Communicating truth — rationally and aesthetically

The only reason I bought the book 101 Key Terms in Philosophy and Their Importance for Theology was because an Internet search for a handful of keywords produced a passage from the book’s entry on aesthetics.

The word “aesthetics” can mean one or both of two things: (1) thinking about beauty and (2) thinking about the human experience of beautiful things. Aesthetics tends to be an academic discipline within philosophy.

I want to quote a significant passage from the passage on aesthetics in the book, which was written by two faculty members at Calvin College and one at Gordon-Conwell seminary.

Some of the following terms might be a little dense, so I’ll bold-face the easier-read, core parts:

“While strands of Christian, especially Protestant, theology have adopted the more rationalistic stance of Plato, throughout history many theologians have affirmed the aesthetics as a central medium of both revelation and truth, particularly Neoplatonic theologians such as Bonaventure. The emphasis on aesthetics has received renewed interest in contemporary theology due to the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jeremy Begbie. At the core of these theological aesthetics (or aesthetic theologies) is a rejection of the rationalist axiom, which assumes that truth is communicated only in cognitive propositions. Rather, there is a mode of truth telling that is unique to the aesthetic or ‘affective,’ that cannot be reduced to cognitive propositions. Appeal is often made to the liturgy itself as an example of this, particularly the rich eucharistic liturgies of Orthodox and Catholic traditions, where all of the senses are engaged in order to communicate the truth of grace.” — Kelly James Clark, Richard Lints, and James K.A. Smith (bold-face added)

religion and philosophy

Revitalizing liturgical worship: Stephen R. Holmes on history and location

“Because of the doctrine of creation, historical locatedness is something good. The tradition we inherit is part of our location in history, and so in doing theology it is necessary to relate to the tradition.” — Stephen R. Holmes in Listening to the Past: The Place of Tradition in Theology

Notice the assumptions in the title of the book: Theology is somewhat abstract and intellectual, while tradition is somewhat tangible and embodied.

Also, consider what Holmes is saying, and I’ll put my own interpretative spin on it: even if you don’t believe in “sacred spaces,” you can appreciate that many people have worshipped within a certain place, and you can appreciate that all the symbolism within a place points to Christ or to the Trinity, and you can appreciate that someone, whether the craftsman or just the purchaser, cared that tangible things would be symbols for God, for Christ, and for the glory of God. After all, in Christian belief, the printed word “Jesus” is not the Incarnated God, yet the word stands as a symbol for the Incarnated God. If words can refer to God, than other symbols can, too, and a place with many symbols can be considered special without being considered idolatrous. We don’t fix a flood with a drought, as Thomas Howard said in a quotation I posted the other day.

Marcus Aurelius: Do you live in chaos or order?

“Either everything is a confused gathering and scattering of atoms, or else it is all a great unity and design. If the former, why am I so eager to go on living in such a swirling chaos? Why should I care about anything but how I will finally ‘return to the soil’? and why am I disturbed? For whatever I do, this scattering will come upon me as well. But if it is the other alternative, I am reverent, I am calm; I place my trust in that which governs all things.” — Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy updates article on ‘Foreknowledge and Free Will’

“Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity and hence are unfree,” philosopher Linda Zagzebski writes in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Theological fatalism is the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no human act is free.”

What follows is not light reading! See the full article here.

Maybe even read it.

‘No one enters into the Kingdom of Heaven by fear’ or why I love Emil Brunner

“One scarcely hears a sermon any more about The Judgment. Perhaps in former times there was too much and too rash preaching on this subject, motivated by a desire to drive men into the Kingdom of Heaven by fear. No one enters into the Kingdom of Heaven by fear, and the man who tries to do God’s will out of fear simply does not do God’s will.” — Emil Brunner, in Our Faith 

Brunner was a Gifford Lecturer; more about that here.

Read Theopedia’s entry on Brunner here.

Why the medium must change if the message is to remain the same

Cover of The Courage to Be

“It is not always personal doubt that undermines and empties a system of ideas and values. It can be the fact that they are no longer understood in their original power of expressing the human situation and of answering existential human questions. (This is largely the case with the doctrinal symbols of Christianity.) Or they lose their meaning because the actual conditions of the present period are so different from those in which the spiritual contents were created that the new creations are needed. (This was largely the case with artistic expression before the industrial revolution.) In such circumstances a slow process of waste of the spiritual content occurs, unnoticeable in the beginning, realized with a shock as it progresses, producing the anxiety of meaninglessness at its end.” — Paul Tillich, in The Courage to Be

I realize, of course, this could cut against everything from liturgical worship to Reformed systematics. The purpose of the cutting, however, is the central matter.

I find Tillich’s The Courage to Be to be very clear and resourceful in understanding non-rational aspects of human experience, especially anxiety and existential matters.

