To Boldly Think What No One Has Thought Before

Recently I've been rereading a biography on a thinker whom I haven't seriously read for many years. His thought gets mixed reviews in my assessment.

But what is striking me most as I review this material is not so much the content itself as the way that it is described, the way many proponents of this man's views have received his ideas. Philosopher T (let's call him) is described as a "bold" thinker, a "visionary" thinker, an "original" thinker.

This gives me some pause. It sets off a warning signal.

Let's briefly consider the question: To what extent are boldness and originality virtues in the realm of thought. Of course, it all depends upon context. Clearly, when old ideas clearly are not working, creativity and nerve in exploring new options are the dispositions that the moment requires. Certainly, too, one can admire courage: the courage, for example, to claim one's convictions, to articulate difficult truths against opposition, etc.

What about "boldness" in the sphere of thought? I have philosophical and theological discussions in view primarily, but consider an analogous situation which calls for thought: You exhibit a bizarre combination of symptoms. Your physician can't figure out what's wrong with you, but makes a couple of tentative hypotheses. You get a second opinion, and the second doctor is confused too, but has his own theories. In utter frustration, you see a third position. This one is young and brash. He is "bold" both in his diagnosis and prognosis and in his prescription for a cure. He expresses his views with a confidence and clarity that the previous two professionals lacked. What's more, he recommends to you a "bold" new experimental procedure -- and a risky one, at that.

In this scenario, whose view do you trust? Of course, many factors come into play. The situation would seem different, too, if you had followed the first two doctors' suggestions and your suffering had only worsened. But there is a difference between boldness and desperation.

There's a difference between throwing the Hail Mary pass when your team is behind six points with 10 seconds left in the game and calling this play in the second quarter when your leading by six points and are just five yards out of your own end zone. In the first instance, the long pass is your only realistic hope of winning. In the second case, the call (most coaches would agree) is "bold" indeed, but idiotic.

This is my question: In the spheres of theology and philosophy (one might include the social sciences as well), which virtue, overall, is more a propos: boldness or humility? An unqualified answer is impossible, but much can be said for the latter option. My ideas are bold. But what if they're wrong? What if they're really wrong. Tyrants can be quite bold.

Another thing I've noticed in reviewing this thinker's following: He has quite a fan club. A well-organized professional society with scholars from a broad array of disciplines is dedicated to exploring his thought. Part of its mission statement is to "defend" Dr. T's ideas.

Really? Is this in keeping with the spirit of inquiry? Should a professional society of scientists, let's say, dedicated to the work of Einstein, Planck or Darwin strive to "defend" it's foundational thinker's legacy? Explore, certainly. Debate, to be sure, if any serious challenges to the theory exist. Such is the spirit of scientific inquiry.

As I understand scientific theory, it needs to be proven and tested continuously to account for new data. Eventually, if the data demand it and our tools for interpreting it improve, a paradigm shift might be in order, and that move may very well requires creativity, boldness and vision. But what if a group of followers is defending ideas that are basically fantastical or just plain crappy?

Listomania: Theologian Biographies

What would a blog be without lists? Here's my first one.

The topic: My favorite biographies of theologians (note, I didn't say the best available biographies, but rather, the ones that I've most enjoyed).

1. Peter Brown -- Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. This is indeed one of the finest books I've ever read. Simply essential, a masterwork. Since most everyone out there seems to agree with me on this, I don't really need to say more.

2. Roland H. Bainton -- Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. This choice may surprise some Luther aficionados, but in my estimation, this book delivers. The purist would perhaps lift up Oberman's work over Bainton's. Both, indeed, have a privileged place on our bookshelf -- the one in the living room, where most of the really good stuff (excepting Barth) can be found.

I think the attraction of Bainton for me is colored by a positive memory: In 2000 -- back before the terrorists had starting turning all of us into terrorists, torturers and the like -- I took a delightful study trip exploring famous Luther sites in Germany. The facilitator was the New Testament scholar Eugene Boring of TCU's Brite Divinity School. Prof. Boring assigned us two books for background reading -- the Bainton bio and the Dillenberger anthology. This pairing offers what is, probably, the most painless introduction to Luther you can get. I caught a G.I. bug when we were staying in Göttingen and was leveled flat out barfing miserable. You might say it was a bad case of Lutheran Anfectung.

Prof. Boring schlepped out in the middle of the night to the only emergency pharmacy in town to acquire medicine for me. For this virtuous deed, he had to endure the taunt of "Das ist nicht in Ordnung!" from the piqued pharmacist. One appreciates American pragmatism at such moments.

3. David Daniell -- William Tyndale: A Biography. Daniell is virtually a one-man guild of scholarship on the too-little-known English reformer. This book emerges, clearly, from a deep love for and devotion to its subject. It is a delight and a must read for anyone interested in the history of English vernacular Bible translations.

