Breaking God Talk

[Warning: this is an especially geeky post]

God talk is an impossible possibility. This leads to all kinds of problems. Among them is a situation where many theists and atheists think they’re talking about God when they have not yet risen (or perhaps better, descended) to that level. The problems all flow from God’s eternality, and our non-eternality. I’ve been engaging this difficulty with a friend of mine via email. Below is a recent response by me to him. In the exchange “God talk” is being discussed as “the eternal.” I had said previously that religious belief was in a category of its own due to the eternal nature of its object. I said that religious belief needed to “transcend the categories of merely subjective and objective reflection.” He took issue with this, saying: 1) How can you know this? and 2) It’s impossible. The following was my reply.

The Possibility

It’s an interesting situation we’re dealing with. On the one hand, as you say, you can form a theoretical belief about the infinite that does not “mark it off as an object beyond oneself.” As you point out, I’m doing that when I say that the eternal “includes the reflecting self as well as the reflection.” You are right on both these points. And the fact is, there’s no way around it if we wish to go on thinking or speaking about the eternal in a discursive mode.

The Impossibility

Here we see the point where the trouble starts. Since these acts of thought can be performed, and because they are, in a sense, necessary, it is easy to think that by that very fact they are adequate. They are not. The eternal can never be talked about adequately because we are always in it, speaking, from it. (just like, as you point out, we are in our subjectivity. I’ll come back to that). Because of this there is no simply theoretical, no objective, no detached analytical knowledge of the eternal. This is why, I argue, religious belief is (or ought to be) in a category all its own.

The Paradox

Thus, religious beliefs (including atheistic religious beliefs) are sort of weird. They are irreducibly subjective, but they make universally objective claims.

From this, the terms we use to talk about the eternal need to mirror this weirdness. Their relative adequacy is constituted not simply by a their reflexivity, including the self as an object of reflection (“the eternal as the sum of all things, including myself”). No, as Charles Taylor points out, a radical reflexivity is necessary. The mind must try and fail to grasp as an object the very act of its own reflecting. This is what Robert Sharlemann pointed out as the genius of Tillich’s relation of human reason to divine revelation. In this attempt and failure, something of the eternal is paradoxically understood without being grasped. And from here, a sort of map is given for all further speech about the eternal. There is the attempt to speak of the eternal reality, the failure, and the pointing out of the attempt and failure (It’s rather Christological, if you think about it).

Transcending Our Subjectivity?

As for transcending subjectivity. The claim was that any relatively adequate term must transcend the merely subjective and objective modes. It was not that I have done this and have returned with the eternal Word. You’re right; it’s impossible (hence, what I said in the paragraph above).

How Can This Be Known?

To the question of how I know these things, two responses: 1. This question assumes that we are dealing with a theoretical question. As I’ve shown above, we are not. 2. It happens every time I pray. It is, as Sebastian Moore says, “intersubjectivity with the infinite.”

In closing, the following passage makes no sense if it is read from an “un-broken” frame of mind, one that has yet to meet the failure of radical reflexivity. But from the standpoint of one who as endured this paradox, it is a beautiful extension of the logic I have been describing in this post.

The God Graveyard: A Theologian’s Approval

Yesterday I saw an interesting post come up on the Patheos blog, “The Friendly Atheist.” It was about how certain college atheist groups were erecting “god graveyards” on their campuses filled with the names of the gods we no longer worship. The question they wished to provoke was basically “when will yours be next?”

As a theologian, I thought this was pretty sweet (for reasons that I will point out shortly), so I decided to tell them so.

As a Christian theologian, I support this message. It is at the heart of classical Christian theology that Yahweh, understood as a particular divine being, must have his own gravestone. The death of the Gods is precisely the truth of God who is Truth itself.

The response to this was mostly:

1. A lot of “down votes”

2. Utter confusion

3. General rudeness, or at the very least, hostility.

I’ll take responsibility for 2. I’ve rarely been applauded for my clarity of expression. But I was honestly surprised at 1. and 3. At least one of the other commentors felt similarly, lamenting:

The downvotes here depress me. Just because we disagree or find the message muddled doesn’t mean we should discourage those who want to respectfully discuss the topic at hand.

Here was one that I could speak to. He also authored a brilliant response to a sci-fi fan who was in the process of creatively taking me to task by way of a Star Trek example. I should not have such difficulty speaking to them, my critic suggested, for they were rational thinkers, not like the perplexing Tamarians. He went on,

I am reminded of the Star Trek: TNG episode Darmok, where Captain Picard encounters an alien civilization (the Tamarians) whose language is purely metaphorical. For instance, rather than saying, “I went to the store,” a Tamarian would say, “Darmok at Shaka,” which would reference a famous event of the past where a person named Darmok went to a store in the city of Shaka.

