Reading and Writing for New Creation
The practices of reading and writing shape selves, relationships, and communities. They do not simply transfer information. When we write a program review or a love letter, more than just describing a situation, we solidify relationships and make way for future action. If we spend our days reading budgets or meditating on nature writing , we will likely come to care for creation in different ways. Reading with patience in a search for guidance and insight will exercise different capacities than reading sharply for citation and refutation. Because they are so old, we have likely forgotten that texts are technologies (or perhaps recent shifts in media have made this insight unavoidable). They are apparatuses that are not simply exterior to us, but they play a constitutive role in forming our selves and, through the uncountable accumulation of small acts, our cities and even creation .
Ancient forms of writing, because of their strangeness, sometimes help to lay these aspects bare. As Michel Foucault argued, the ancient pursuit of wisdom was not limited to the accumulation of knowledge, but the texts of the sages and philosophers were technologies and exercises that cared for the self and the polis or city. 1 On Pierre Hadotâs account, the texts of the ancients are meant to be engaged as spiritual exercises that shape an entire way of life. 2 Wisdomâs dual sense of a state of being and a path that is followed echoes in the etymology of this English word. âWisdom â is both the domain (-dom) of sound judgment and a habit, a way, in old English, a wiseâa sense that abides in its use as a suffix, as in clockwise. 3
Likewise, the apostle Paul sought to transform his readersâ ways of life through both what he said and in the exercises of reading and writing he performed and commended. Paulâs first letter to the enclave of a new social movement in Corinth, written in the first century, pursues some of the same ends as our love letters and program reviews. On the one hand, it expresses the deep passion Paul has for members of this fledging community, while seeking to call into being followers of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, his letter directly engages issues of everyday conduct; it assesses and guides their central social practices and seeks to direct their action toward shared goals and values.
Paul seeks to exercise his readers so that they may be able to walk down the difficult path of the wisdom of the cross (a formulation and route that orients this study and which may be regarded as its subtitle). He acknowledges in the opening chapters of 1 Corinthians that identifying death on a cross with the way of wisdom will likely inspire some cognitive dissonance if not outright offense (1 Cor 1:18â25). From the perspective of those who are in power and those who have found a way to be successful in the order of the Roman Empire , the cross marks the road to ruin. In their eyes, execution on a cross is the opposite of wisdom, it is the sign of foolishness (1:26â31). Paul, on the contrary, preaches that the cross reveals the cruelty of the dominant order (2:1â8).
Christâs path, his way of life, was one of self-giving love . His work, his very being, is the wisdom that heals and renews creation . Christâs death does not render his life foolish. It shows the foolishness of those who are associated with the order that finds it necessary to kill a teacher of love. Christâs execution shows the callous foolishness of all of those who directly exercise violence in the empire and the folly of those who complicitly and excellently function within its rules and games. The empireâs exercises of false wisdom have misshapen many of Paulâs readers. Through his letters and the social experiments of his community, he seeks to show them the folly of their ways and to provide the means of transformation so that they may live otherwise.
This study proposes that these ancient exercises of transformation could provide the opening for just and sustainable ways of living in our time. It will be difficult, however, to follow this path as we have been trained to read and write in other ways. As in Paulâs time, we live in an imperial order that associates wisdom with power and success. The prudent of this age are taught to read and use apparatuses of assessment to pursue productivity and efficiency. This order of education and management has yielded widespread poverty and ecological catastrophe. This worldâs ways of reading interpret creation as human and natural resources. Its reports and assessments find it profitable to decimate a mountain to extract coal. Missing from this accounting is the destruction of one of the most biodiverse habitats in the world, watersheds that support life far downstream, and communities that are already oppressed (to say nothing of the cumulative effect of carbon emissions on the global climate).
Our current challenge is that our ways of living and thinking are unsustainable, unjust, and destructive. Weâthe educated, prudent, and privileged classes of our timeâdo not lack information. We lack wisdomâthe vision, the relationships, and the capabilities to live differently and more justly. Practices of reading and writing that cultivate patience, attention, sympathy, and compassion, that illuminate the false pieties and hidden cruelty of our cultures, that strengthen just relationships and communities, could contribute to the transformation of our environments. They could be exercises of new creation . Like the letters of Paul, this would direct the work of philosophical theology to intellectual and spiritual exercises that are not limited to a top-down formulation of doctrines and worldviews but that are also engaged in the bottom-up, grassroots, formative work of social experiments , and slow and subtle pedagogies.
The philosophical theology along the path of the cross âwhich scandalizes and transforms the ways of empire âis a radical theology, as it does not assume the position and methods of a God and theology of sovereignty, but it moves closer to collective and formative work on and in the ground. 4 It is radical in the etymological sense, as it follows the path of the radix, the root. The wisdom of the cross could be termed a Christology âfrom below.â Rather than starting above with concept and dogma, it begins with exercises , relationships, texts, and the earth. 5 Only in this case, the focus is not on the works of Jesus described in the Gospels, but the messianic ways of life pursued by Paul and the Corinthians, who imagined themselves members of the body of Christ renewing creation . This situates theology in spaces that are often considered âordinary and secular.â 6 As Sallie McFague proposes, it is radical in the sense that it marks a depth of commitment and engagement that cuts across the categories of the religious, the social, and the political , affecting a âmode of life.â 7 This theological discourse is not simply descriptive, but it points a âfinger at the readerâ and it does not move away from creaturely life. It is âworldly rather than ascetic.â 8
This book pursues the wisdom of crossing ancient and more contemporary exercises of reading and writing for the sake of transformation. This wisdom marks a path for philosophical theology that is oriented by the practices of the care of the self , the city, and creation . Paulâs loving scroll to the Corinthians, Augustineâs personal codex the Confessions, Jacques Derridaâs playful postcards in âEnvois ,â and Søren Kierkegaardâs multilayered drama Fear and Trembling , among other texts, are explored as exercises and experiments that show the foolishness of the dominant forms of life of their time, while they also cultivate alternative ways of acting and relating. In our time of crisis and our age of instrumentality, reading such texts may seem like the indulgence of the privileged. But I argue that these difficult exercises of wisdom are what is needed in a world that is busily and efficiently hurtling toward ruin.
Paul, the HermeneutâTurning the World Around
Once, Paul was taken to be the incarnation of Hermes (Acts 14:11â22). On Lukeâs narration, this happened in the Roman colony of Lystra. Paul and Barnabas were proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ , sharing the wisdom of their social movement known as âthe Way.â Among their hearers was a man who was without strength (adynatos), without potency, without possibility in his feet. He had been unable to walk since birt...