On Being a Christian Philosopher

Throughout the past weeks I have had a certain theme (or perhaps question) on my mind: the relationship between Christian faith and philosophy. This question has roots in an ever broader (perennial) question, which concerns the relationship between reason and revelation (or as Tertullian put it: “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?”). As many know, the dynamic tension between faith and reason has deep autobiographical roots for me. I spent many years pursuing reason-less faith, followed by years pursuing faith-less reason, and the one-sided nature of those pursuits has been the cause of many periods of despair and skepticism

Since philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom and Christian faith demands that one locate all wisdom in God, it appears that one cannot separate the two if one calls himself or herself both a “Christian” and a “philosopher.” The immediate follow-up question is then: isn’t Christian philosophy really theology? Or, are all Christian philosophers necessarily theologians? I think that there are two responses to this question as well as two related models. I will call the first one “Augustinian” and the second one “Thomistic.” The first model makes no clear distinction between theology and philosophy, while the latter one definitely does. I must step back and note that I am oversimplifying the matter, but nevertheless, this is how I think it works. I believe that I am proceeding down the first, Augustinian path.

For Augustine, what separates the Christian philosopher from the Christian non-philosopher  is not a distinction between wisdom and foolishness, or between knowledge and opinion, but rather the difference is inherently related to the deepest concerns of the two. It is not the case that the Christian philosopher is closer to Truth than the Christin non-philosopher. This point is illustrated clearly in Confessions book IX when both Augustine (the philosopher) and Monica (his faithful pious mother) have a divine revelatory experience. So, both kinds of Christians can see the Good, but one kind is content to live life piously in worship of God, while the other does the same through a life of thinking rationally about the problems of philosophy.

The relationship between philosophy and theology is then really irrelevant in the Augustinian framework because at the most basic level all Christians see everything from a theological perspective: all things are gifts from God; all good is what it is because of the goodness of God; all truth and wisdom points to God; all of creation is fundamentally oriented towards the Divine. This is why Christian thinkers like John Milbank (who also ignores the whole Christian philosophy/theology distinction) deny that there is such a thing as “Christian ethics” because to be Christian means that one already is pursuing a just and rightly ordered life.

Upon reflecting on this problem, I think that I have erred in the past by demonstrating an awful amount of intellectual hubris. Being a philosopher does not make me closer to Truth than my non-philosopher Christian friends, and in many ways I stand in need of correction and teaching from them. I sincerely hope, then, that my fate won’t be the same as Socrates’ who died because the city was fed up with a pesky philosopher running around asking questions. Strauss may be right in demonstrating the inherent incompatibility between the life of the philosopher and the life of the simple city-dweller, yet this rupture in human life can be healed with the recognition that now all beings can be citizens of the “City of God” and work together to bring peace and justice to this world.

Thank You John Milbank (Or, Why I Am Returning to Augustine)

While working through John Milbank’s essay “Augustine and the Indo-European Soul,” I came across a paragraph that “confirmed” for me the proper relationship between philosophy and theology, and also the proper relationship between myself and St. Augustine. Milbank writes:

For Augustine, the objectifying gaze of philosophy without love produces no truth, but merely satisfies a perverse voyeuristic desire, or curiositas. By contrast, only when something is genuinely loved for its goodness, and to an appropriate degree given or allowed to be by us in its goodness, is it truly seen, although this implies inversely that we should love the thing in the light of how we judge it should be. Judgment is something which, as Augustine makes clear in Books 8 and 9 of De Trinitate, arrives afresh with each new circumstance and is not the implementation of a priori standards but the active application of the concrete standard which is Christ-justice incarnate. Indeed, its implication with desire shows that to judge truly is nothing but the aspiration to judge with infinite, divine exactitude. Desire and Vision have become inseparable, supplying each other.

If the philosopher asks, “what is the meaning of being?” there can only be silence. The theologian, however, can come over and answer: “the meaning of being is love” (Milbank a la Augustine). Without love, philosophy will only continue to manipulate and explain the objects of consciousness through autonomous Reason. A truly robust Augustinian theology, however, has no place for such things as “objects,” but instead it has gifts being given by God to creation, and creation returning the gifts through doxology. There are no “objects” because there is no “given,” only an exchange of gifts. Following Augustine, I must turn my “erotic” gaze to the City of God and let philosophy be consummated by liturgical theology!

