Prayer as Memory

Toward the Comparative Study of Prayer as Apocalyptic Language and Thought

Reinhart

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621899587
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What would a comparative study of prayer look like? If the human impulse is to survive by thinking and acting religiously, Reinhart says religion is born on the day prayer first finds breath. He discusses prayer as a discourse since that first day that is speech out of brokenness or suffering is expressed in the hope of something more. Through his engagement with theorists of language and memory (Habermas, Derrida, Metz, Ricoeur, and others), Reinhart develops a framework that sustains an innovative approach to apocalyptical thought that also lays the foundation for a new field: the comparative study of prayer.

1

Coming to Prayer

The Problem of Prayer

Credit card companies and other financial corporations are becoming infamous for a practice called “black box accounting.” Enron Corporation rose to its height hiding its calculations and then fell disastrously when outside observers finally recognized that everything did not add up. Yet many financial institutions still use these same methods that are not regulated. “Black box” refers to a company’s central accounting that is not transparent to external observers. Critics of black box accounting say that if there is no access to these hidden methods and calculations then the public is not treated with fairness. Not only is it difficult to verify or know the truth of the calculations, also there is little way to know whether decisions are arbitrary or consistently applied to all. This lack of transparency gives rise to the name “black box.”

Please excuse me for beginning with an obscure analogy, but here it goes. Prayer is the black box of religion. Prayer is foundational to religion. It is at the core of religious experience, thought, and decision-making. Within each prayer there is already a basic algorithm at work that relates the sacred to profane everyday existence. Prayer is like the black box of religion because it is a problem to anyone who wishes from the outside to know or critically evaluate the religious decision. Whether there is any other way to pray is uncertain, maybe all prayer is obfuscation or maybe not. I merely want to point out the general problem for now and ask the question, “Can the language of prayer be understandable to others?”

The issue I am raising is the relation between religious experience and it’s object. Succinctly stated, what is religious experience an experience of? How can religious experience be subsequently applied in an inter-subjective decision? This is an especially difficult and important question for the Abrahamic religions that affirm a transcendent G*d, all holy and all loving. The experience of G*d within these traditions is traditionally described as “revelation”; an in-coming, a breaking into, an overlapping between the sacred and profane that occurs as that which is complete(d) gift. This providence, from a wholly Other, can only be expressed as a reduction or symbolization of G*d’s gift. This is the observation, expressed by Wolfhart Pannenberg, that all that is called revelation is indirect revelation; Pannenberg then needs to speak to the breadth of history as a proleptic truth. Within this type of monotheism a decision of faith is always unavoidable, or one could say the providence of the place of faith is always either acknowledged or ignored. But regardless of all this providence, there is a persistent problem that is never settled regarding whether and how the invisible may (not) be reduced or symbolized visibly. This can lead to many forms of moralism, for instance among the most militant fundamentalists who set out to destroy all “strange” symbolizations of the sacred.

The problem is illustrated in the broad logic of twentieth century phenomenology of religions. On one hand, transcendental experience is seen as a reflection if not a proof of a larger transcendence. (See, for instance, by Karl Rahner.1) On the other hand, this may lead to the further step that if an Other is assumed or even named, then the person who names the Other is more original than G*d; this is an audacious act by any standard.2 I am asking a similar question as Jan Assmann; whether secondary religions of revelation that yet depend upon an earlier worldview or their primary religions, are either enhancements or corruptions. How would one begin to think about this relation? So while a transcendental approaches to religion begins with the limit of what humanity can know and recognizes a relation to an experience of the limit, the subsequent critics of this position understand a wholly Other beyond even the limits of human understanding of limits. However, there is a mediating stance between these two. This is represented by a position like that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty who describes human reflection as always already within a given reality. This is a mediating reflection in so far as it acknowledges that any human experience works as if it is horizontal; we come to know ourselves in relation to society, even when humanity can’t or doesn’t decide upon a vertical transcendence. So epistemicly the self is more original than G*d insofar as one begins to know something of the wholly Other or a Holy G*d by knowing human limits. While this does not solve our dilemma about religious phenomenology, it does indicate a dimensionality that is important to the understanding of religious language and experience. It is the recognition that where religion is concerned, map may not be territory but the knower is a maker of language and symbols that are entwined with experience and understanding. Some of these symbols both represent a formative event and provide ground for rich discourse for centuries, uniting many interpretations of a shared past.

