Whoology?
So now we find we don’t even know what theology is. Or that maybe we don’t. Or that maybe we know what it is in some places but not in others, and that it may depend on whether the department has changed its name or not.
Names have a lot to do with it, in fact. I’ve always assumed that theology was a different sort of discipline from comparative religion, history of religion, sociology of religion and the like. Atheists and secularists can perfectly well study the latter items, but I’ve always taken it for granted that the first would be something of a bad fit. By definition. That only theists can be theologians. But apparently that’s not a universally accepted fact.
But theology does apparently start from the assumption that there are good reasons for believing in God, for instance the evidence of the natural world. That’s why I say names have a lot to do with it. Because I can see thinking there is at least a question about how the natural world got here, and why there is something rather than nothing; and I can see thinking there must be or should be an X that caused it all (though of course I would then wonder what created the X, and get stuck, as I always do – but never mind that for now). But I have serious difficulties with calling it God. God is a person. God is a guy’s name, and the guy is a character with specific qualities and a particular history. God is a proper name the way Allah is a name and Jhwh is a name and Zeus is a name. God is a local, parochial, familiar kind of fella, quite human but more powerful. He’s not the kind of thing that could create the cosmos – any more than Huckleberry Finn could have created it, or than Emma Woodhouse, or M. Homais, or Werther, or Hedda Gabler could have. We might as well all think our cats created the cosmos. It’s just too local, and too human, and too literary.
But that’s not what’s meant by God, God is the First Cause, or the Unmoved Mover, or another name for the Big Bang. But, one, no he isn’t. You can’t use the same name for two completely different things like that – it causes hopeless confusion. Like an underground map with all the stations put in wrong. You’d be getting out at Turnham Green when you wanted Belsize Park. And, two, if that is what God means, why name it God, why not just stick with the Big Bang, or with ‘whatever made all this happen’? Or X? Since nobody knows the answer to those questions – since whatever explanation is given we can always say something like ‘yes but what about just before that?’ or ‘yes but where did all this happen?’ – what is gained by labeling it God? I really don’t see it.
Especially if there is an X that made it all happen (as in some sense there is, though what that sense is, God only knows – well not him, but X, or gravity, or something) then it’s a pretty, well, exotic X. It’s not our kind of thing. Not friendly, or consoling, or helpful, or something to sing hymns to. Write poetry about, possibly, but sing to, no. It could be just…a lot of code. Probably is. We are, so maybe it is. Just code. Not Mind, not Conscious, certainly not feeling. It doesn’t love us, or anything else. Or it’s just something like gravity or energy. It’s not…a guy. Not even a very very big very very clever one. It just isn’t. And what people think when they hear the word ‘God’ is definitely a person. Not some code. Am I right? Theology doesn’t mean codeology. Theologians don’t think of themselves as students of code or of the Big Bang. So why call it God? So as not to have to make a whole lot of new name tapes, I suppose.
Isn’t it perfectly obvious that you and I and whole wide universe were all made by a Big Daddy, and that just as your own Daddy makes rules for you and Sissy and Little Billy to follow, so the Big Daddy Up In The Sky cares about you and has a set of rules for everyone down here to follow? Believing that should make you feel a helluva lot more comfy and cozy than your cold mean empty universe-without-a-human-purpose, so why don’t you just go ahead and believe it? And once you do, you can dedicate your obvious intelligence to figuring out precisely what those rules are, ’cause Sky Daddy made ’em kinda cryptic, but the answers are all there if you look real close in that leather-bound rulebook He left there on Granma’s reading table. You better learn those rules, too. Don’t make Sky Daddy hafta take the strap to you!
“Especially if there is an X that made it all happen (as in some sense there is, though what that sense is, God only knows – well not him, but X, or gravity, or something) then it’s a pretty, well, exotic X.”
Exotic X indeed. To me it seems awefully evasive not daring to consider that wanting people, from their natural self-important perception, created god from their own image instead of the other way around.
Then again, if X were to be, let’s say, a paradoxical entropic feedback system then this perception would only be wrong by abstraction, not by analogy.