Transubstantiation and Language

Recently I have been picking up more literature from my favorite theological movement – Radical Orthodoxy. Catherine Pickstock, an RO theologian who will never cease to impress me with her rich prose and audacious claims, once again challenged me at the core of my Christian faith. While reading her essay, “Necrophilia: The Middle of Modernity, A Study of Death, Signs, and the Eucharist,” I returned to the days of Northwest when I sat up in the balcony during chapel and consumed her book After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Specifically, I recalled how impoverished I found the Protestant view of the Eucharist to be – in particular, the rejection of transubstantiation. Over against the (gnostic?) Protestant view, Pickstock argues that only a doctrine of Transubstantiation can give meaning to not only the Eucharist, but to all of language as well.

Protestants have always found it strange that the sacraments of bread and wine could become the body and blood of Christ. Perhaps this is some sort of fear of cannibalism, or maybe it is just “modernity” and its demands for empirical verifiability. Whatever it is, Protestants hide behind the argument that Jesus did not really mean, “this is my body” when he referred to the bread, but rather, it was some sort of symbolization. Pickstock writes:

I have argued above that in the articulations of the Eucharistic Body, the sign is not left behind. Indeed , this is so extremely the case that is is possible to argue that the theological body turns everything into sign, that the distinction between thing and sign can no longer be sustained. This can be seen in the assimilation of sense and referent in the words “this is my body.” Under ordinary circumstances, one attaches a referential anchor to the ostensive indicator “This,” for whilst the word “This” is demonstratively specific, ye tis is also superlatively indeterminate. If Jesus had said “This is my bread,” we could have consulted the physical bread and understood the sense of the word by looking at the object. But that is impossible here, for we cannot look at the elements in order to expand the meaning of the phrase, which suggests that the levels of sense and referent are fused together, since a bare indication of sense has to do all the referential work. The words underline that things are only ever present in the mode of sign, that there is no leaping over language, for at the beginning of the phrase, the word “This” seems to indicate bread, but where bread is simply referred to, “body” is signified, or evoked as a sense, which assimilates the sense to the referent, or rather, effaces the stage of reference altogether. Whereas one might otherwise consider it a category leap, as if to say, “The bread has so, short of attributing meaninglessness to Jesus’ words, (or claiming in bad faith that they merely ’symbolic’ when elsewhere in the Gospels where this is the case, Jesus always says clearly ‘This is given to you as a sign of x,’ etc) it would seem that the phrase has occluded the distinction between thing and sign.

So my question is, why are Protestants so scared to consume the body of Christ? We are eager to consume the pleasures of daily life; eager to consume each other in capitalist business practices – yet, why the phobia of consuming our savior? Not only does Pickstock think we should embrace the doctrine of Transubstantiation, she also proposes that the Eucharist provides the perfect place for the exchange of meaning in the form of receiving and giving gifts (we receive Christ and give back through worship):

Not only is language that which administers the sacrament to us, but conversely, the Eucharist underlies all language since in carrying the secrecy, uncertainty, and discontinuity which characterize every sign to an extreme (no body appears in the bread), it also delivers a final disclosure, certainty, and continuity (the bread is the Body) which alone makes it possible now to trust every sign. In consequence we are no longer uncertainly distanced from ‘the original event’ by language, but rather, we are concelebrants of that event in every word we speak (the event as transcendental category, whose transcedentality is now revealed to be the giving of the Body and Blood of Christ). The words of institution “This is my body” therefore, far from being problematic in their meaning, are the only words that certainly have meaning and lend this meaning to all other words. This is because they fulfill the contradictory conditions of the beneficent secrecy of every sign (certain/uncertain, continuous/discontinuous, iconic/arbitrary, present/absent) to such a degree of oppositional tense that the inhering of bread in body is not a relation of signification (as for a Zwinglian view) but more like a condition of possibility for all signification.

