A Beautiful Bricolage

Theopoetics as God-Talk for Our Time

Krabbe

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498295369
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Theopoetics is a plea for a more fully human way of speaking about God in the twenty-first century, a way that offers new life to dry and dying platitudes. Drawing deeply from linguistics, theology, philosophy, and even quantum mechanics, theopoetics attempts to reimagine the relationship between human language and speech about God through poetic phrasing and metaphor--thereby proposing a new God-talk.

Chapter 1

Where Are We? When Are We?—Situating Selves

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.41

—Jack Kerouac

Ghosts—mine and yours—sleep in long-ago vacated hotel rooms, dorm rooms, bedrooms, and cribs. In each of those (death)beds remains a ghost when I rise to live. And at night I reunite with that ghostly vapor of a prior self and it sooths me back to sleep. But what of those times I do not re-turn in the midst of my day, and my movement leads me on to an else-where, where I find a different bed? What of the vapors to which I never return? Are they lost? Do they search for me, or I for them? How many may I leave before none is left, and I am but a hollow shell? For you and I are always on the move: crawling, walking, running, riding, trotting, galloping, rolling, driving, flying, and rocketing out into space. With every new move a little less vapor is left, and I fear that leaving is happening at ever increasing speeds. For when I would crawl, I was slow though able to re-turn to my ghost, but now nothing is fast enough. The wheels of the cart, train, and car never revolve quite fast enough; even the propeller and the jet do not quench my thirst for speed. Left behind are the wisps of a ghost I no longer know, and I am never going back.

Mine and yours—we press on and telecommute, spreading ourselves wire thin. But wires were too cumbersome and slow, so we dis-connected and sent messages through the air, through the lingering vapors of our previous selves, to satellites in the sky. Messaging alone was not enough, we needed more: more mobility, more speed, more distances covered and locations slept in. So we made pocket computers that accomplish all of our tasks while resting in multiple locations all at once. Now we hurtle down the information highway even when we are defecating. We are slow and fast, present and absent, everywhere and nowhere—all at once.

Where then is stability? Where are our foundations? Where are our unchanging concepts? Where now are our platonic forms amidst this motion? Nowhere, that is where! As we tear ahead at incredible rates, we are fractured by the speed of life; our souls seep out of the crumbling forms and drip like tears all along the way. Our glory, our weighty kavod, is spread out like heavy oil drops on a highway. Snapchats, Instagrams, Tweets, and status updates stream live up into the information cloud where they create our ideal timelines. We create our own ideal forms with Photoshop and store them in the bits and bytes of the cloud. We are oily tears spread along the highways of life becoming evaporating droplets; we are everywhere and nowhere—all at once!

Spread so thin, we are barely able to think. But if we did, we might wonder, Will the cloud turn into a thunderhead? Is there a way through this thin spot? Is there a way to let our ghosts re-gather and catch up? Is there a place to be, where our ghostly souls will not be spread so thin, a place in which we can dwell? To which one might hear the response, Perhaps. Perhaps there is a way to let our ghosts catch up and our souls condense, a way for the cloud to offer a warm spring rain rather than a destructive storm, a more human, walking-way of being-in-the-world. But only if—perhaps.

Perhaps is a favorite word of Caputo, and in a compact little book—written for the average reader, Truth: Philosophy in Transit, he offers a compelling case that humanity’s increasing mobility not only affects our existential angst of having our souls left behind, but that this movement “has in fact precipitated a crisis in our understanding of truth.”42 From Immanuel Kant, who never left his hometown of Königsberg, to Derrida, who traveled constantly around the world and would intentionally get himself lost in a new city upon arrival, Caputo constructs a survey of Western intellectual history that draws a correlated development from static location and absolute Truth to movement and situated truths.43 Rejecting a nostalgic return narrative, Caputo seeks a way forward into the faster paced realm of truths, a realm where philosophy and religion are not as distant as they used to be, where many truths are spoken and where theopoetics might play.44 If Caputo is correct that our physical movement throws into turmoil our conceptions of what true means, or what rational means, then perhaps play is the best way to move ahead as the Western world enters a time of reconsidering where we are, when we are, and what all of our rapid movement means.

Those participating in theopoetics are very involved in exploring what the world looks like from a viewpoint that takes seriously situatedness. Such an approach moves beyond the hegemony of The Rational or The Truth (for which capitalization is always implied as though referring to an absolute or a proper name of an entity), which are common in the Western world and often live on in uncritical parlance due to often unexamined assumptions. Yet while exploring this world these thinkers by no means assume such exploration to be easy or simple. Wilder reflects on our complicated predicament: “The Enlightenment means liberation, but this liberation is part of the metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity. We have replaced the teleological schema of antiquity, which confined individuals to assigned places within the system, with a new complex of evils, of subjective individualism, on the one hand and a spreading objectivism on the other.”45 Thus, for Wilder, the Enlightenment results in an increased freedom and movement, but this has apparently paradoxical ramifications of both flagrant subjectivism and outrageous objectivism coexisting. Paradoxical binaries such as these appear to be a common outcome of Enlightenment thought. Theopoetics by being post-Truth and pro-truths makes a ta...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Pre-amble-ing
• An Introduction: Why Theopoetics?
• Chapter 1: Where Are We? When Are We?—Situating Selves
• Chapter 2: Questions
• Chapter 3: The Folds: A Braided River of Theopoetics
• Chapter 4: Aims: Not-Answers
• Chapter 5: Delineating a Bricolage Pitch: Game-Play of God-Talk in Our Time
• Conclusion(s)?
• Appendix: Theopoiesis or Theopoetics?
• Bibliography