Sometimes only your self-image needs revision and everything miraculously falls into place. :)
There are some shitheads in the world who call their god ‘God’, not knowing that god is not a name but an occupation. ‘Allah’, by the way, is not the name of the Muslim god; it is the Arabic word for god. All Arabs use it, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jew – even the italianised and anglicised Arabic dialect of devoutly Roman Catholic Malta retains it.
Just to add to Ophelia’s understandable confusion about what theology actually *is* and what constitutes theological work (as opposed to Religious Studies work), allow me to introduce postmodern theology.
Postmodern theology, according to Victor E. Taylor’s essay ‘Theography: Sings of God in a postmodern age’ (in Secular Theology: American radical theological thought – Routledge, 2001) aims to ‘find a truth that, in the end, is not deep, but nevertheless meaningful’, to ‘find a way of thinking about God as a surface’.
Taylor continues:
‘While theology in the postmodern moment is characterised by an abandonment of metaphysical discourse, questions concering meaning and value in lived experience endure. Along with these questions comes the significance of the sign of God, not as a metaphysical entity but as a linguistic construct offering a logic of heterogeneity and a “disjunctive diversity” resulting in text production, the “unconditionality” of artistic creation. The sign of God is not the “name of God”, the inadequate linguistic expression of an all-powerful being, but a condition of the possibility of signification. The sign of God is an economy of concepts that takes “shape” as grammatological arrangements. God, freed from a spacial limit, no longer is language’s “other”; nor is God philosophy’s first principle – God is a sign-network’.
So, there you have an example of atheists calling themselves theologians…
‘Go figure’.
Correction:
The essay is ‘Theography: Signs of God in a postmodern age’ (not ‘sings’!)
Oh, thanks, Adam – for the correction about Allah.
Of course God is also the English name for god – but it’s also a proper name. At least in practice, if not formally. Which creates a space for all sorts of confusion, it seems to me. People can talk about God meaning a particular guy but then if anyone starts asking awkward questions they shift their ground and pretend they meant something quite abstract and “ineffable.” So it’s a damn tricky word – which I take to be one problem with theology.
But of course whether one means God or god, there are still some, er, oddities in the concept. Quite a few, actually.
And thanks Edmund. Of course, we’ve already met a little postmodern theology, thanks to Philip Blond, whom you so enjoyed reading…
God is a sign-network.
Yeah…that’s pretty obvious. But that’s postmodernism for you – “making the obvious look profound for forty years. Coming soon to a mall near you.”
Theology, when it is taken to mean a rational account (bear with me) of what the Abrahamic religions worship as supreme, has routinely exerted effort to display its epistemological credentials. In late antiquity, this meant a Platonist approach; in the middle ages it meant an Aristotelian approach; in the 17th and 18th centuries it started to look more difficult, considering the emergence of Galilean science and a Copernican universe – it must have been devastating to learn that the planets are not angelic intelligences that go around the earth in eternal circular motion, etc. Still, theologians found ways to convince themselves they could harmonise God with a mechanistic world. In the 19th century there was an Hegelian theology; in the 20th century, theologians looked first to existentialism and then to marxism for models, and there have been other philosophical models as well, until FINALLY we have a “postmodern theology.” This is to speak only of the most “up to date” and “progressive” theology of whatever period; there have always been plenty of god-folk who prefer a more archaic approach. The continual attempt by theologians to harmonise their “inquiry” with the current science, philosophy, or intellectual trend seems to me to be a game of hide and seek with an imaginary friend who cannot be found here, nor there, nor the other new hiding place, and who will never be found except in the imagination of the seeker. Perhaps postmodernism is the ideal model for theology – there need be no more pesky problems with evidence or argument when God IS the very absence of truth, merely a play of signifiers without any stable meaning.
I’ve noted that a great deal of modern theology, from post-Whitehead process theology to the po-mo drivel cited above, is simply a way of concealing the conclusion “God is make-believe” behind as many layers of tortured rhetoric as possible. One suspects that the students of theology, having invested so much time, money and effort into their educational process, are loathe to admit this, even to themselves – especially to themselves.