Pickstock’s argument fits into the larger context of her argument in After Writing, and essentially into the whole project of RO, which is to reestablish the meaning of human existence as a liturgical existence (there are no objects, only gifts, and gifts are given by God and returned through liturgical life):

Transubstantiation saves the meaning of the sign because the element of uncertainty remains and yet this becomes identical with an infinite corporeal presence which, as infinite, does not arrive in the manner of an object’s transferral from one place to another, but rather arrives in and through its supplementations, which effect a return of the sign… As the Church transmits, or supplements Christ, it also receives itself again from without, from the coincidence of what it supplements with that surplus which arrives as body and blood, the surplus which the Church itself is, the ‘body of Christ’.

By not affirming Transubstantiation we are left with the necrophilia/necrophobia of modernity/postmodernity. Our culture is so preoccupied with “beating death” that death is the only thing that defines us; or, we consume and devour ourselves, rather than Christ. The Eucharist offers itself as a place of meaning and life, the very life of the Word of God, which is Christ. After reflecting on this, I think that the Protestant church should rethink the place of the Eucharist in church life. Furthermore, I am also interested in exploring the connection between Pickstock’s liturgical theology and Marx’s critique of capital, or as John Milbank has suggested, we must investigate capitalism as a pseudo-religion, a pagan ritual, and a site of cannibalism rather than the orthodox/orthopraxis embrace of the Eucharist as the only thing that we can consume and be consumed by without death, for the Eucharist overcomes the dichotomy between death and resurrection!

Apocalyptic Thoughts

Maybe it started with the downward turn in the U.S. economy, but regardless of its origin there nevertheless is a growing “apocalyptic” concern amongst Westerners – primarily, Americans. Of course, this dynamic is nothing new: the Great Depression, WWII, 1984, Y2K, and 9-11 are all instances that engendered vibrant apocalyptic expectation.

What sorts of things are on people’s minds during this moments? The decline of morality, genocide, corrupt political power, economic depression, bankruptcy of organized religion, etc., to mention a few. Of course, much of this hype has been brought about through misunderstandings of the Book of Revelation and the completely misguided pronouncements made by unpleasant preachers. What do all of the above American events also have in common? Well… history has not ended, there has been no Antichrist; although, I don’t think there ever will be one.

The collapse of morals, etc,. I believe are all characteristics of what we call nihilism, which, according to Nietzsche, is what the Western world was on the brink of circa the late 19th century. I happen to agree with Nietzsche… as well as with MacIntrye, Milbank, Lyotard… who all claim that modernity and its secular ideologies in general has collapsed.

The Western world is crumbling, and it has nothing to do with the Antichrist. Secular democracy has failed. Utilitarianism and deontological based ethical theories are useless. Organized religion is bankrupt, and the Christian church offers us a pick between cold tradition, fanaticism, hypocrisy, conservatism, or motivational speaking. Technology is out of control. The Machine controls us. Capitalism has proven to be not worth the quality of life that it promised.

Education has failed. Our universities are turning into businessmen-training skills-providing vacuums with all the glamor of cheap beer and tons of immature slutty girls. College grads leave with a diploma that is useful for either pay-raises or fire-kindling. Americans know how to read, and yet they don’t know how to read literature. They can speak, but they can’t articulate. When I tell someone I am studying philosophy the response is something like this: (1) confused facial expression, (2) the word: “interesting” and then either (3) “So… like psychology?”, (4) “What can you do with that?”, or (5) “What’s that?”

To make matters worse for me, I can’t help but wonder if after over 11 years of higher education I might not even be able to get a job. Humanities departments everywhere have to do what never has had to happen since the beginning of liberal arts education – namely, to prove their worth. What a ridiculous idea!

Our culture, which claims it does not need philosophy anymore, is in actuality in need of philosophy more than ever. What ever happened to the days when philosophers and artists moved entire nations? What would it like to be Socrates facing charges for corrupting the youth? Or to be Aristotle running for your life because of your ideas? Or Hobbes? Or Kant having your lectures observed by the Russian military? Or Hegel, being so politically influential that the Prussian government had to try to proactively stop Hegel’s ideas from spreading?