The work has two problems: One is the paucity of actual information we have on the elusive Tyndale. Daniell handles this lacuna admirably by giving quite a bit of background detail on early 16th century Oxford and Cambridge, Erasmus, etc. One also meets Thomas More in these pages (but, if you're a devout Roman Catholic, let me warn you: You aren't going to like the portrayal too much).

The other problem is that Daniell's apologetic fervor for his subject pushes the work dangerous close to hagiography. Now, I'll fess up and say that Tyndale is one of my heroes, so I don't mind it too much. But some of the exposition tends in the direction of suggesting "a greater than Luther is here."

4. William J. Bowsma -- John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait. This very readable book presents Calvin as a man of his own times. The portrait is about one half intellectual history and one half existential psychology. The consensus out there is that Bernard Cottret's biography is the standard work so far in this area (see this Calvin enthusiast, for example). I will admit, with embarrassment, that I had taken a copy of this out of the library but got kind of "Calvined out" that fall and ended up returning it unfinished. But Christmas is just around the corner!

5. Eberhard Busch -- Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts.  I would be remiss not to mention this text. My list was about to give you the false impression that I'm a Reformation historian and not a troubled (post)modernist like everybody else. Not so. The 20th century is my go-to period, for better or worse. This is the standard work for probing the life of the most important theologian since Schleiermacher.

But this is not an easy read. Because of his tremendous archival work, Busch is one of the most important Barth scholars alive today. This is a chronologically ordered rendition of biographical materials drawn, mostly, from Barth's own writings and tied together in a loose narrative framework. It is not a critical biography. Such a work, to my knowledge, does not exist. For my part, I really consider this more of a primary source than a secondary evaluation of Barth. But the material here is crucial for setting Barth in his historical context.

6. Richard Wightman Fox -- Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography.  Who would have guessed that this country's most important Protestant public intellectual of the past century was a driven workaholic with a persistent German-American immigrant's anxiety about fitting into American culture? An amazing, brilliant and (in some respect) tortured figure emerges from these pages: Deeply ethical, with a profound sense of political realism, with an early passion for social and economic justice so vigorous that it is vulnerable to morphing into the disillusioned cynicism of an old warrior. Nieburhr's life story is a window into every important social and political crisis from World War I to Vietnam.

To-Do List

In addition to Cottret, here are a couple other books I have dipped into without having yet finished them (but I hope to remedy that shortly): Diarmaid McCulloch's Thomas Cramner and George Marsden's Jonathan Edwards.

Ontotheology* 101

S: "Do you believe that God 'exists'?"

L: "Of course."

S: "I mean, couldn't we say, with Prof. Jean-Luc Marion, that God transcends existence, that the one we call 'God' far exceeds the very category of being itself. That we can talk of God only as pure gift, absolute beneficence, pure self-giving love, utter agape beyond being? Just like some of the mystics of the past and some deconstructionist theologians today say?"

L: "I never bought into that."

S: (Voice rising) "You mean to tell me that we, mere creatures, share with the Creator of the universe the category of 'existence' as a predicate of our reality? Doesn't this subsume God within some overarching metaphysical schema?"

L: "Whatever."

S: "Well, I guess we could go the route of Thomism and say that God is self-subsistent esse, a pure unity of being and action, and that our creaturely existence is a finite participation in God's transcendent esse. But, again, that commits us to some sort of analogia entis -- some notion that there is within our existence as such something that links us existentially to God, by virtue of our very creaturehood and apart from Christ and  historic revelation. And I'm just not sure I'm ready to go there."

L: "I thought you were going to write about William Stringfellow. How's that going?"

(Pause)
S: "I really love this weather we've been having."

L: "Have you paid the phone bill yet?"



(* I haven't found online any clear, rough-and-ready definition of "ontotheology." I take the term generally to mean the attempt to relate the reality of God, the subject of theology, with a general metaphysical account of the cateory of "being" as such.)

Nevermind. Some Apologies are in Order.

I feel like this blog is starting(!) to lose its focus -- that I'm edging more and more into the "heat" rather than the "light" category.

So let me start today by making some amends, by way of an attempt to get back on track.

First, let me apologize to anyone who works on Hegel (though I doubt such folks would bother to read this blog). Despite what I've been saying, I'm not really going to engage him now. I'm 40 years old and, if I had wanted to seriously engage Hegel, I probably would have done so already. It was intellectual hubris on my part to suggest I can do a whiz-bang refresher course in 19th century philosophy and theology as a preamble to reading Barth. Grad school is over.

There has been a good deal of interesting work in recent years attempting to give a genetic account of Barth's development in relationship to its 19th century intellectual background. Prof. McCormack's work stands out in this vein. For now, I'll content myself with Barth's own book on 19th century Protestant thought and see where I go from there.

