Abstract
The design of many contemporary theological frameworks seems notably deficient as it pertains to a creative poetics of the possible, especially as applied to alterity and in dealing with difference. I will propose a discourse and praxis reaching beyond the factional and, from an eschatological analysis, fictional understandings of diversity—limited as they are by categories primarily grounded in sociological disciplines—toward the recognition of our commonly unique humanity via the Imago Dei as analogia relationis (cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall).
A proximate spark for my topic emerges from a single sentence in a recent prescient book review of Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God. This former chief rabbi of the Commonwealth of Nations, Jonathan Sacks, writing in the Jewish Review of Books muses: “Too little has been done within the faith traditions themselves to make space for the kind of diversity with which we will have to live if humankind is to have a future” (2014). These words, at a minimum, form an echo of Martin Luther King’s prophetic axiom, “If we cannot learn to live together as sisters and brothers we will surely perish apart as fools.”
But I am reading Sacks also to say that there is a particular creative opportunity to imagine or even re-imagine our koinonia with categories resonant to a fuller range of the Christian theological enterprise. The poetics of the possible proceed from the future, redeem the present and interpret the past, all through an eternal lens of recognitive relationality, die Anerkennung.
When things go wrong with religion they tend to go badly wrong, because religion is such a powerful force(Jackelén 2012).
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Notes
- 1.
Eric Banks, “The Provocations of Mark Taylor,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 January 2010: “I always find religion most interesting where it is least expected.”
- 2.
While easy associations of these two posts (postmodernism and postcolonialism) seem inferentially reasonable, a de facto coupling of postcolonialism with postmodernism misses the reality that all posts are not created equal, so to speak; postcolonialism and postmodernism derive from an environment that is not coincident in time, geographic location or referential scope. Further, postmodernism’s incredulity toward metanarratives represents potentially a disavowal of certain historical and present realities. Although those realities may have wounded by providing the ideological fodder for colonialism, I maintain it is within this wound that healing is found for what ails postcolonial communities economically, socially and spiritually. Credulity, or a hermeneutic of hope, toward certain metanarratives, even as they are critiqued and scrutinized and scrubbed by critical modernism, rather than a default hermeneutic of suspicion, might be just what is needed most.
- 3.
It should not go without saying, however, that critical modernity and postmodernity—especially as used by philosophically-oriented theologians—do share in common some key characteristics. As Merold Westphal describes in the preface of Modernity and Its Discontents: “Critical modernism and postmodernism agree that all forms of foundationalism have failed be they rationalist, empiricist, phenomenological, positivist.”9 He continues with an estimation of what critical modernism can import from that confederation of ideas ascribed as postmodernism:
Critical modernism retains the modernistic commitment to rationality, critique, and evidence, but listens to and learns from its postmodern other about mediation, the fallibility of reason, the nefarious political uses to which reason is often put, and the pathology of the modern. Critical modernism rejects triumphalistic modernist tendencies toward totally apodictic truth and is critical of postmodernism…
- 4.
This theme pervades Jean Francois Lyotard. Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
- 5.
The middle- and upper-middle class communities of, most often, white people in the United States, western Europe, South Africa, Australia, and Canada are most frequently considered the bearers and custodians of what we call western.
- 6.
Full name: Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Though simple, I find this acrostic not simplistic, but a useful teaching tool for diversity:
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Different
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Individuals
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Valuing
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Each other
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Regardless of
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Skin
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Identity
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Talent or
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Years
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- 10.
The fullness of the Imago Dei “in, with and under” every human person carries the corresponding dynamic of every individual’s right to be regarded with dignity within every cultural context. I define the human person within an Augustinian framework as a “being imaging the essence of God, of unconditional worth, characterized by a complex of internal and external relationships which are integrated into a unity of being, relation, and activity.” E. Edward Hackmann, “Augustine and the Concept of Person” in Lutheran Theological Review III: 2 (Spring/Summer 1991): 25.
- 11.
There are some philosophical concepts, for examples, time, which only can be understood in a narrated, not definitional context. See Antje Jackelén’s Time and Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science, and Theology. Translated by Barbara Harshaw (Philadelphia: Templeton, 2005).
- 12.
The quotation of Derek Walcott’s ensues from a discussion of history, its attendant visions of progress, and the myths associated with the postcolonial conjunction of the Old and New Worlds. Ironically, Walcott here employs the idea of absurdity existentially even in debunking any notion of postcolonial existentialism: “The blasphemous images fade, because these hieroglyphs of progress are basically comic. And if the idea of the New and the Old becomes increasingly absurd, what must happen to our sense of time, what else can happen to history itself, but that it, too, is becoming absurd? This is not existentialism. Adamic, elemental man cannot be existential. His first impulse is not self-indulgence but awe, and existentialism is simply the myth of the noble savage gone baroque. Existential/philosophies of freedom are born in cities. Existentialism is as much nostalgia as in Rousseau’s sophisticated primitivism, as sick as recurrence in French thought as the Ilse of Cythera, whether it is the tubercular, fevered imagery of Watteau or the same fever turned delirious in Rimbaud and Baudelaire.” Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998): pp. 41–42.
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Nunes, J. (2016). A Poetical Proposal: Diversity in Lutheran Traditions. In: Baldwin, J. (eds) Embracing the Ivory Tower and Stained Glass Windows. Issues in Science and Religion: Publications of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23944-6_7
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