The world is ending. How do I know this? Britney Spears has more influential power than Plato.

More Good Resources on Biblical Authority

Although I have already blogged about biblical authority and inerrancy, I came across this article which I think fits as a nice follow-up resource that helps round out some of my thoughts on the matter. In summary, the author explains how modern evangelicals embrace an inerrant Bible out of a reaction to the Enlightenment skepticism that viewed that entire Bible as myth. Thus, both positions are outdated products of the Enlightenment and modernity, and should no longer be of any concern to contemporary Christians. Also, the author explains two postmodern philosophers (Derrida and Lyotard) and how their thought has caused deep controversy in the Christian community. I think that this article is perfect for anyone who has questions about biblical inerrancy and does not have a background in philosophy or theology.

What Church Should Not Be Like

I’d almost forgotten about my old church, The City Church, and how damaging it was to me both as a Christian and a human being, but then I came across this interesting review in the Belltown Messenger that brought all those memories back. Granted, some were good memories. I find this short review interesting in the sense that it comes from the very area that my old church has been targeting; I guess, it’s good to see what your neighbor’s think of you.

Click here to view the review

If I Wrote a Book of Proverbs…

So, while the William Buckley clan is pounding me below for my critical post on McCain and Palin, I am offering this new post for my intellectual, liberal, humanities-loving friends… all two of you (Meghan and Jason). As a 24-year-old grad student, I think it is apropos for me to share my wisdom with the world. So here it goes….

PROVERBS: SAGACITY IN PAIRS (or Paris, an acceptable Freudian slip)

There are only two “disciplines” worthy of study:
Philosophy and Literature

There are only two theories that make sense of our Western existence:
Marxism and Existentialism

There are only two narratives that best interpret history, religion, and belief:
Power and Ideology

There are only two motivations and explain our actions:
Passion and Despair

Finally,

There are only two things that are totally absurd:
Violence and Love

THE END

Oh, here’s a freebie; there are only two majors worth doing at Northwest University:
Religion/Philosophy and English!

Oh, and since I mentioned William Buckley earlier, check out this debate from the sixties where Buckley gets trashed by Chomsky over Vietnam and U.S. imperialism!

Pack the Bags… We’re Moving to Venezuela!

A certain imminent fear grips me with the realization that McCain might be the next president of the U.S. If this tragedy becomes a reality, then a second fear arises – namely, that if McCain dies in office then we will have a soccer mom for president. Critics on both sides of the political spectrum have agreed on one thing, that the McCain/Palin team has indeed set a new (poor) standard for campaign honesty. While I thought McCain was bad enough, his new acrimonious Alaskan advocate, Palin, has not ceased to amaze me with her ability to spread more lies in such a short period of time.

The only thing that has not surprised me with this election campaign is the unceasing support of fundamentalist evangelical Christians for the GOP and for the McCain/Palin team. Of course, for the conservative “Christian” south and mid-west, there are no disagreements with such a candidacy, which somehow justifies joining so-called Christian morals with war, unchecked capitalism, and relentless oil-drilling. But, remarkably, so many people that I know from Seattle, which is known for being an educated, progressively liberal city, are so quick to hop in the soccer-mom van with Palin, her knocked-up daughter, and her drug-loving son.

It seems that it doesn’t even matter how inconsistent these politicians are, or how dishonest their campaigns are, or how obvious it is that they are simply using “Christian morality” as a platform for gaining political power. Of course, as soon as they are elected they will (as Bush did) toss aside this dishonest allegiance and proceed to blow people up to the delight of the small oligarchy that really runs our world. But don’t worry! If you simply love their morality rhetoric, wait until re-election year comes!

It is also sad that these poor naive folks who vote for people like McCain actually think that the U.S. is a good country that wants to “help out” in the world around it. And when I mention “U.S. imperialism” they look at me with the expression of “I have no idea what you are talking about” and then give me a lot of crap about how abortion is wrong (although they haven’t even thought about how to enforce such a law) and how gays are evil (really?) and how Iraq and Iran are terrorist threats (perhaps, but they learned it from bigger terrorist states like the U.S.), and, in the end, fail to offer any substantial reasons for their political alignment.

