Living in a Post-Theological World: Beyond Theories of God

November 12, 2010 By George Elerick 7 Comments

Underneath Paris

In philosophy, theory (from ancient Greek theoria, θεωρία, meaning “a looking at, viewing, beholding”) refers to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action.[1] Theory is especially often contrasted to “practice” (Greek praxis, πρᾶξις) a concept that in its original Aristotelian context referred to actions done for their own sake, but can also refer to “technical” actions instrumental to some other aim, such as the making of tools or houses. “Theoria” is also a word still used in theological contexts.

“Hollie Baylor: I was still waiting for everything to start, and now it’s over” (Elizabethtown, Movie)

In terms of developing theories, why do we do it? Most likely because we want to know. In a very simple form, this is a type of gnosis. We look to information to inform us of something that lies outside of ideology. I think it also comes down to how we view God. Sometimes it does seem we use theology to prove to God who she should be. In this light, theology as a theory then becomes a tool of coercion and/or measurement. And not only towards the divine, but towards one another.

In this moment, our theories on the Divine are to prohibit people from believing or living certain ways. Yet, the hope of any religion is to make humanity better, right? Some might agree that to be better at being human is to be better at being free. So if religion has come to a place where it denies the very element it inherently claims it holds, then it has become something other than religion.

We’ve entered into an interesting era in history where people are beginning to ask if history is all we get. Not just in Christianity, but within the framework of the world. We are beginning to see things differently, and I think this is a great time for transformation. I think a good place to start is to realize that now doesn’t have the last word for what is to come.

There is more to God, more to Jesus, more to Christianity than what has previously been offered. But, I have to be honest, I don’t think this exciting new change includes theology. Let me explain. When I used the word theology I am speaking of the theory of theology. Theology as Ideology. Theology as a static entity that exists before the liminal threshold of ideological transformation.

The nation of Israel in Ezekiel 37 are represented as a metaphorical pile of bones. These bones are awaiting resurrection. Awaiting new life. These bones are lying in a deep valley. Darkness surrounds this nation of people. It is a dark time. They have systematically lived their lives to the letter of the law, and God enters the scene and promises to give them a new heart. This is the thing that sustains life, the heart. Israel has lost her heart.

To the point of no longer being human.

She is the object that still persists beyond existence. Although there is no flesh in sight, God responds to Israel as if she is embodied. In this moment, there is a realization that occurs, that God’s Gaze* is actually Israel’s Gaze*. The only way God can respond to Israel as if she is embodied in this metaphor is because God is full embodiment of the disembodied divine. God’s ability to interact creates the illusion of embodiment. The reality in the parable is that Israel is de-fleshed.

Theology has become the pile of bones. It has become embodied by history, assumptions, subjective truths and alienated concepts that have been kept in tow by those before us.

If we simply believe something that has either been socially or historically accepted as truth without ever questioning the intentions of the writer or the point that is being made, than we are not believing, we are simply believing under the guise of belief. In this sense the system itself is mediating our belief. Theology has become the mediator of our belief.

It believes for us.

In a post-theological world God exists not because theology says so, but because God is pure in the Hegelian sense. He exists as Being, but also exists as non-being. This much like the character of the Cheshire Cat who’s mouth exists without his body. It is the disembodied reality that is also the embodiment of reality. Rather than one being different from the other, they are one in the same. Or like how the Matrix is something that is always spoken of but never fully realized. In a post-theological world, there is no system in place to describe God because every system does not have ability to account for a God is consistently becoming.

This is why Heresy as the New Theology must be taken seriously and not simply because it is inflammatory. When I speak of heresy, I do not just mean what is deemed as theoretically unsound by the mass majority, but as a positive deconstruction that grows through the systems we create round the Divine. It is positive in that it opens up endles possibilities for discovery. It leaves holy space for unholy moments. It invites us to see that this Being beyond being lies outside of our system of thought. This is why the mystics are so important to the general religious landscape, they remind us the inherent inadequacy of our words. We must exchange awe for literal expression.

It’s that moment where we experience the Divine to the point where we just can’t seem to fit God in our rhetoric. This is a post-theological moment. This is a moment of heresy. Heresy leads those with theories to action. God illicits darkness because that is where she belongs. God had to create light, because she exists there. This isn’t the darkness that is easily compared to evil acts, but rather the darkness that brings distinction, paradox, inconsistency.

We need this stark inconsistency to understand that we don’t understand God and that is a good thing. So what do we do with God being near, and the God who is far? They are one in the same. His immanence is her transcendance. In a Post-Theological world God resides in inconsistency because that’s where the Divine makes sense.

So, what does this world look like without ‘Theology’? What it means is that competition and apologetics are near non-existent in their current forms. That we don’t have to be right. That beyond our theories lies humanity at its best. This may sound like one idea replacing another, but it is more than that, it is the ability to see that multi-culturalism doesn’t just lie in the culture itself but is understood as something comprised of many things. So, a heretical multiculturalism seeks to open space where there was no space to be open prior to the post-theological world.