I’m a philosopher by profession, and even I look at these people, shake my head somewhat sadly and think, “Why doesn’t he/she just go get a real job?”
The Maltese don’t speak a dialect of Arabic. Last I heard, the native patois is a lineal descendent of ancient Phonecian.
Maltese and Arabic
Yes, as the many a Hyacinth Bucket of Lebanon and Malta would like to have it; likewise Memsahib Bucket’s dismissing Urdu as a Hindi dialect: “from Persian, isn’t it?”.
Two people could believe in the identical belief or correlate of belief, and yet, modally, their beliefs are not the same. Let’s take, as an example, the belief in the “literal” Resurrection of one Jesus Christ: for one person, such a belief might amount to a kind of supernatural rocket science, while, for another, it might amount to a belief in what, for all this world, at least, is an impossibility. Perhaps theologians waste their time sitting about thinking about distinctions like that.
But let’s drop any name-calling contest,- ( as if anyone would claim to know God, or as if meaning could be contained in a name),- and call it “X”. While fully granting the distinction between causal and communicational/intentional predicates, there still remains the experience, (for which there is no evidence), of existing *in* a world which exceeds one, in which one is affected by events in terms of a before/after, such that one is traumatized/transformed by what affects one, such that events are not “linear” in the sense of a continuous flow or smooth distribution, and in which one experiences a need/call for “redemption” , in which the contingency of one’s existence is joined to an obligation that exceeds the sense of self, is “higher” than oneself. And this “experience” is ek-static, that is, comes from outside the self and estranges one from one’s own desires. Where then does it come from, since it is not one’s own self-referential autonomy? From X. Or from that which grants a new adhesion to the sundered self, from “grace”. There is a “dimensional space” there, which is part of the complexion of the real, if not “reality”, to which the thought-form of theology refers, regardless of whether one applies it in conventional, orthodox ways or not. Now, more or less orthodox believers adhere to “scriptures”, which is to say, stories or a narrative arc of stories, which are granted paradigmatic status and force. But those stories require further extention and application, if their sense is to be “redeemed”, that is, if they are to bear any fruit in actual praxis. Such to-and-fro should be enough to keep ideologues busy.
On the other hand, theology is a peculiar artefact of the “translation” of Jewish tradition/crisis into Greek and a mission unto gentiles. (Jews don’t have any theology, except under pressure from Christian culture; their tradition consists in Talmudic explication.) This gave rise to the notion of dogma, that religious belief or “faith” consisted in adherence to doctrinal specifications. But if “theology” is a theoretical discourse about an object called “God”, then the case is quite hopeless. But even the Christian doctrine of final judgment/immortality is ambiguous as to whether it amounts to an acknowledgement of mortal human finitude or its cancelation. In that respect, critical attention is perhaps better focused on the manipulations of established hierarchies than on the rationality of believers.
Adam Tjaak:
No expert here. Just what I’d heard. And given the proximity to Carthage, it made sense. But, no doubt, given the currents that have washed over that blessed isle, the native patois would be a hodge-podge. I’ll leave it to the philologists to sort out.
Maltese is generally held to be an Arabic language, though with tremendous influence from mediterranean Romance languages.
Oh, now I get it! No wonder I never understand a word Halasz says (well, except on those rare occasions when he shifts gears and deviates into sense). He’s a postmodern theologian!
Postmodern theology is hereby declared to be subject to arbitrary and drastic deletion without notice upon the whim of the proprietor.
I googled the Maltese language. The original language is thought to be “Punic”, a dialect of Phoenecian, which is thought to have died out in North Africa around 600 A.D. The island was annexed to the Roman Empire, of course, and curiously was an early adopter of Christianity, in part because the Aramaic in which the “message” was brought was readily intelligible to the natives. After the island was conquered by the Arabs, the dialect melded with the cognate language of the new rulers. The third main ingredient is Sicilian. Words that are only modern are adopted from English, which is widely spoken on the island, due to the last colonial period. The language is a bit of a political football, with “Punic revivalism” being associated with the left-populist-nationalist cause against the Italicized upper crust. One website I consulted also claimed that ancient Phoenecian survives in some degree in some dialects of Lebanese Arabic. However, the politics of the issue are an inversion of the facts, since it is the Maronites who claim to be “Phoenecians” and not Arabs, but the author maintains that the Maronites, whose ancestral lands are in the mountains, are, in fact, mostly Syrian migrants, with some Yemeni, due presumably to trade routes, thus Arabs, whereas it is the Muslims in the coastal cities who would, in fact, be the remnants of the Phoenecians.
