Marriage is impossible. Christian marriage is also impossible, only more so. Marriage is impossible because it demands that two people devote themselves to each other, no matter what, for the rest of their lives. Christian marriage demands more: Husbands are to be like Christ, wives like the church, and together they are to form one flesh – again, no matter what, for the rest of their lives. (more…) Read more
Desmond offers an intriguing argument for a unified self, for an “idiotic” self in the original sense of idiotes , what is one’s own. There is an irreducible “mineness” to all our actions and experience, a mineness that cannot be reduced to categories or analyzed in terms of outside forces: “The human self – and this is felt singularly by each singular self – has an ineluctable sense of itself as itself and itself alone. This is I. We have... Read more
Desmond takes another enthralling step. If “seeing is” may be “seeing is,” then metaphor might reveal being. “Metaphor may be a revelation of reality. Metapherein – the thing carries itself across to revelation, metaphorizes itself; this is its spread beyond univocal identity. In its self-metaphorizing, it reaches out to more, reaches into the meta , the middle. The metaphorical ‘as’ thus seeks to identify the plurivocal ‘is’ of the ‘thing’ in its otherness. Thus the thing may be, so to... Read more
It might seem that saying things have determinate qualities undermines their dynamism, while emphasizing things dynamism of things fuzzies all the boundaries to the point where there are no things at all. Desmond, again, demurs. We cannot have a pure flux without any determinacy, because then “there would be no distinct center of perception (the ‘self’) trying to make out things and shapes in the fog: there would be no thing in this pure indefiniteness.” But this is not how... Read more
Modern thought is often materialist. Whatever happens to spirit in such an outlook, at least we’ve got things left. Right? Not so, argues William Desmond ( Being and the Between ) . The doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, he says, is a “classic bifurcation of thinghood into two extremes of objectivism and subjectivism.” It ends up diminishing things “on two fronts. On the one hand, objectivity contracts the range of concreteness. On the other hand, subjectivity is placed outside... Read more
As I noted a few weeks ago, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen points out that everyone has multiple identities, and that these identities slip into the foreground and background in different settings. At a family reunion, our family identity is prominent. At a political rally, family identity recedes as we join with others of similar political opinions. At dinner, the fact that one is a vegan is important; at an academic conference, his vegan-nature doesn’t matter, but his expertise in his... Read more
In separating philosophy and theology, Spinoza mounts a kind of historicist critique of the Bible; its authors are bound by the assumptions of their time and culture. Besides that, the Bible and philosophy are completely different in method and style; the Bible is narrative, and its truth depends on the reliability of the narrator rather than the power of its arguments. For an early historicist, Spinoza certainly gives philosophy an historical bye. He doesn’t even seem to consider that philosophy... Read more
Whitehead said, “Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.” I know Whitehead said this because J. Samuel Preus quotes him in an article about Spinoza. That’s not quite right, though: Preus doesn’t quote Whitehead, but quotes a quotation from Whitehead in a book by Robert Merton. And now here I am quoting a quotation of a quotation of a quotation (I think that covers it, but I’m dizzy). Kinda confirms Whitehead’s point, which... Read more
J. Samuel Preus recounts this incident to illustrate the freedom Jews enjoyed in the 17th-century Netherlands: “A Jew is mugged and stabbed by a German, who then runs off. The victim gets up and chases him. Christians help him catch the perpetrator, who is summarily tried and executed. The Jew is then invited to an anatomy lesson at the University – using the fresh cadaver.” Read more
Pneumatology was at the heart of what George Marsden describes as the “Great Reversal” in American fundamentalism. A stress on the significance of Pentecost as the beginning of a new dispensation hardened the contrast between old and new covenants, and the contrast of Spirit and law also worked to undermine fundamentalist interest in public theology. Marsden writes, “The contrast between the present New Testament age of the Spirit and the previous Old Testament age of the law did involve a... Read more
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