration we are particularly concerned with how (our) God-talk ups the ante on truth. But what is the link between the truth question and the God question? There are, of course, truths about anything and everything. But in the vicinity of religion, and in particular of Christanity, truth has also served as code for “God” and whatever God reveals. But even if we understand God to be “absolute”—nonbiblical but conventional language—that understanding does not make, or need not make, any human language (however inspired, however truthful, however revealed) itself absolute.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand …

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS²

I am arguing that when people of faith step out of the mystery and make totalizing claims for our truth and our beliefs, we perpetuate an antagonistic polarity that actually paralyzes faith rather than fostering its living process. Relativity dissolves into the indifferent relativism, and truth freezes into a deified absolute. But we shall see that the antagonism actually turns into a bizarre two-way mirror-game. When the secular, thus cast as the dissolute, turns reductive in its hostility toward religious absolutes, it slides strangely toward an absolutism of its own.

Is God the Problem?

The camps seem to divide neatly between faith, tending toward absolute and exclusive truth-claims, and secularism, tending toward atheism by way of religious toleration. In the United States, those who are committed to democratic freedom of (and from) religion of course traditionally include the whole range of moderate and liberal Christians. But a secular fear of religion has intensified under pressure from the politically well-mobilized Christian right wing on the one hand and Islamic extremism on the other. This double whammy of fundamentalisms has put some irate atheists on the best-seller list. They help to expose the proclivity of all religious absolutism and exclusivism to violence and repression. With in-your-face titles like The God Delusion, God is Not Great, The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation, such authors predictably preach Reason as the great virtue of democracy.

Intriguingly, these authors show little tolerance for religious moderates—precisely, as The End of Faith author Sam Harris explains, because they are tolerant! “By failing to live by the letter of the texts while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.”³ He is right that the religious middle does indeed often fail to scrutinize critically certain key presumptions of their own religious faith as well as of their own secular legacy of tolerance. But he presses dauntlessly forward: “Religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”⁴

Just when one expects a reinforcement of the Jeffersonian wall between church and state, this new anti-tolerance would dismantle it—from the other side! Jefferson had based his hope for democracy—and it was a hope he knew to be far-fetched—precisely on the tolerance of any beliefs: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”⁵ Harris, however, leaves Jefferson in the dust: “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”⁶

Could there be a more dangerous proposition than that? Harris then comes out as an enthusiast of Buddhism. Since it doesn’t worship a God, it doesn’t count as a “religion.” I agree that we should all learn from Buddhism’s enlightened compassion. Noting that it attends skillfully to the fact that all will die, Harris asks: “Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”⁷ One must reply, “Well, Sam, because like you said, some of them believe the wrong things and should be killed.”

It is heartening to hear voices of the secular left designate such generalizations “secular fundamentalism.”⁸ But I hope this little debate exposes the way secular relativism mirrors and mimics religious absolutism. That mimicry of opposites makes treacherously difficult the work of a third space—as though theology must find its way through a carnival hall of mirrors. Both atheism and theism can play the gam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Come, My Way (Theology as Process)
• Chapter 2: Pilate’s Shrug (Truth as Process)
• Chapter 3: Be This Fish (Creation in Process)
• Chapter 4: After Omnipotence (Power as Process)
• Chapter 5: Risk the Adventure (Passion in Process)
• Chapter 6: Sticky Justice (Com/Passion in Process)
• Chapter 7: Jesus the Parable (Christ as Process)
• Chapter 8: Open Ending (Spirit in Process)
• Acknowledgments
• Teaching Resources
• Notes
• Index