OB:
There was, in fact, nothing “postmodernist” in what I typed, (unless you conflate Heidegger with the epithet, but “reactionary” or, better, “rechts radikal” would be more like it.) But one can make an effort at “sympathetic” understanding of matters or beliefs one does not adhere to or agree with. And you were the one to have brought up the “discipline” of theology, asking what “good” reasons it had to offer, which presumably allows for fair discussion. (And, needless to say, causal ones are the least likely candidates, as if no one had ever read “The First Antinomy of Pure Reason”.) Others pointed out that theologians proffer their “reasons”, whether good or bad, on the basis of the assumption of a prior commitment. Which is itself of interest, since such a structure applies much more generally, indeed, is in a certain sense universal, (cf. Gadamer). The other matter of interest, which I tried to make plain above, is that theology, provided one sorts it through and filters out its dogmatic elements, presents a thought-form that is a species of non-objectifying thinking. At least, that is of interest if one does not believe that objectifying thinking can be totalized, which belief is itself metaphysical, indeed, virtually the definition of metaphysics. (The grim comedy of physicalism ensues, which maintains that all meaningful questions pertain to, are grounded in, the bounds of physical reality, which means, at the limit, that there are no meaningful questions, since there are no questions, simply the mute transcription of “reality”). Benjamin’s “rescuing” criticism, for example, insisted on attempting to recuperate the lives/worlds of the oppressed of the past as a whole, precisely in their truncated potentiality, rather than regarding them as mere stepping-stones to the linear march of progress. And, of course, the point is not to retreat into the past, but rather to illuminate the “wholeness” of the present, in opposition to its tendency to constitute itself as a totalizing, homogenous enclosure; that is, reparation toward past injustice serves as a standard, a “measure”, of authentic progress, as opposed to the notion of “progress” as a triumphal march of the inevitable. Benjamin’s work amounts to an application of a basically theological, if Judaic, thought-form to entirely atheistic ends. And if his project is ultimately “impossible”, it is not because it defies obvious causal laws, but rather because it strains the limits of communication. The upshot is that there are “dimensions” to “reality” that are suppressed, forbidden expression, if one truncates rationality to the function of reference to “facts” alone. (And, yeah, there was a school of West German RC theologians who attempted to adopt Benjamin, under the heading of “amaneutic (sp?) solidarity”, which goes to show that there are at least some Christians who take the alleged obligation to solidarity with the deprived and oppressed seriously, if only theoretically.)
So go ahead and delete away. I realize that the sensitivities of B&W are too tender to permit anything but denunciation of disagreement in the name of inquisitorial pseudo-inquiry.
I would, of course, but it’s such a classic example of what it is that I’ve decided to leave it, for the same sort of reason I linked to that article on Butler the other day.
You realize nottink, nottink!
It’s got nothing to do with sensitivities, however many times you say so. It’s got to do with a settled dislike of verbal fog-machines. But this particular fog-machine is, as I say, so very what it is, that I can’t bring myself to erase it. Not for a day or two anyway.
John, Do you talk the way you write? I’d love to hear you at the lectern or in face-to-face conversation. It’d be an awesome experience to feel that torrent of twenty-dollar words pour over me in a wondrously neverending flow!
I have personally witnessed both in 1950s Malta and the eastend of London, Arab seamen and Maltese gabbling away at great speed with seemingly no difficulty. Even with all the foreign and religious influences there is a common core – my original point being that even in Maltese allah=god.
It came back to me, after which I felt a bit of a fool. I knew that. Allah – al’lah – it just means the lord, right? I knew that.
Still. The effect is the same. It refers to a character, not to something like a First Cause.