Secular Theology

American Radical Theological Thought

Clayton Crockett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781135254049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Secular Theology brings together new writings by some of America's most influential theological and religious thinkers on the viability of secular theology. Critically assessing Radical Orthodoxy and putting American radical theology in context, it provides new resources for philosophical theology.
Themes covered include postmodern theology, ethics, psychoanalysis, the death of God and medieval theology.

1 Theology and the secular

Gabriel Vahanian

DOI: 10.4324/9780203866542-2

For it was not through law that Abraham, or his posterity, was given the promise that the world should be his inheritance, but through the righteousness that came from faith.

Romans 4:13

If a man merely stares at the world, while another not only sees but questions it, the world does not appear differently to them; but appearing the same to both, it is dumb to one and answers the other. Or rather it speaks to all, but only those understand it who compare its answer with the truth that is within them.

Saint Augustine

I

“Secular” - no other word has been so pried loose of its semantic context as has this word. Made to bear all by itself the brunt of the Death of God, a cultural phenomenon the size of an epochal “continental divide” for which it has been both acclaimed and vilified, it has become the unwilling syndrome of a metastatic evolution, so irrevocable that we forget it was brought about less by the rise of the secular itself than by the self-inflicted demise of Christianity.

And yet “secular” was only the antonym of “religious.” not its antithesis: they formed a pair, never to be cleaved one from the other. Together, they belonged to one and the same worldview, and belonged with one another. And no sooner are they split from one another than each seems to come apart at the seams. And “secular” either has become a shibboleth for a newfangled ideology of liberation from the past or is looked upon as an orphan or as a kind of prodigal son that is in the process of squandering his father’s religious inheritance. But this is a positivistic approach which feeds on the assumption that religion is a thing of the past - an allegation which is not entirely undeserved. One must admit that in keeping with just about any traditional definition of it, religion boils down to memorizing the past, even keeping it alive medically through artificial means, if necessary. Either way, however, overlooked is the fact that religion and the secular belong together as do two sides of one and the same coin. Or that just as blood runs through both arteries and veins so does life - and even faith - run through the religious and the secular. Remove the heart, or kill God, and the same finger is pointing at us: we have also killed the secular or turned it into the parody of an obsolescent religion.

No other word has been more maligned than the word “secular. Its connotations encompass so diverse a debauchery of meaning as to throw anyone endowed with the least love of words into a dizzying puzzle of bewilderment. They range the whole gamut from antonym of religious to synonym of atheist. True, words are like Russian dolls: they achieve a meaning by shedding another; or they grow on words, as often acquiring new meanings regardless of their etymological roots as because of them. But “secular” is a word whose fate has been worse even than that of the word “God,” though the latter is a noun which, naming that which has no name, is neither proper nor common, putting us in the strange situation of being caught between conflicting demands: that of the secular, on the one hand, which eschews God by extruding him from the realm of daily concerns; and on the other, that of a religion which can only posit God by intruding him into the kernel of memory and thus by identifying religion with memory before turning it into a survival kit. It’s as though religion had and need have only one fear - that of having no future. Indeed, from time immemorial, religion, not unlike the albatross burdened by its wings, has been weighed down by this fear instead of discarding or shedding itself of it in keeping with the biblical tradition which holds, precisely, that true religion has no future and none certainly beyond this world - the saeculum.¹ There is no religion in the new Jerusalem or in Jesus’ parable of the Last Judgement or again in Thomas More’s Utopia or even in the world come of age as celebrated by Bonhoeffer, though Bonhoeffer himself continued to be caught in the throes of a residual Lutheran dualism, and, despite Luther, the condescending look it casts upon the world, upon the secular.

The secular is what outgrows religion; it looms on the incompressible horizon of memory as what’s left when religion is loosened from the fossilizing effects of memory and fades into hope. To wit Israel: instead of merely remembering the past, listens to that God that would be no God should God not make room for the world and should there be no world here and now, should there not be once and for all a world as ephemeral and contingent as it is secular, i.e. a pro-vision of the new heaven and the new earth, of the newness of the world - its worldhood. The secular is not merely secular. Nothing is secular that is not at the same time symmetrical with something religious. And just that is the paramount reason why traditional “theology must address its own irrelevance"² (“secularized” as others are wont to say, giving that term a negative inflection meant to drown all positivity to which its pristine meaning is intrinsically entitled).