To this my ally responded:

I think the point of that episode was that Picard DID learn to communicate with the Tamarian captain once he abandoned his prejudices and began to listen in earnest (finally accepting the dagger as an offer of alliance instead of conflict, ha, I out-nerd[ed] you).

Truly brilliant, and better, to my point! In what follows I respond to him and do my best to briefly set out what my point ultimately was.

This, I love. The truth of it goes both ways and is really at the heart of what I was trying to suggest. “The gods,” in a very important sense, ARE our prejudices. They are our little securities, the ideas, habits, and patterns of life that make us feel safe in the face of the threats of existence. The trouble is that our little gods necessarily limit us. If they are the source of our security, then fear keeps us living in their power. And in their power, the gods of others can be nothing but a threat, an opportunity for conflict. This is why the graveyard is so appropriate. We are not meant to live in fear, so let the gods die. All of them, regardless of the name we give them, be it Zeus, Yahweh, Reason, Science, or Jesus…

But this leads to my deeper point. It’s not easy to describe, so please bear with me. We say that Jesus revealed God, not because he said he was God; rather, it is because he deflected every attempt by others to make him into “a god.” His divinity consisted in his freedom from “the gods,” not that he was one.

As some of you may recall, Peter wanted Jesus to be the source of his own security. Jesus, on the other hand, said he came to serve and to die. Peter, feeling his security threatened by this, freaked out and tried to stop him. Jesus’ subdued response was basically to call Peter the Lord of Darkness and to suggest that his framework was a bit narrow.

And that’s our basic human problem. In light of the eternal, all of our frameworks are a bit narrow. That includes my own. To live with faith in God as eternal, is exactly to live free from “the gods” of our narrowness. If we can’t manage this, we’ll cling to our own little constructions, and fear will cause us to lash out at those who pose a threat to our god. Those who have been in some way gripped by the mystery of the eternal feel no such need to defend their own ways of seeing things, for their own gods have already been crucified.

My one concern for this community is that it is not nearly atheistic enough. The rather ‘un-friendly’ reception I’ve been given does not seem to evidence freedom from the gods. Perhaps the graveyard could use a few more tombstones? 

God and Taking Nothing for Granted… (well, maybe just one thing)

“Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross and follow Me.”

What if we take nothing for granted; how do we find God, the Ultimate? Well, we must presuppose logic, in some sense. Right? For without it the inquiry can’t even get off the ground. So there it is, we presuppose logic.

If logic is presupposed, then our task is to seek for an answer to ultimacy within the structure of logic. We must seek for some foundation that anchors the endless regress of logical dependency (If X, then Y. But why X?). We find ourselves on a quest for a necessary beginning that kicks off the chain, a non-dependent initiator of all subsequent propositions. But—and here’s the problem—the idea of an un-caused cause is not possible within the structure of logic. Such a notion, in fact, breaks logic.

Thus we find that the answer to the question of ultimacy cannot come from within the logical structure of existence. Logic, it turns out, cannot be presupposed, but neither can it be avoided. This is the paradox, and it is one instance of the general paradox of existence-itself. The rationality of logic is both a part of the question as well as part of the answer. It is for this reason that the question of ultimacy, even with respect to bare logic, is birthed from the answer while at the same time the answer contains the question.

We can see here that the “answer” to the question of ultimacy is not an answer in any conventional sense (and neither is the question a conventional question!). In fact, the question of ultimacy destroys all answers just as it is present in all questions. An answer which serves as a foundation is therefore impossible. In view of this, what is needed is both the death of the quest to secure a safe foundation followed by an entirely different way of relating oneself to reality.

A paradoxical stance must be adopted to match the paradox of existence. As to the question of ultimacy, it is my suggestion that it is both “answered” and deepened in each moment we reflect on the possibilities and limits of existence. We must learn to live in the paradox that the closer we get to anything—a stone, a thunderstorm, a friend, a lover, our very selves—the deeper the mystery becomes. Can we tolerate this terrible mystery? It’s not a trivial question. To honor the mystery of reality is in a very real sense to die. It is a death that goes to the core of our very self, to all the defenses we’ve built up to keep the terrible mystery of reality at bay.

This is why most of our questions of ultimacy don’t go nearly deep enough. Instead, we stop short. We ask safe, shallow questions and accept answers which have lost the paradox of reality, that don’t negate their own pretensions (as in the desire for an answer from within the structure of logic). With respect to ultimacy, “question” and “answer” must always be one. Life, then, cannot be the quest for a settled foundation, but must ever be the project by which both question and answer are deepened.