For some, postmodernism extends modern suspicion revelation and tradition. For others, however-whom we might call “traditionalist postmodernists” - postmodernism offers resources for recovering elements of premodern traditions that were rejected or masked by the modernists. The Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas and the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion both stress the way in which the divine interrupts our efforts to ground knowledge and ethics in the autonomy of human reason. Both also appeal to their respective religious traditions to articulate the significance of this interruptive revelation. We find a similar postmodern traditionalism in the turn by a number of contemporary theologians to the category of “narrative” as a way of understanding how God’s revelation, not human reason, is the primary shaping force of life, religion, community, ethics, and reason
Outline
I. For Levinas, it is in the ethical relationship with the other that we find ourselves related to God. He argues that God did not really give the Jews the choice to enter into the covenant, that they were essentially commanded to enter into it.
II. Levinas saw a need for the continual study and revision of revelation as a way to work out the meaning of the Jewish tradition in the contemporary world. This line of thinking brings us to the next step in our consideration of postmodern religious thought.
A. Levinas owed much to modem philosophy even as he criticized its metaphysical orientation. He also remained a devout Jew whose thought was informed by the traditions and discourses of Judaism.
B. Modem philosophy insisted on the autonomy of reason as humanity’s sole intellectual tradition.
C. One way to distinguish postmodern religious thinkers is through their understanding that, alter all the criticism, all the self-consciousness, and all the suspicion, it is faith that allows us still to live, make decisions, find meaning, and act morally.
D. One of the most important intellectual developments of the 20th century is the linguistic turn-the idea that language is not simply a transparent medium for thought but is constitutive of thought and of the way we experience the world.
E. We have identified two problems with the idea of revelation.
1. The appeal to revelation seems to set substantial limits to human autonomy.
2. Even if we are willing to question autonomy, how might we ever identify an idea or imperative as coming from God?
III. Rowan Williams, the current archbishop of Canterbury, brings together the threads of the discussion so far in his treatment of revelation.
A. Williams acknowledges the value of the hermeneutics of suspicion in providing interpretive frameworks that make possible incisive insights into human behavior, but he is critical of the scientific pretensions of Marx and Freud.
B. For Williams, suspicion in the context of faith is a kind of spiritual practice or spiritual therapy.
C. Williams’s approach to the question of how we know that something comes from God rather than the human is that we don’t. But if we assume from the start that everything comes from the human, we will not be able to attend carefully enough to claims of revelation or religious experience to open ourselves to the possibility that something does come from God.
D. Williams rejects two of the most common ways of thinking about revelation in the modern period-both the liberal and the fundamentalist.
E. He suggests that history and interpretation are the means by which we continue the process started in the Bible, the process of learning what God is saying to us.
F. Revelation is the grace and the forgiveness that allows us to break out of these patterns, to bring creativity into our lives, and to forge new patterns of connection with others and with God.
IV. Levinas and Williams think about revelation through their traditions, and in each case, they treat revelation as something that calls us out of the ways of seeing, feeling, and acting that we construct for ourselves.
A. Revelation calls us out of ourselves by calling us to the other.
B. In this postmodem return to tradition, then, traditions are seen as processes of thinking, believing, and imagining that guide our engagement with the world.
Suggested Reading:
Levinas, Otherwise than Being.
Morgan and Gordon, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy.
Williams, On Christian Theology.
Questions to Consider:
1. What does Levinas mean when he calls ethics “first philosophy”?
2. How does Rowan Willams’s concept of revelation differ from revelation in someone like Carl Henry?
Lecture Thirty-One -- Transcript
Postmodernism and Tradition
In the last lecture, we turned our attention to secular and postmodern theologies, and near the end of the lecture began to address the postmodern ethics of the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas argues that in the face of the other we find an imperative to subject ourself to the other. At the very end of the lecture, I stated that, for Levinas, it is in this face -- and only in this face -- that we find what he calls “traces of God.”
I want to begin this lecture by diving right back into Levinas to develop his ideas about God and Judaism. I’ll then turn to a general discussion of revelation and suspicion in postmodern religious thought. I’ll conclude by considering how suspicion and revelation come together in the theology of the Anglican theologian, Rowan Williams.