This inadequacy of knowledge to figure out and penetrate the inner core of religious experience leads to the theme “manifestation is not revelation” played out in various manners in the thought Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, David Tracy, Jean-Luc Marion and a host of critical theorists. These recent approaches probe Enlightenment reason as a metaphysics of presence that privileges verifiable and visible knowledge. All of these ask the same question in different ways, “Was the modern turn to the subject also a turn to the same?”3 With respect to prayer, how is modernity different from earlier times, the ancients and the middle ages? What place does prayer have within modernity, especially insofar as past and future are marginalized by a concern for the present or the now? This question entails a “floating” or hermeneutical positioning of phenomenology that is neither an approach to nor a stepping back from naming religious experience. Positively stated, Hans-Georg Gadamer defines this kind hermeneutics: “Hermeneutics may be defined as the attempt to overcome the distance in areas where empathy is hard and agreement is not easily reached. There is always a gap that must be bridged.”4 Understanding remains a mutual enterprise, a bridge built from both ends. With regard to religious language this becomes especially difficult. This neutralized phenomenological description of consciousness can eventually decline into a pure form of the positioning a formless self.5 This purity provokes criticism from a rhetorical perspective.

Rhetorical Criticism

The word rhetorical here is meant to describe an intentional influencing of oneself and others regarding an indeterminate issue or decision. “The rhetorical trope upsets the literal proposition, decenters conceptual argument, and calls into question empirical fact and rational first principle. Argument occurs on either side of a question, stabilizing a position, but only for a moment, until it starts up all over again . . . [W]ord unto world without end.”6

Rhetorical theology often plays with two options of ethical method, situating itself within the dialectic between a normatively weak contextualism and a context-insensitive universalism. On one hand, ethical contextualists argue that norms arise only within cultural boundaries. On the other hand, soft universalists believe some norms transcend cultural boundaries. Regardless of the veracity of the arguments presented by both contexualists and universalists, the social situation remains that neither side is able to advance theological conversation. Mediation between global and localized perspectives or liberal and fundamentalist conceptualities remains unattainable. In addition, the ever-changing gravity and proximity of cultural applications further complicate this situation, which contributes to cynicisms and terrorisms when there may seem to be no valid or legitimate norms that make a difference in the world at large.

In response to these complications, neo-Augustinians sometimes attempt to by-pass this seemingly endless fluctuation of theory, sometimes characterized as “epistemological crisis.” This broad range of exemplary argument focuses on the moral imperative at an intersection of tradition, practice, and narrative. Some neo-Augustinians try to establish the communitarian parameters of a virtue discourse. Of course, there are various strategies of disengagement from a more public discourse. For example, John Milbank and Elaine Pagels enlist Augustine as the non-liberal, while Oliver O’Donovan and Jean Bethke Elshtain see Augustine as a morally robust liberal. Perhaps on the boundary of neo-Augustinianism, William Connolly and Romand Coles read Augustine as an anti-liberal and John Caputo enlists Augustine as an ancestor of deconstruction. In addition to religious scholars mentioned above, Augustine continues to influence modern theory. Arguably the two most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt and Reinhold Niebuhr, are not adequately understood apart from Augustine. The Bishop of Hippo not only represents the bridging paradigm of the ancients and the Middle Ages; he infuses our time with a conception of memory that is able to move conscientiously, longing for the beautiful and the good. Human nature and its concomitant destiny justifies the tension between the secular and sacred institutions of his day. So although Augustine is most of all a thinker of prayer, it is easy to see his appeal to theorists of late modernity, religious and political.

Much of the wide variety of neo-Augustinianism is a productive and telling movement within current religious and political theory because it indicates some of the limits of modern categories of social theory, especially in relating the past, present, and future. However, I would argue that the complexities of a plural society and the need for values that make a difference in this society are better served by a more participatory criticism. Quickly stated, my point is that an over reliance upon appropriations of an exemplary virtue often results in a false consciousness and reification of metaphysics. This is often indicated by a selective reading of history. The response I propose is a more public historiography that will utilize a hermeneutic phenomenology in tension with an ongoing moral-ethical praxis and discourse, thus opening an exceedingly creative relation of past, present, and future.7 In simpler terms, this is a comparative study of prayer; how it works within public spheres of discourse and also how it references the sacred.

Memory

Most people admit that how you remember makes a difference for the future but does how you forget the past make a difference? Is forgetting simply the absence of remembering or are these two distinct modes of memory? While remembering privately and forgetting publicly is dishonest or disingenuous to many, it might also be a form of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Coming to Prayer
• Chapter 2: Perspectives of Prayer
• Chapter 3: Prayer and Karl Barth’s Apocalyptic Discourse
• Chapter 4: Public Reason and Religious Discourse
• Chapter 5: Reconsidering Knowledge as Memory in Prayer
• Chapter 6: Prayer as Courage
• Chapter 7: Prayer in Discourse
• Bibliography