II

We talk of the secular much as we do of religion. Used to presuming there is an essence of religion, more immutable than not, we likewise tend to think of the secular as though it too must have an essence. And, of course, that essence should both set it at the opposite end of the spectrum from religion and keep it from shying away from the least pretense of an incontrovertibly self-adjudicated status at the apex of an equally self-programming ideology.

Unfortunately, no sooner has under the guise of “secularism” such an essence been identified than its true nature becomes manifest. It festers the secular, just as its counterpart, fundamentalism, festers religion. Worse still, however antagonistic their respective claims may be, fundamentalism and secularism similarly result from an equally positivistic coercion of one prong of the dialectic of the religious and the secular into subservience to the other. Faking each other, they are interchangeable. Not being real twins, they are not self-limiting, either, and they counterfeit or blur and pervert the respective realms of the absolute and the relative, of the transcendent and the immanent. Either by absolutizing the relative (fundamentalism) or by relativizing the absolute (secularism) they disfigure the intrinsic autonomy whether of the religious or of the secular. Either way, there is inaugurated a process which consists in reducing language to some kind of Newspeak, so terrorized that it will carry any ideology. And, in fact, from East to West, this is the age neither of secularism nor of fundamentalism, but of each joyfully blending with the other. Not that, here and there, people live in some dark age whereas others do not. Ironically, this is an age when no religion can claim to be the best or the only religion; when, in other words, every religion is the whole religion and yet every single one of them shies away from embracing the only thing they have in common: not religion (which is why they are divided), but the secular - a language all the religions have in common, just as mutatis mutandis language is also what the religious and the secular have in common. Or else language would not be iconoclastic, which it must be if the religious is iconoclastic of the secular and the secular is of the religious.

III

In this light, neither secularism nor fundamentalism can claim to be viable projects. They do, however, provide sociology, or a sociologically attuned mindset such as ours has become, with enough fuel to keep it sliding down the slippery path at the end of which not only the religious but also the secular lose their respective identity, melted as they are in a process that is neither fish nor fowl and is no less abusively called secularization, though it has less to do with any drive towards the secular - which in keeping with biblical faith is vested in and vindicated by true religion - than it does with the dis-habilitation of religion or the obsolescence of Christianity. Disheveled, bruised, maimed, kidnapped or raped by would-be specialists more concerned with their own press than with pressing the real issue in the aftermath of the death of God, secularization needs to be salvaged and retrieved. It must recover the meaning of its pristine thrust as one prong of a dialectic in which, in the biblical tradition, the other is perceived as hallowing (or sanctification).

Saying that these are theological terms nowadays deprived of their down-to-earth significations is hardly questionable. What is questionable, oddly if ironically enough, are the reasons in the very sense in which Archibald MacLeish’s Job declares in J.B. that “God is reasons” - for which the effects of the interface between hallowing and secularization have deserted the mindscape of the imagination even among the American people, whose cultural heritage would no doubt sink into oblivion if Thanksgiving should perchance cease from being emblematic of its spirit. And yet whether Thanksgiving is a religious or a secular holiday makes no difference. And it doesn’t, precisely because of the phenomenological principle at work in the inescapably mutual compatibility between church and world, which held that ecclesia in mundo latet while mundus in ecclesia patet, or, as Tillich will say, that religion is the substance of culture and culture the form of religion.³ Precisely because religion means the overcoming of religion (Buber) and its secularization, it can be overcome only by religion. So that correspondingly secularization can refer to the gradual dismissal of religion only by adepts of a sociology of religion already sentenced to extinguish itself. The situation is like that of Pinocchio’s nose: should it keep growing, there would soon be no Pinocchio left to tell a lie. But of course sociologists who have to make a living will doubtless find then another half-truth and switch from one fundamentalism to another, from one secularism to another, prone as some of them are to mistake the sign for what it points to.