For Levinas, as in Buber, it’s in the ethical relationship with the other that we find ourselves related to God. Put differently, this encounter with the face of the other/God tears us out of ourselves. It interrupts a basic narcissism that’s so deep that it requires a radical reorientation to the other to get out of it. It should come as no surprise, then, that in his treatment of Judaism, Levinas places a strong emphasis on the radical nature of God’s commandments. Where many Jewish thinkers will stress that we accept God’s commandments as part of a covenant with God, kind of a deal or pact between God and his people where God promises to watch over the people if they will follow his laws, but Levinas reads the Bible differently. He argues that God did not really give the Jews the choice to enter into the covenant-that they were essentially commanded to enter into it. We can recall, here, Franz Rosenzweig, who talks about God as giving the commandment to love him, and in a similar way I think Levinas is talking about how this commandment comes in and interrupts, and it’s not really a choice -- it’s a commandment given to the Jewish people. So, Levinas in a similar way, when he talks about our encounter with the face of the other, talks about it as a commandment to respond without thought of one’s self -- to attend to the other and his or her suffering not because such attention will save you, but simply because it’s commanded. There’s also a parallel, I think, with Vattimo, because we find in both Vattimo and Levinas a radical vision of surrender of self-a surrender to justice that does not rebound back to the advantage of the self As Levinas conceives it, this is the heart of Judaism.
He writes: “The suffering of the just for a justice which is without triumph is lived concretely as Judaism.” On the one hand, then, Levinas offers a view of Judaism that is, in crucial respects, at odds with those who would emphasize a more covenantial understanding of the Jewish relationship with God. Levinas sees this difference, though, not as a rejection of tradition, but as a working out of the meaning of the tradition in the contemporary world. He talks about study of Torah, and he describes it in this way-that the study of Torah is “the pennanent revision and updating of the content of reve1ation.” So, revelation here is something that needs to be continually updated. Torah needs to be continually studied, and in this context, in this process, revelation is revised and updated.
This appeal by Levinas to revelation allows me to take the next step in our consideration of postmodern religious thought. Levinas was a philosopher who owed much to modem philosophy, even as he criticized its metaphysical orientation, as we discussed in the last lecture-but he also remained a devout Jew whose thought was deeply informed by its traditions and its discourses. In this respect, Levirras-like a number of other Jewish and Christian thinkers -- combines the postmodem critique of metaphysics with a recovery of fomis of reasoning derived from premodern religious traditions.
Modern philosophy, as we’ve discussed a number of times, insisted on the autonomy of reason as humanity’s sole intellectual authority. But it’s this very autonomy that’s being questioned by postrnodernists, and this opens the door to Levinas and others who stress tradition and revelation as the contexts in which reason does its work. We’re not far from Barth here-for Levinas, like Barth, when it comes to comprehensive visions of life and reality, our starting points are taken from something that announces itself to us or imposes itself upon us. Faith, then, is our assent to this revelation, and religious thought becomes faith seeking understanding -- which itself is a process of working in, and through, and -- in some respects-beyond the tradition. So, one way of distinguishing postmodern religious thinkers from other postmodernists is that the former understand that it’s faith that, after all the criticism, all the self-consciousness, all the suspicion, it’s faith that allows us still to live -- to make decisions, to find meaning, to act morally. It’s the grounds from which these things can proceed.
For a thinker such as Levinas, it’s precisely the divine imperative that makes ethics possible. But the question remains: Can we imagine an appeal to revelation, a conception of God as law-giver, that does not make us simply unthinking slaves who must give up all modern notions of critical consciousness and freedom? If we follow Ricoeur, we see that this process of coming to understanding about faith also involves suspicion, critical thought, the close and radical examination of our faith. Here, we can note a crucial difference between Carl Henry, the Fundamentalist theologian, on the one hand-and thinkers such as Levinas, Ricoeur, and even Barth on the other hand. As we saw, Hemy argued that the Bible is the depository of God’s revelation -- and that we are to understand the Bible and this revelation as a set of propositions about the world and about human beings.