Second, let me also apologize for some snarky comments I made about Prof. Pannenberg, especially to any students out there who may be working through his imposing corpus. His work deserves careful and thoughtful engagement, but I'm not going to do that here, at least not anytime soon. So I had best be quiet.

I will admit that some of this snarkiness comes from a sensitive personal spot: The only exchange I ever had with Prof. Pannenberg was brief and did not go very well. During my qualifying exam year, the eminent  paid a visit to the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he gave a couple lectures. At an informal luncheon talk, during the Q & A, I embarrassed myself with a question that he lightly dismissed. Everyone got a good laugh out of it -- at my expense! I still think it was a good question and that he didn't really answer it. But the exchange probably failed because of my own failure to articulate it and to persist with a clarifying follow-up.

Third, and this is the most important point I want to make, let me apologize to the conservative Neo-Calvinists, again targets of my snarkiness. Several of my friends belong to this camp, so this requires eating a particularly bitter bit of crow. There is some serious theology going on in this area, and I might have some cause to engage with it at some point. Actually, some of the Neo-Calvinists have become pretty perceptive readers of Barth.

My undergrad alma mater is Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Down there, among the restive Baptists, some conservative Presbyterian money has built a fine conservative Protestant seminary called Beeson Divinity School. Amazingly, the div. school building was constructed from the ruins of my crappy first-year college dorm. Anyway, when I worked for the Samford student newspaper, I had the privilege to interview its dean, the very fine historical theologian Timothy George: What a kind, calm and reasonable man he is!

Part of my conflictedness, too, comes out of my own Southern Baptist roots. Though I'm a confirmed, prayer-book carrying Episcopalian, I'm still genetically Baptist. That's where the orneriness comes from. My dad has been a Baptist minister since age 17. Can you imagine that! We went to a lot of SBC national convention meetings during the height of the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination, the early '80s. Our side lost: Big time.

The intellectual leading lights of the SBC makeover were and are Neo-Calvinists, including the very prominent president of the flagship SBC seminary, who, through his amazing Internet presence, has himself become something of a phenomenon within evangelicalism today. Is there a little residual pique about all this informing my petulance? Probably. Some folks want to reenact the seventeenth century Synod of Dordt. I'm not sure I'm one of them, but who knows?

But I will say this, for now, about the Neo-Calvinist movement: Some of the rhetoric about gender -- about "biblical manhood" and "womanhood" -- that flies under this banner has me alarmed. I would urge all evangelicals to keep both their minds and their Bibles open. And also, if you want to know where my sympathies in the gender debates lie, please read Rachel Held Evans.

Dueling Hegels / Dueling Barths?

So, as I mentioned before, I'm trying to remedy a longstanding neglect of Hegel's philosophy, with a keen sense of my own limitations. Hegel's impact on modern theology is extraordinary (Hodgson, Moltmann, Pannenberg, Altizer, Küng, the list could go on an on).

I have more than a little ambivalence (as you might have guessed) about this legacy, but I want to do a few more soundings to make sure I'm on solid ground.

I've been perusing this fine article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (This is a superb website, and for a couple years now it has been my go-to when I start to explore a new topic in philosophy. The articles I've read are of a manageable length, very readable, written by experts and peer reviewed.)

I'm learning about a significant controversy in contemporary Hegel studies. Some who follow a more "traditional" interpretation of Hegel read his system as being rooted, basically, in a metaphysical conception of God as absolute spirit. Others, though, read Hegel in a more anti-metaphysical sense, in a way that highlights his emphases on the concrete contingencies in the processes of history. The later, more materialistic way of reading Hegel brings him more into line both with Marxist and postmodernist sensibilities. I'm sure I'm not expressing it that well, but you can read the article for yourself.

The field of Karl Barth studies -- in the United States, at least -- has been embroiled in recent years in a controversy that seems, on the face of it, to have some interesting parallels with the debates over Hegel interpretation. Two major readings -- or, I really should say, two strategies of reading, for there is a fairly wide range of Barth interpretations out there now -- have emerged.

The issues are complicated, and I'm not going to name of the principle combatants here. But one of the central disputes is this: What is the proper place of metaphysical (or better, ontological) concerns in our interpretations of and appropriations from Barth? Should such questions be bracketed out or are they integral to a proper reading of Barth?

These issues are not arcane. Some very old debates about the proper relationship between philosophy and theology, about the very nature of God and about the Creator-creature relationship are surfacing within this debate. I became interested in this debate several years ago, but haven't been able to follow everything that has emerged from it.

But I do find the potential parallels between respective debates over Hegel and Barth interesting. In many ways, it seems, theology still lives in the shadows of the 19th century.

Hegel, Schlegel!