This heretical multi-culturalism asserts that truth much like Hegel’s pur God is just as becoming as the Divine itself. What does this mean then for all of us? It means we have to lace up our boots, pull out our camping gear, bring some rations because we have no idea where this might end, but we know we are moving forward…

* Lacan’s Gaze is simply defined as : “The ‘Gaze’ is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan to describe a condition where the mature autonomous subject observes “the observation of himself” in a mirror.

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When Rockstars Deny the Foundation of Religion

September 5, 2010 By George Elerick 3 Comments

I lift my eyes up to the mountains, where does my help come from?* – King David, King of Israel

“Ancient Egyptians viewed their pharaohs as living gods they were the personification of AMUN-RA the king of gods and when they died they became true gods. Therefore these pharaohs weren’t only regarded as the kings of Egypt but as divinity.”

The king in the ancient world was the person you went to with all of your problems, the king had all the answers. In fact, on some ancient BC archaeological scrolls, something simlar to these words were found “The king is the representative of the Gods who has come down to show us how to be.” The king was God in effect. The king was a direct representative of the ontological spirit that culture looked to. People would worship the king. They would give their lives to the king. The king was the rockstar who had all the fame. The king was the one in power.

They had all the answers.

So, what happens when the king defers to someone/something else? They not only deny their power, they deny their ontological influence. They divorce themselves from being the one who has all the answers. For all intense purposes, they stop being who others think them to be. David denies his status and defers it elsewhere. This is a very self-deprecating move for a king, this is a sort of castration.

David chooses castration rather than power.

He chooses a state of non-status rather than those things that might seem to give him importance in the sight of others. What are we choosing that gives us status? Are we at least deferring them? For David, God is the ontological end. God is the true King. The ultimate monarchy doesn’t lie in what we see, but it suspends itself in the unseen. For David, it is in the unseen or in the uknown where true (post-colonial**) power resides.

We tend to look to things in our history as a church for influence on what we should do and where we should go, we tend to look to what we know rather than what we don’t? Why, because we have believed the perverse lie that somehow knowledge equals power. To David, there is power in the uknowning.

In the unraveling.
In the dismantling journey towards unbelief.
Where unbelief is true belief.

David takes it too far. By focusing outside the temple and outside of the mountain, the very foundation of the temple, David is basically condemning these things as useless.

Much like Jesus did when he spoke to the institutional representatives and told them they were dead inside. David is challenging us to see that the foundation of the institutions are the issue.

For some, I get this might be a bit outside of where you might be, and don’t want to minimize the struggle of attempting to fully divorce ourselves from the noise of structuralism into the quiet of post-structuralism. It isn’t an easy journey, I realize that, but it is one we can take together and to come to realize that the God we seek doesn’t just simply lie outside of the institution, but also resides outside of the foundations of our institution.

When David utters the words up above and looks toward the mountains, it isn’t just a declaration of nature or the natural order of things, the temple is what sat on that mountain. Centered in the ancient Eastern Levant religions was the belief that you could meet with the Divine in tents (Genesis 18), trees, and mountains to name a few spaces. They wanted to define their experience of meeting with God, so they created an institution, they created a structure.

We as people, tend to want to define or give some sort of structure to our experience, so we try to explain in it words, in language, which is itself – a structure. We have also been fed the lie that we need to instiutionalize everything that has value. David, a king, the ultimate expression of institutionalization denies the need for institution. In fact, he looks beyond it.

He looks outside of it.

He looks to what isn’t and can’t be institutionalized to express what is beyond words. David doesn’t just challenge the temple that would have been on this mountain, he challenges the mountain itself. The very foundation of the institution. David essentially says that everything of value doesn’t lie in our history, or what is laid-down before us, but is outside of what has been laid for us. It doesn’t cheapen what has been, it does encourage us to come together and dream outside of the contingencies we’ve been led to believe should be ours. The Church is in an interesting place, because for years, it has been set on a mountain, on a foundation of historical colonialism. In fact, the English language has been part of this structured ‘advance of the Kingdom’.

Structures have been the problem.

Now, we are beginning to ask important questions about the future of the de-institutionalized body of believers and what our future home will look like.

Which I think is a great question!!

I think for me, it won’t include walls, but where the walls used to be, there will be people. Where injustice used to be present in the name of God, now there will be love and renewal. Where liturgies, worship songs, and bibles used to be there will be people who are now the liturgy, the worship song and the bible. The Church has a lot of room to grow when we realize that the Church wasn’t meant for us.

* Psalm 121 is by far my favorite Psalm.

** David more like would have thought of power in a colonial sense, so I wanted to share that I am thinking of power in terms of the post-sovereign, post-colonial sense.