Given these basic propositions, one can then reason from them to figure out the details of our ethical and religious lives. But thinkers like Levinas, or Ricoeur, or Barth see revelation very differently. For Barth, the revelation is Jesus Christ, and-as we’ve seen-the Bible is a witness to this revelation; it’s not the revelation itself For Ricoeur, the revelation is what he describes not as a command, but as a “non-violent appeal” that is addressed not to our obedience, but to our imagination. For Levinas, what is revealed in the face of the other is the imperative to turn to the other, in responsibility.
Despite crucial differences between Barth, and Ricoeur, and Levinas-in each case, revelation is not something propositional. This means that, to a far greater degree than we see in someone like Henry, revelation requires interpretation and human judgment to bring this revelation into the religious life and into life in general. On this account, then, because of this requirement for interpretation, tradition becomes a resource for thinking about what revelation is, how to interpret it, how to respond to it. Revelation is not a repository of specific laws or specific propositions about the world. It’s not a theological foundation analogous to that which modern philosophy seeks in reason, or what Fundamentalists such as Hem'y seek in the Bible, or what Neo-Scholastic Catholics sought in the doctrines of the Church. Rather, faith is understood as a commitment to God’s revelation as it has been expressed and reflected upon through characteristic forms of reasoning, interpreting, acting, and community that have been developed in the tradition. So, this is a commitment to a human and, therefore, fallible partial process of elaboration, correction, and criticism that makes up the tradition.
Levinas puts it this way:
I am suggesting that the totality of truth is made out of the contributions of a multiplicity of people: the uniqueness of each act [and here, he’s talking about each act of interpretation and each ethical act] carries the secret of the text; the voice of Revelation, in precisely the inflection lent by each person’s ear, is necessary to produce all the dimensions of meaning.
So, here we see revelation as something that emerges as each person hears the Word of God and gives it a certain inflection. Another problem that arises as we think about revelation is the one that informs the liberal religious response to Barth, that his revelation is too objective, and we’ve talked about this in previous lectures. The issue is that anyone who does not take the Fundamentalist line that revelation is contained in the plain sense of the words of the Bible has to undertake significant interpretation to derive meaning from the Bible-and has to articulate just how authoritative any given interpretation is. But then how do you know that the meaning you pull out of the biblical text or out of some other source of revelation is, in fact, God’s revelation and not some idea that you have projected into the text or projected onto God? How do you know that it’s divine and not human? To what degree does your particular historical and social location and your particular interests or your particular neuroses or fantasies influence your interpretation of revelation?
One of the most important intellectual developments of the 20th century is what is generally referred to as “the linguistic turn,” and this emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as many philosophers and other intellectuals embraced the idea that language is not simply a transparent medium for thought. It’s not simply a tool for communication, but that language, in fact, is constitutive of thought, and it’s constitutive of the way we experience the world. The claim is that the very words we use and the very systems of language in which we are enmeshed come out of long histories -- are already interpretations, already lead us to see and experience the world in one way or another.
Another way of putting this is that we never have direct access to the way things are, but we only know and experience things through the lens of the language that we use. If this is the case, how would it be possible to identify any words, any experiences, any form of knowledge as coming from a source beyond the human? The linguistic turn radically historicizes our language and, therefore, our knowledge and experience of the world. We are so deeply stuck in history and language on this view that it’s impossible for us to separate out in any given text, or any experience, or any doctrine that which is divine and that which is human. One upshot of this is that we have to be suspicious whenever a thinker begins with an idea or an experience that he or she contends is in some way not embedded in human interpretation -- that in some way comes from God and so is prior to, or outside of, the web of language and reason. This is one reason why even Barth was in many ways quite tentative about the appeal to revelation, even as he put it at the center of his theology.
To summarize, then, we’ve identified two problems with the idea of revelation. The first is that the appeal to revelation seems to set substantial limits to human autonomy -- that is, our thinking only begins from a command, or an imperative, or an appeal that comes to us from God. The second is that even if we are willing to question this modern autonomy, the question remains how we can ever identify an idea or an imperative as coming from God, rather than from the human.