Caveat (need I repeat this?): This is a blog post, not scholarship!

Let's recap where I'm heading: I started out to write a post titled "Why I'm not a Barthian." Then I decided I needed to check my theses by starting over (yet again) with some intensive reading in Barth. But since I've tried that many times before and tend to get lost in the forest, I decided I better clarify my questions a bit first. Then I thought, to really get at Barth, I had better first reread Feuerbach (then, perhaps, a little refresher in Schleiermacher and Luther).

So I started to read Feuerbach, the 19th century German philosopher who emerged mid-century from the circle of left-wing Hegelians. And there, already in the preface to the book, he's trying to distinguish himself from Hegel's absolute idealism.

I admit that I'm afraid of Hegel. Don't get me wrong: I'm not afraid that I'll ever understand him. Rather, I fear that if I started to trying again to read him I'll get lost forever in the thicket. That I'll become like Pannenberg, except without the brilliance and erudition. That I'll turn into that most dreaded entity, the ontotheologian. So I've tried to avoid Hegel since dipping into the bits required by my graduate education, but it seems to be impossible.

My wife was a philosophy major. But she didn't have to read Hegel, because, as she puts it, her advisor "didn't believe in Hegel." She doesn't read Hegel and absolutely (get it?) refuses to discuss this stuff with me. This is one of the reasons I married her, though certainly not the most important one.

In my view, the trajectories exemplified by Hegel and Schleiermacher represent the Scylla and Charybdis (sorry, I know that's hackneyed, but I just can't resist) of modern theology. I'm trying desperately to avoid being sucked into either of these directions without becoming a fundamentalist. It's hard. That's why I read Karl Barth, even though I'm not a Barthian.

But I'm not sure that Feuerbach's negative characterization of his master is fully reliable. So may I dip into a rough and dirty cram course on Hegel in a pinch, perhaps? I'll lean on an expert, Prof. Peter C. Hodgson. Maybe I can get by for now with his anthology.

This is my second plug in this blog for the Making of Modern Theology series. I'll be expecting my kickback check from Fortress Press to arrive in the mail soon.

It's Feuerbach

I don't have a lot of time. Now, I'm mainly just thinking out loud. I usually try to say something cute or clever, but there's no time for this today.

I think the best book to read at the outset of a thorough study of Barth's work is The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841) by Ludwig Feuerbach. The translation I'm looking at was done by George Elliot -- yes, that George Elliot -- which, I'm assuming, was the first translation into English.

(Apparently, Elliot enjoyed promulgating controversial texts, for she also translated Strauss' Life of Jesus. There are so many Strauss' out there in our cultural history: This is the one who put forward the idea that the miraculous material in the gospels is "mythological." Interestingly, according to this source, Elliot published the Feuerbach translation under her actual name, Mary Ann Evans. James Luther Adams, more recently, also translated Das Wesen, but somehow it seems cooler to carry around a book with Elliot's name on the cover. No disrepect is meant to Dr. Adams.)

I don't have any new groundbreaking insight into Feuerbach, whom most theology and philosophy students will have encountered, but I am rereading this work to refresh my memory on the basic argument. which goes like this: Theology is anthropology that doesn't realize this about itself. Theology is anthropology, perhaps, with a bad conscience. I think Feuerbach, were he alive, might level the latter against many theologians working today.

Feuerbach offers the classic modern reductionist account of religion. Religious discourse (theology) represents an alienation of human life and thought from its ownmost proper concern -- humankind itself. According to Feuerbach, all religious doctrines are projected from human ideals and from concrete realities, hopes and aspirations of human experience. Christian doctrines have true referents, but the referents aren't what theology claims them to be: "God" is a hypostasized projection of ideal human characteristics. Feuerbach's thought seeded the major 19th-20th century hermeneuticists of suspicion, that trinity beloved by critical theorists and angry undergrads alike -- Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.

A quick trip to wikipedia would yield all this info. So why do I bother with this stuff? Well, like I've said, I'm obsessed with Barth -- who quite possibly was less obsessed with Feuerbach than I'm supposing, but we'll see. And my thesis is that we need to understand Feuerbach's claims, various possible modern responses to his claims and Barth's assessment of these responses, to get a clear picture of some of the bigger moves in Barth's thought. So I'm relaying some groundwork here, hoping maybe to hit some new gem I never saw before in the dirt.

Then, once I get a better handle on Feuerbach, I might proceed thusly: Flashback to (the early) Schleiermacher, then maybe a quick look (if that were possible) at some Luther. It may be, as others have suggested, that there is potentially a problem in how Luther construes the divine-human relationship which Feuerbach has exploited. At this point, just maybe, I could construct a sort of ideal typology of possible reponses to Feuerbach.

I think this may take a little while. But, fortunately, my Christmas bonus is not tied to my theological work.