When I started in-fraction on March 17, 2005, I explained that the title is a synthesis of two dissimilar words. In liturgical use, the fraction is the point of the Eucharistic service in which the celebrant breaks the host into pieces, representing the broken body of Jesus. Though the bread is broken, communal unity is front and center (οἱ γὰρ πάντες ἐκ τοῦ ἑνὸς ἄρτου μετέχομεν; 1 Cor. 10.17). People come to the same rail and eat the one life-giving bread. No such unity attends the word infraction. That word means a rude violation. It is a broken bone that never heals right. In-fraction, I said, holds these two words together. It is about entropy's undoing in the breaking of the broken man.
Now, when something is broken, like a window or a serving plate, there is nothing to do but to kneel down and collect up the pieces (Lk 15.8). My project pantomimes this very act. Here, I always lift an illustration from Gospel studies. The implicit theology of each Gospel is described as coming from below or from above. John's Gospel, for example, exemplifies a theology from above. Jesus is so divine that he barely touches the ground. He is the incarnate Son, the second person of the Trinity, glowing with divine action, who was before all things. Contrast that with Mark's Gospel. In Mark, Jesus's humanity is at the fore. Jesus is very much a second-temple Jewish prophet embedded in a people in a culture and acting at a certain moment in history. In-fraction is like the latter, an exercise from below. And I don't find this surprising. I am a Protestant after all.
Protestant theology is characteristically from below. Martin Luther's criticism of the Roman Catholic scholastic theology of his day was that it tried to climb a ladder and view the naked God (deus nudus), a tendency he called a theology of glory (theologus gloriae). A theology of glory seeks God in reason, in being moral, in private revelation. Luther said his would be a theology of the cross (theologus crucis). The Jews of Jesus's day were lost in fantasies of glory. Their "one as a son of man" was to come on the clouds without suffering, like Baal of old (Dan. 7.13). But the truth and glory of God was revealed in the death and resurrection of the Suffering Servant, a man. So, God is revealed to all in the broken body of his son on the tree as properly witnessed by the apostles and prophets. We sum this up by saying that we find God in his word and sacraments. And in-fraction attempts to be such a theology of the cross.
In his Heidelburg Disputations, Luther said, "A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is." I bundle this with the Reformation principle of "to the sources" and the Enlightenment turn to observation rather than metaphysics. The arc "from below" becomes an affirmation of the cosmos and reason in their proper spheres. The theologians of glory see "the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man" (Luther) which leads to the God of the Philosophers, to Schleiermacher, to New Thought, and to be guilty of Feuerbach's projection. But the point is not to deny matter or reason, as the fundamentalists do, but to affirm these in their proper spheres.
Our time is a child of the Enlightenment. Science governs the public square. And science has disenchanted the world. A great deal of evangelical theology ignores this. It attempts to remain in an enchanted universe by building walled gardens. This is a Gnostic move away from matter, the body, beauty, and reason and toward sentimentality, tribal community, spectacle, and emotion. Secret gardens breed private revelation and virtual worlds. Such a move is anathema to proper theology.
Beginning from below, theology confesses, with the ancient creeds, that it pleased God that the Son became incarnate as a real human man. His body is a real body. And that body assumes a kinship with the created cosmos. As science tells us, we are all made of stars. The body of Jesus demands we confess that matter is real and good. And matter can hope, for what is assumed is atoned for, paraphrasing Gregory of Nazianzus. For the Christian, science is no enemy. Not that this is a new affirmation. Theology has always confessed two sources of revelation: scripture and the created world (mirroring the two-natures of Jesus, its proper Adam). In Reformation theology, the former, through Calvin's spectacles, is for salvation and the latter for praise. Revealed and natural theology are both productions of the same God.
Now, it is true that science disenchanted the world. But that disenchantment is but an extension of the iconoclastic affect of Christianity on the pagan pantheon of Rome. I welcome the acid bath of scientific skepticism as thought welcomes new understanding. The process of seeing--of contemplation--is a process of disenchantment, of disillusionment. That is how we come to contextualize knowledge properly. And apart from disenchantment, theology cannot discover the beautiful thing: that sacraments are the world's proper re-enchantment. When lamps are extinguished, the stars do shine. Thinking on whatever topic done on in-fraction must move in a common direction. All must go forward and kneel at the eucharistic rail ad fontes. So, too, science goes forward to the altar or it is no proper science.
Science, like all human things, must be properly handled. Human things are distorted by the noetic effects of sin. Unredeemed human beings make their tools into idols. And, in our day, science unbrackets it naturalism, forgets its creator, and sets up its gospel of scientism and its proponents as a priestly class. It abstracts itself away from things as they are and is lost to its own enchantment. It, too, must be disenchanted in order to properly see. Science should regain its place as a human tool working to garden a world made in God's creative providence (Gen. 1.28).
This from below principle suggests, where this blog approaches aesthetics, a similar approach to art. A movement from below calls the artist (the arts) away from groping around in pure subjectivity, in phantasie, in enchantment. The arts are freed to the contemplation of things as they are "in the light of Easter" (Balthasar). They are restored to their natural theology. The cross frees the arts for praise.
----------
You haven't talked about the move from the individual to the community as a basic datum re: existential to political. Nor did you discuss narrative (synchronic; eschatological) over systematic (asynchronic; atemporal). Nor did you discuss historical-grammatical exegesis versus, say, the fourfold use. All of these emphases are woven through the blog and are part of this same, common direction, which I can sum up as my attempt to act as a theologian of the cross. Oh, and what about the direction of aesthetics from gathered ascetic contemplation of the concrete quiddity of things that naturally contextualises and moves up to contemplation of things in light of their creator, coram deo, (imagism, phenomenology, Balthasar) versus the scattered uncontextual, meaninglessness of subjectivity, the aesthetic imago-impossible godlessness explored by Baudrillard? Indeed, you actually should rewrite, for the central symbol here is the incarnate Jesus, not a series of abstract arguments from historical theology.
No comments:
Post a Comment