In the remainder of this lecture I want to explore the ways in which Rowan Williams, an Anglican theologian and since 2002 the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Church, the way Rowan Williams addresses these questions that I’ve just phrased. I’ll begin with the question of suspicion. When we look at the work of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, we see that their hermeneutics of suspicion employs as a fundamental principle the idea that all human religious ideas and practices can be explained in human terms -- and as involving human efforts to evade reality or exert power over others. It’s important to emphasize this. Their starting point is the assumption that religion has a human cause -- they don’t prove this in any final way, and don’t even really try that hard to prove it, and so they want to say that religion, because of this, is fundamentally illusory.
In an essay entitled “The Suspicion of Suspicion,” Rowan Williams acknowledges the value of the hermeneutics of suspicion in providing interpretive frameworks that make possible incisive insights into human behavior and into human religiosity. But he’s critical of the scientific pretensions, and particularly the scientific pretensions of Marx and Freud. He argues that religious thinkers should consider any claims emerging from this kind of suspicion as applied to religion not as scientific conclusion, but rather as what he describes as a “social proposal.” What he means is this: As a theologian, or simply as one who is examining his or her faith and his or her religious practice, it’s necessary to take very seriously the possibility that a Marxist, or a Freudian, or a Nietzschean interpretation of this belief and practice will be illuminating. That is, Rowan Williams thinks that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had a lot of very important insights, and it is necessary, as Ricoeur says, to take ourselves through the process of thinking through our faith in terms of this suspicion. But Williams also says it’s only possible to determine whether it’s a good or apt interpretation by applying it carefully to the particular relevant context in a process of dialogue and discernment.
So, let’s contrast, for example, a therapeutic situation where psychoanalytic theory is brought to bear on a particular person’s life, and the success of the therapy depends on the analyst and the analysand working out the meaning of various symptoms together. Psychoanalytic theory in this context will direct the analyst, but a good analyst needs to hold the theory lightly -- not impose it in any rote or rigid way. The meaning of what is happening gets worked out in therapy -- it is not brought to the therapy. For Williams, suspicion in the context of faith is a kind of spiritual practice -- a kind of spiritual therapy, if you will.
The usefulness and aptness of a Marxist or a Freudian interpretation of a belief or practice will be a matter of judgment and persuasion in a particular context, a specific situation. It will be what Williams calls a “rhetorical accomplishment” that takes place in, and through, attentiveness to the details of a given situation. To refuse this kind of process, that takes time -- it takes specific focus on a situation. To refuse that kind of process, for Williams, is to renounce connection with finitude and life. It’s to try to stand outside of time, bring in this so-called scientific interpretation, and apply it in a kind of rote way to a religious context. Of course. there will always be scholars and others who are theorizing religion in Marxist or Nietzschean terms, but William’s point is not really directed to such theories, but rather to those processes of individual and group discernment that take seriously the process of examining religious motivations, doctrines, and actions in the world.
So, Williams’s suspicion of suspicion is based in at least two claims -- first, that such interpretation is more social than scientific; and second, that those whose suspicion of religion starts from the principle that religion is an illusory flight from finitude are themselves fleeing from the time-consuming task of working out this claim and testing this claim in specific instances. Hence, Williams’s approach to the question of how we know that something comes Hom God, rather than the human is that, well, we don’t -- at least in not any certain way, but that if we assume from the start that everything comes from the human and think about this in Freudian or Marxist terms, we’l1 not be able to attend carefully enough to concrete claims of revelation or religious experience to open ourselves to the possibility that maybe something does come from God.
This focus on interpretation is at the heart of Williams’s approach to the questions of revelation and autonomy. His basic definition of revelation is quite simple and uncontroversial. He says revelation is “what has been shown to us by God’s will and action.” But, he also acknowledges that revelation as a concept has “frequently been put to deeply corrupt use.”