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Jewish Superheroes: A look at an oppressed people

June 2, 2010 By George Elerick Leave a Comment

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

(This is a deeper/scholastic look at the development of the Jewish belief system, rather than a ‘theological’ one)

Myths are stories with a deeper meaning. Myths are narratives with a culturally deep hearbeat that lives beyond its own shelf-life. Myths are important to any cultures existence and growth. Myths also tend to demonstrate something larger at work. A theme. A deity. An ethic. A truth. A love. Things that get lost in words tend to find themselves in myths, because the story itself is too powerful for everyday words.

If you look at the Jewish people (first and foremost) as a group of people committed to their myth (as defined above) than you see a people deeply in-tune with the world above them and around them. A poetic people, a people who trust their myth. As I said, their myth made sense of the world around them.

The Jewish people (in and outside of biblical record) were an oppressed people. If you put this in terms of highschool. They were the ‘nerds’ of the world. They were the essential outsider, the geeks who never got the girl. Their story (in the Torah, Gemara, Mishnah, Tanya and others) out of that oppression seems to be quite document in their literature. During their development as a people, one man stood apart in the eyes of their deity. He was chosen to be the progenitor, or the first Jewish Superhero of the race of this ‘holy nation’.

(Did Abraham live?; I am not sure that question matters as much as why he lived in the minds of his people, if he didn’t live that is).

Here we have an oppressed people who are looking outwards.

Who are trying to make sense of their oppression.

They need someone to come along and save the day. And so their history is riddled with Superheroes and heroines who represent their resolve to rise above that oppression. From Abraham we go to Joseph, who was oppressed by his own family/his own people, and Yahweh stepped in and orchestrated certain events in life so that he could rise above being oppressed. Then we a Judge named Deborah, who lives within a culture whereby if you are female you are automatically oppressed. She stands up and fights for her people even when the man wouldn’t. Than we have Samson, who in the fashion of a ‘Romeo & Juliet story’, falls in love with the enemy who ends up injuring him. At this point, he is the oppressed (a representation of Israel perhaps?); then Yawheh comes in and gives Samson (the ultimate Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day) a bit more strength to win the day for his people and smash their enemies to pieces. Then you have the uberman of superheroes, albeit flawed, King David the Giant Fighter. He came up through the ranks, not even in the army but as a helpless shepherd (it’s important to remember here, that when we first catch up with the Jews in the Torah, for the most part, they see themselves as traveling shepherds) who ends up defending an oppressed country.

As time went on, Israel popped in and out of the oppressed narrative, but for the most part they were the oppressed. Then the age of the prophets came. There was talk of a Messiah. A bruised reed. A suffering servant. Who was to come and free Israel of its oppression from others. This was the ultimate superhero, this was the political and militaristic savior come to ’save the day’. (Now, when you start diving into interpretation of who or what this Messiah was meant to be, there are interpretations across the board – one of many was that it was a person who was meant to come; some others thought it was yet another metaphor (myth?) for Israel itself).

There is also the choice of deity. There were a pantheon of gods to choose from. They happened to worship the god Yahweh who was in the council of El (Elohim-this shows up in Genesis). Yahweh was the god of war. He was a jealous god. He wanted all praise and worship for himself. He was the ultimate God who would have been a god of the oppressed. He was the warrior god they needed to be their voice for oppression. He was the god who would send them on divinely sanctioned wars to fight their oppression. This deity promised them a new land, their own. For an oppressed people who were known by their nomadic lifestyle, this would be a perfect land, a promised land. An Eden of sorts. A land ‘flowing with milk and honey.’ This god of war was going to make sure they got it and kept it.

For those who believed that the Messiah was a person, they were waiting in hope that this savior was going to rescue them from any current or future oppression. He was going to be a leader. They waited for him to come for year and years. Finally one day, a small-town Rabbi pops on the scene and starts talking about a new kind of Kingdom. He starts about how this new way of doing things would upset the natural order of things.

This is the message they were waiting for.

Hoping for.

This Rabbi did things backwards, he approached people to be his disciples (rather than the prescripted opposite); he treated others with compassion and open-arms. He was a different. He was going to upset the system, just not in the way they thought. His friends became to close to him, most of his friends were Jewish. They had heard of the thousands of years of oppression, some from their own grandparents. They begin to see this Jesus of Nazareth in a whole new light, they begin to see him as the ultimate superhero.

Even bigger than David.

Bigger than the giant-killer.

He was going to save them from the oppressive regime of Rome. He was going to usher in a new world where the Jews were going to rule the world (‘and the government will be upon his shoulders’), they were going to at least be the center of it, if not the former. Jesus was now the Jewish uberman (that Nietzche coined). He was the Messiah for the oppressed who was going to usher in the New Messianic Age they hade been waiting for for centuries.

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