What should I do? Well… how about Venezuela? Great weather and, wait, an actual democratic electoral system! It is so bizarre that impoverished developing-world states can achieve true democracy while big wealthy developed states like the U.S. can barely even offer a two-party system. And what happens when Venezuela and Bolivia kick out their U.S. ambassadors because of ties to an assassination coup against Chavez? The U.S. hides the truth and condemns these countries’ actions, when they should be supporting their attempt to establish a true democracy.

So unless Obama wins… one can either hop in the soccer-mom van, or get on a plane to the nearest democractic country.

Chomsky and Political Dissidence

Due to my recent interest in Noam Chomsky, I am beginning to worry more and more about the state of U.S. politics. Chomsky argues that the U.S. is not a democracy, but rather a polyarchy whereby power is held by a small oligarchic ruling class. This class, for Chomsky, is the business class which controls all major U.S. economic institutions. Such institutions are in actuality the only real political power in the U.S., and, thus, our nation does not even have a two-party political system, but instead a one-party system (the business party), which functions as advocates of the interests of major U.S. corporations.

Furthermore, Chomsky argues that practically every U.S. military action taken in foreign affairs has been imperialistic and in the interest of strengthening U.S. economic interests oversees. So, the so-called war on terror is actually a two-way street. The U.S. is just as much a terrorist nation as any of the nations in the middle-east that we typically refer to as terrorist states. According to Chomsky, we operate on the premise that we own the world, and any interference with our military action is a war crime, while our military action is somehow self-justified.

I must admit, my own political beliefs have been substantially altered because of influence from Chomsky. While I formerly supported Obama as a legitimate alternative to the oppressive right, I now question how different Democratic politics are as opposed to the politics of their obvious rival party. Are Obama and McCain simply two sides of the same thing? I thought that at least Obama could pull us out of the war and keep us from an illegitimate war with Iran, but now I wonder if the Democratic party is really even interested in following through with their promises. Are they not just simply playing the same game? Is Obama truly an agent of change or simply a celebrity, or a tabla rasa where everyone can write in what they would like to see? Should I have supported Ron Paul all along instead?

Transportation Difficulties: What is the Real Problem?

This morning I walked into my favorite local coffee shop, the Rocket, and purchased my usual americano, sat down, and picked up a copy of the Pacific Northwest Inlander. The Inlander is a local paper that serves Eastern Washington and North Idaho. Flipping past the pages filled with the usual periodical banalities and curious discussion of UFO’s, my eyes landed on a commentator’s pointed remarks about the current transportation problem. The contents were typical, including statements on gas-prices, the need for fuel-efficiency, the superiority of European transit, and the lack of viable solutions from politicians, notably, McCain and Obama.

I definitely liked what the author proposed for a solution concerning traveling between Seattle and Spokane, which was a bullet train that would allow me to go home to Seattle in two hours! However, I do not think that this commentary penetrated into the underlying problem of our current state of transportation, which is (surprise, surprise), Capitalism.

Since I believe that one of the fundamental goals of Capitalism is the conversion of real, material wealth into imaginary, abstract wealth, my conclusion actually makes a lot of sense. What individuals like the author in the Inlander or politicians are fundamentally proposing is the inhibiting of certain large companies to produce abstract wealth. These businesses cannot profit from fuel-efficiency or the reduction of the number of vehicles on the road. Cars and fuel are real, material things, and while many people are outspoken about using them properly (in a way the best serves us and the environment), the producers of these commodities have the opposite goal.

To a car manufacturer the idea of having one person in one vehicle is blissful, and the idea of having one person in on SUV is even more ephemeral. Naturally, the idea of having four people in one car, or worse, having forty people in one train is diabolical. This conservation of material things works against their goal of creating more abstract wealth, which is only useful for placing more control of real wealth into the hands of an oligarchic group of business leaders. Thus, how can any real solutions arise if there is, fundamentally, an agonistic relationship between the interests of Capitalism and the interests of transportation efficiency?