Wednesday, September 14, 2005

On onto-Theology and its fate

John G. was asking me about onto-theology this afternoon. It seemed a perfect excuse to blog something. Simply put, onto-theology is theology built upon ontology. Ontotheology confesses a God built upon a Greek metaphysic of being (ousia), where the divine is the Being of beings and the rest of us find our place within a descending ladder or chain of being according to some characteristic or limitation or other. Onto-theologies' definition of the divine was created by the Greeks and largely taken over by apologistic, Greek speaking Christian theologians searching to make sense of the gospel in a certain metaphysical climate.

Onto-theology met its match with Descartes' -> Hume's -> and Kant's observation that there is no way of knowing anything at all about the being of beings. When theology begins with "the one God" and works out from there, it makes assertions based on...what? This begins the process of a turn to the subject, where knowledge begins with what people (subjects) can know, an epistemology which rules absolutely in our own day - even if not so securely as in the heady days of the early Enlightenment.

Now I haven't personally thrown off onto-theology completely. I'm loathe to put aside what has so informed the thinking about God for most of church (theological) history. I wonder if there isn't some Christian nuance about it that the philosophers may have missed. At the same time, the arguments against it are 100's of years old now, and have stood quite a good deal of scrutiny. Theology has long decided that it must abandon the old ontologies and learn how to survive in a turn-to-the-subject climate. Any theologian doing work in an onto-theological universe is either hopelessly out of date or innovative to the extreme of genius (and either unknown or - to put a conspiracy theory into it - or shunned by the academic community.) In short - for myself I'm still weighing the odds and trying to simply understand the argument, which is quite complex unless you want to choose sides ahead of time and take their word for it. Trinitarian-ontology seems to be the better way to go, whereby relation rather than absolute subject lies at the very bottom of things (and, if you remember, this is exactly what I argued for in my paper at Harvard a few years ago.) Trinitarian relation-ontology seems to keep the best of onto-theology, while allowing room for the Other. Also, the textured and layered presentation of God in the Old and New Testaments makes more sense apart from a God of the Absolute "I". Taking this route also provides a way around process, at least you don't have to go there as far as I can tell. The process-god of Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorn, and John Cobb Jr. is the new God of the Philosophers, the new God of the Spirit of the Age, as far as I understand it. A trinitarian/relation ontology means that one's epistemology will be hermeneutic: knowledge is absolutely and radically interpretative. The hermeneutical circle is how we know. This seems to jive well with what Christians mean by revelation and how we read, process, apply, worship, and preach. It makes everything alive, and opens up living spaces that were just slots with Aristotle.

; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; .

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:01 PM

    On the onto-theology thing. Perhaps you might add this to your blog since my initial inquiry prompted a post. I can understand how a secular philosopher can say to a Greek - hey, you have no grounds to reason from beings to being! Even though I think they are wrong even in a secular manner to do so. They can even apply the same critique to Christianity. (For more on that you might see what is going on with Intelligent Design) There is a marked difference however in the authority of the Bible in the three systems. I think the Christians were adopting vocabulary and some selective thoughts from their own language/culture to communicate effectively at the time. But I think they were communicating Biblical truth.

    For instance, the Scriptures tell us repeatedly that based on our observation of things in this world (beings), that we can have some accurate knowledge of an infinite and invisible being called God. The scriptures also speak of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit but emphasize that there is only one God.

    So if we can not use greek to express this - three hypostases in one ousia - the biblical truth remains. I don't see any great advantage to dropping the traditional formulation that held us out of so many heresies. After all, the Christians adopted the vocabulary selectively to express what they meant - not just copied Plotinus. Do you see any advantage here? Can we express things more clearly? How do we avoid losing accuracy?

    ReplyDelete
  2. (1) Does a correct interpretation of what the Bible says about God require a Greek metaphysics of being?

    (2) Shouldn't we be willing to adjust our confession where the philosophical foundation that has held up our understanding of this or that doctrine (rather than the doctrine itself) is in error?

    (3) You are arguing in this last part for a theology built on revelation. Certainly, Christianity is a revealed religion, not a natural one or one founded on mystical insights. But this does not preclude the fact that we tend to understand it through the lense of our philosophy. For example, one may hold the gospels innerant, but argue about the nature of the genre: gospel.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Here's a note found in the pocket:

    "The death of substance is necessary to get beyond idolatry -- thus the hapexlegomenon of "spirit" in John. [I'm not certain what I'm talking about.] You can still use "being" but with more modification than any present attempt.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Iain Thomson, "Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger's Destruktion of Metaphysics" International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 8 No. 3 (Oct 1, 2000), 297-327.

    Heidegger's Destruktion of the metaphysical tradition leads him to the view that all Western metaphysical systems make foundational claims best understood as 'ontotheological'. Metaphysics establishes the conceptual parameters of intelligibility by ontologically grounding and theologically legitimating our changing historical sense of what is. By first elucidating and then problematizing Heidegger's claim that all Western metaphysics shares this ontotheological structure, I reconstruct the most important components of the original and provocative account of the history of metaphysics that Heidegger gives in support of his idiosyncratic understanding of metaphysics. Arguing that this historical narrative generates the critical force of Heidegger's larger philosophical project (namely, his attempt to find a path beyond our own nihilistic Nietzschean age), I conclude by briefly showing how Heidegger's return to the inception of Western metaphysics allows him to uncover two important aspects of Being's pre-metaphysical phenomenological self-manifestation, aspects which have long been buried beneath the metaphysical tradition but which are crucial to Heidegger's attempt to move beyond our late-modern, Nietzschean impasse.

    ReplyDelete