Williams rejects two of the most common ways of thinking about revelation in the modem period. First, he rejects the liberal appeal to a kind of immediate experience that gives us awareness of the transcendent, as we see perhaps in Schleiermacher and certainly m some of his followers-and he rejects the Fundamentalist understanding of revelation as something propositional. In both cases, revelation is proposed to us as something given to us. It’s untouched by history and interpretation-something that can be appealed to, to settle all arguments. It is, he goes on to say, to make revelation a human possession. We know what it is, we have it, and we can apply it in this and that way.
So, Williams agrees with Barth that we can never really possess revelation-or, to put it differently, that part of all genuine revelation is the realization that we can never fully grasp it. Yet Williams also thinks that Barth’s view of revelation has its limitations, in that he goes too far in the opposite direction from the Fundamentalists and the liberals by separating revelation too much from the human. Williams, in fact, follows Ricoeur quite explicitly in treating revelation as a call that comes from beyond the human -- again, we can think about Ricoeur’s idea of a non-violent appeal. It comes from beyond the human, and it helps us look at our world in a new way and look at one’s self and one’s community as participating in this new world, which for Christians is the Kingdom of God.
Williams puts it like this: “Revelation ... is essentially to do with what is generative in our experience -- events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life.” Two elements of this definition of revelation are crucial. First, revelation breaks existing frames of reference, which means that, as in Barth, revelation itself pushes us to examine our religious lives critically. I’ll expand on this in a moment.
The second point, which I want to address now, is that revelation initiates new possibilities of life. This is not to say that revelation gives us a full picture of the Kingdom of God-a new hilly formed world that we must embrace, but rather opens our imagination to what is possible and starts us on a process of interpreting this new possibility, of coming to find out hi history and with others what this new world entails.
Before, I spoke about the problem of history and interpretation. If we are embedded deeply in history, how can we even identify -- much less understand-something as revelation. But Williams is suggesting that history and interpretation are not the problem. They’re not that which gets in the way of our trying to know what God’s revelation really is, but, m fact, the means by which we continue the process started in the Bible, of learning -- and this is Williams’s word-of learning what God is saying to us, and this is a historical process. So, the Bible, which is where the struggle to interpret God’s revelation must begin for Christians, is not any kind of final answer, but a beginning. It’s the starting point for the Christian community as it comes in history and through interpretation to learn more about and to understand better and better God’s revelation. It allows us to see that revelation must be understood as a dynamic process of forgiveness and grace. Rowan Williams puts it this way:
“God reveals himself” means that the meaning of the word “God” establishes itself among us as the loving and nurturing advent of newness in human life -- grace, forgiveness, empowerment to be the agents of forgiveness and liberation.
This is the paradigm that the Bible establishes: grace, forgiveness, empowerment. So, in history, Christians together from the Bible start working out the meaning of these words -- grace, forgiveness, empowerment -- but note that these words themselves already indicate that revelation is a dynamic process not just confined to the Bible. We can think about it this way. If, as Christians believe, human beings are sinners, it; that is, they are always falling into destructive patterns of life that have their root in the effort to secure the self against other selves, to secure one’s community against outsiders and other communities, to secure the human against God with appeals to autonomy-then revelation is the grace and the forgiveness that allows us to break out of these patterns, to bring creativity into our lives that allows us to forge new patterns of connection with others and with God.
So, it’s not just that Christians are trying to find out the meaning of these words, but are trying to live forgiveness and grace, which means God’s constant renewal of their lives. So, revelation must always be speaking anew in new and different situations. If it’s to open up a new world for us here and now, it must help us break out of the world that we’ve created for ourselves. Forgiveness allows us to tum from the past, and grace allows us to imagine a new future. This leads Williams to say that rather than giving us a set of answers, revelation “poses fresh questions rather than answering old ones.”
But to accept this grace of creativity is not just to appropriate it for one’s self, but to live it in extending it to others-to make real God’s anarchic love that breaks down barriers, that interrupts those habits and structures by which some-tax collectors, Samaritans, the sick, of the Gospels-are oppressed, shut out, marginalized, that demands of us compassionate acceptance and love. Again, Williams: “It is through what we learn to say of Son and Spirit that we can interpret the abstract notion of ‘absolute creativity’ as the absolute gratuity of love.” One crucial way in which this happens, as Williams emphasizes again and again, is to immerse one’s self in communities of dialogue and interpretation.