Hallowing and secularization are, on the contrary, the cutting edge of a process through which by “world” is designated not so much a datum as a mandate, not a fate but a destiny, not only the realm of anankē (necessity) but also that of nomos, i.e. of the possible though it may seem impossible.⁴ And so, by “world,” is ultimately designated the realm of logos, the empowering of the will unable by itself even to do the good that possibly is within its reach, inasmuch as the will precedes everything except itself. No world comes of age except through the word, as illustrated according to the biblical tradition of creation and incarnation and the fullness of time. Nor do any of these notions entail the least contempt for the world, though they require its defatalization; or entail disparagement of nature, though they require its desacralization.

IV

In other words, biblical religion is not geared with a dualism of the sacred and the profane. It is tackled by a dialectic of a different order, that of the holy and the secular, or, for a better consonance with the biblical outlook on the world, of the holy and the not yet holy.⁵ And then, one might as well go the further step of identifying it as a dialectic of the secular and the not yet secular, if only in order to bear in mind that, on account of this same perspective, nothing is more religious than the secular, and more secular than the religious. It bears repeating: they belong together.⁶

They belong together, although not as do the sacred and the profane. Take Eliade’s well-known definition. Its laconic succinctness is more telling than any disquisition that would only burden the evidence. The sacred, says Eliade, is that which is not profane and the profane is that which is not sacred. Standing between them is something like an altar rail. Each is confined within itself rather than to the other, but neither is really self-limiting. Things are the way they are by reason of anankē or physis. Greek is set above barbarian, Jew above goy. They evince a statically structured order, quite in contrast to the dynamic configuration achieved by the religious and the secular, where the “altar rail” of the sacred and profane lingers on until it is erased from the symbolic imagination by the iconoclastic move towards the priesthood of all believers. Ordered to one another, the religious and the secular limit themselves, they are self-limiting insofar as each consists, not in secluding itself from or being secluded by the other, but in making room for the other.⁷ The Israelites are expected to make room for the stranger that is within their gates, all the more “naturally” since, unlike Athenians of old, the Israelites form a people, by virtue, not of their origin, but of their calling. Whatever their identity or morality, they only can catch a glimpse of it, not in the mirror of nature, nor in that of history, but in the iconoclastic mirror of the word. Identity does not result from natural sedimentation or from historical sedentarization, but in spite of them: it lies in the future, in that which is yet in need of coming to pass. And morality is not a matter of conformity either with natural necessity or with historical convention, but of eschatological provision. Receiving a stranger may be a show of human morality, but it is above all an eschatological act the identification of oneself, not with, but through the other and likewise of the chosen people through the nations, of the religious through the secular: ultimately or, put in biblical terms, eschatologically speaking, what counts is what Israel and the nations have in common, and, in view of the parable of the Last Judgement and Paul’s understanding of the Body of Christ, what they have in common only comes about where there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither master nor slave, neither man nor woman, but one world as worlding of the Word become flesh.⁸ It comes about wherever faith is not the monopoly of religion; and this world is the only world in which one may live by faith - that is, eschatically.

V

Remember, the Greek word from which eschatic is derived refers to that last thing or event, by whatever name it is identified, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Notes on contributors Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• Introduction
• 1 Theology and the secular
• 2 Postmodern secular theology
• 3 À-Dieu to Jacques Derrida: Descartes’ ghost, or the Holy Spirit in secular theology
• 4 Anxiety, risk and transformation: re-visiting Tillich with Lacan
• 5 Love and law: John Milbank and Hermann Cohen on the ethical possibilities of secular society
• 6 On Whitehead’s proposition “Life is robbery”: prolegomena to any future ethics
• 7 Saying Kaddish for Gillian Rose, or on Levinas and Geltungsphilosophie
• 8 The gift of prayer
• 9 And maker mates with made: world and self-creation in Eriugena and Joyce
• 10 Kenotic existence and the aesthetics of grace
• 11 Theography: signs of God in a postmodern age
• 12 Contact epistemology for the sites of theology
• 13 Malformed essence, misplaced concreteness and the law of the indifferent middle
• 14 God is of (possibility)
• Index of names