Self-Proclamation
Halden Doerge has posted some on one central problem with Radical Orthodoxy’s “program”: the rhetoric tends towards preaching not Christ, but its own persuasive power to overcome other narratives. The same danger, turning the attention of theology towards theology itself and thus away from God, pervades quite a bit of contemporary theology, touching not only Milbank but even (to a less blatant extent) Hauerwas, Yale-school theology, and rhetorical biblical critics like Walter Brueggemann.* Even for these quite conscientious and confessional thinkers, the immanentizing trend in modernity is difficult to resist.
Karl Barth makes the same point, more simply and helpfully, in the opening of his Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. He explains there how to distinguish true theology:
bq. The best theology (not to speak of the only right one) of the highest, or even the exclusively true and real, God would have the following distinction: it would prove itself–and in this regard Lessing was altogether right–by the demonstration of the Spirit and of its power. However, if it should hail and proclaim itself as such, it would by this very fact betray that it certainly is not the one true theology.
p(footnote). ==*== Take, for example, his provocative but dangerous claim that “_the God of Old Testament theology as such lives in, with, and under the rhetorical enterprise of this text, and nowhere else and in no other way._ This rhetorical enterprise operates with ontological assumptions, but these assumptions are open to dispute and revision in the ongoing rhetorical enterprise of Israel” (_Theology of the Old Testament_, p. 66). Brueggemann is careful to specify that he’s talking here of the God of Old Testament _theology_, not that God himself is contained by the text but that our investigation of the Old Testament witness is. Nonetheless, was Israel’s enterprise really, at root, _rhetorical_ rather than, as a younger Brueggemann might have said, _doxological_? Doxology is a form of rhetoric, certainly, but a form more noticeably directed _away from itself_.
23 August 2007 |
Comments (2)
Tags: Method, Radical Orthodoxy
![[RSS for this post]](/images/feed-icon-14x14.png){kind=icon}
Yes, the Barth quote is entirely appropriate here. It does seem that our contemporary situation is one in which the conversation has largely turned from a proclamation of God to an argument about method. Some have done so more obviously (in Schleiermacher’s Second Lecture on the Essence of Religion, he tries to do “religion’s cultured despisers” a favor by changing the question from “What are the gods?” to “What is religion?”) and some less so (elder Brueggemann perplexes and disturbs himself with the rhetorically-limited claims he makes.) Doxology seems to get us back to the real issues – the real Life – at hand. Still, I admit that the “demonstration of the Spirit and its power” of which Barth speaks causes me (as embarrassingly illiterate of Barth as I am) to ask questions about criteria for judging that demonstration, which in turn tempt me to create strategies for ensuring the demonstration of those criteria… you see, a method to herald as “the doxological one.”
Have you looked at Wainwright’s book yet?
Wainwright’s book would be a good place to look for this, but no I haven’t. Doxology could be turned into another self-absorbed method, you’re probably right–but wouldn’t it then be recognizably not doxological?