Indeed, for Williams, revelation is not just the event that initiates the history of interpretation in which the Christian community formed around this initiating event-the life and death of Jesus Christ, but revelation is also at work in the history of interpretation. This, for Williams, is the importance of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit: Here, revelation is the event, but also a kind of energy informing the debates and questions that the event provokes. Williams writes: “Radical generative power is ascribed to the life of Jesus, but it is also ascribable to those events in which, through the ages, the community learns and re-learns to interpret itself by means of Jesus.”
So, revelation is not simply a matter of random questions and breaking all frameworks, for it always comes back to the community that is asking the questions. In the Bible we see a new community being formed around Jesus, and the process of constructing the Bible itself was a process of shaping this new community. For this community, the questioning and interpreting that are part and parcel of revelation all revolved around the question not just of God, but of the identity of the community: What is the nature of this community that is constituted by its commitment to this revelation?
In that sense, the Church finds out what it is as it asks the question of what God is-or, to say the same thing, the revelation of God is also the revelation of the identity of the Church and of those who make up the Church. So, Williams puts it: “Puzzlement over ‘what the Church is meant to be’ is the revelatory operation of God as ‘Spirit’ insofar as it keeps the Church engaged in the exploration of what its foundational events signify.” Here we have revelation as puzzlement, and before we assume that puzzlement is rather lame or a lame kind of revelation, think of what it means to continue to grow as a person. One grows not by assuming that they have arrived at their identity, but by continuing to find out who one is by taking on new challenges-by accepting new questions and questioning one’s own received wisdom and one’s own wisdom by continuing to expand horizons.
From this it also follows that suspicion and revelation go hand in hand for Williams -- for it’s precisely this revelatory energy of the Holy Spirit that keeps us turned toward the new, constantly aware of the human tendency to make our interpretations final or to turn them into self-aggrandizing truths to create, as we’ve seen, new idols. Revelation is, thus, a call to what Williams describes as the “unending re-discovery of Christ.” This view also allows us to address the question of freedom and autonomy, and to bring a kind of nuance to this discussion that does not simply resolve to an either/or between autonomy as freedom on the one hand, and heteronomy as slavish obedience on the other.
The idea here is that a certain freedom is made possible precisely in submitting one’s self to the call of the new that comes from God. God’s initiating action, God’s revelation, begins a process by which we are invited into a new world, an invitation to which we respond in creative responsibility -- but in a freedom that is supported by God’s grace and manifested in communicating that grace to others, and so helping to make them free. In the end, Williams wants to borrow from Ricoeur the idea of a “non-heteronomous dependence”: We are called to the new, and we respond, but we respond and submit to the call only as we live to embody this call as a call to newness -- as a call to exercise our imaginations in making it a part of our personal and communal worlds. We are called to think, speak, and act in a new way, but this way is not, as Williams puts it, “dictated or determined.” Instead, he writes: “revelation is addressed not so much to a will called upon to submit as to an imagination called upon to ‘open itself.”’
Levinas and Williams think revelation through their traditions, and in each case -- though in very different ways -- they treat revelation as something that calls us out of the ways of seeing, feeling, and acting that we construct for ourselves in order to make the world easier to grasp and safer for our sense of identity. Revelation calls us out of ourselves by calling us to the other, especially to those who are injured or marginalized by the worlds that we create for ourselves. We find in both cases that revelation makes possible, indeed demands, the continual reinterpretation of the tradition by using the resources of the tradition to engage and reengage with the world -- and come to see it in new ways. In this postmodern return to tradition, then, tradition is not a kind of static, authoritative repository of fixed truths that early modern thinkers saw as opposed to reason, or as anti-modernist Catholics and Protestant Fundamentalists appealed to as a way of combating the dynamism of modernity. Rather, traditions are seen as processes of thinking, believing, and imagining that guide our engagement with the world. This will become important to keep in mind as we consider the question of religion and reason in later lectures.