Searching for additional links for this post, I read something online that made me angry. I hate it when Tillich is labeled merely as “liberal theologian” by conservatives, as if that’s all there is to say about Tillich. Did John Calvin call Seneca a “hell-bound heathen”? Did Thomas Aquinas describe Aristotle as a “Yahweh-rejecting pagan”? Today’s reflexive conservative critics of “liberal theologian” Tillich eagerly mine Christ-denying, idolatrous contemporary culture for metaphors and illustrations. It’s almost like they’re saying, “Claim Christianity without our doctrinal point of view, and we’ll skewer you; but provide mass-market entertainment with a pseudo-religious redemption narrative, and we’ll gush about you in our sermons.” Wow — how do you define schizophrenia? Here’s the cure: Read Tillich. He doesn’t have to be  R I G H T  on all things to offer rich, insightful assessments of familiar human predicaments.

Related articles

• “When traditional symbols have lost their power” by Paul Tillich (gsb3.net)
• “Courage and Despair”, an excerpt from The Courage to Be, by Paul Tillich (gsb3.net)
• “Anxiety, Religion and Medicine”, excerpt from The Courage to Be, by Paul Tillich (gsb3.net)
• Protestant as one who confesses (geneveith.com)
• Religion: To Be or Not to Be (time.com)

The missing mode in evangelical thought

Nobel Prize-winning scientists tend to be atheists. Do orthodox Christians shrug-off their accomplishments?

This issue should be addressed from the pulpits, not just in the seminaries:

When Galileo wanted to show Jupiter’s moons to his theological opponents, they refused to look through his telescope. They believed — as Berthold Brecht put it — that “truth is not to be found in nature, but only in the interpretation of texts.” — Jurgen Moltmann, “Science and Wisdom,” in Theology Today, July 2001

Above, Moltmann (and history) provided just a small illustration of a wider problem. A mere response to this problem — like, “I believe the contradiction between Scripture and science is only apparent, and ultimately the two will be reconciled” — is inadequate. Each believer — myself included, because I’m not sure I can do this yet — ought to be able to make a critical assessment of the relationship between the old texts and scientific facts, as well as the two modes Scripture and science represent. In our time, nothing less will do.

How you got to know your self — or, Christianity’s contribution to the Western understanding of personhood

This somewhat dense passage contains a cultural, social and psychological storyline:

“It is in a theological form, and at the peak of the most abstract conceptualization, that the notions of person and personality were first explicitly offered to the human mind: namely, in the dogmatic formulas concerned with Christian faith in the divine Trinity — one Nature in three Persons — and in the Incarnation of the Word — a divine Person assuming human nature. At the same time the human mind was confronted with a new idea of man — the Gospels and St. Paul disclosed to it the prevalence of the internal man over the external man, of the inner life of the soul over legal or exterior forms — and it could contemplate in the Son of Man crowned with thorns the abysmal depth of the most living and mysterious Self.” — Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

Books, science, & theology: Three excerpts from Matthew Miller’s Q&A with F. LeRon Shults

From Miller’s introduction:

Shults has received Ph.D.’s from Walden University (Eductaional Psychology), and Princeton Theological Seminary (Interdisciplinary Studies-theology/philosophy), and has served as a Research Fellow at Oxford University and Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. He currently teaches at the University of Agder.

From Miller’s introduction:

If theology is to continue to have a voice in our academic and cultural dialogue, it must learn to engage and dialogue with other scientific disciplines. In the latter half of the 20th Century a number of theologians came to realize this reality, and began building bridges between disciplines such as Science, Sociology, Psychology, and many more. My first encounter with an interdisciplinary approach came through the work of T.F. Torrance and his engagement with Science, and later, John Milbank’s groundbreaking Theology and Social Theory.

From the Q&A:

Miller: Which five books would you identify as the most influential on you as a theologian?

Shults: Of course the “right” answer here is “the Bible!”

This is also a serious answer, because it is certainly true that the Bible has been the book that has most influenced me, although my understanding of and engagement with it has shifted significantly over the years.

Besides the Bible… It is hard to limit myself to five, but with the caveat that these are among the most influential books, I would say:

Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death,
Pannenberg’s Anthropology in Theological Perspective,
[Thomas] Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation,
[Robert] Sokolowski’s The God of Faith and Reason,
and [Gille] Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.
 
Read the entire Q&A here.
 

Fear of the Lord — and astonishment at his creation (Jurgen Moltmann)

I found this enormously helpful:

“According to the biblical traditions, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. According to the early Greek philosophers, all knowledge is the fruit of wonder. Do we have to choose between Jerusalem and Athens? Must we decide between the church and the laboratory? Are the sciences and the humanities two different cultures, or two different windows to reality?

“When Galileo wanted to show Jupiter’s moons to his theological opponents, they refused to look through his telescope. They believed — as Berthold Brecht put it — that ‘truth is not to be found in nature, but only in the interpretation of texts.’ A classical definition of this separation of science and theology was given by Pascal: ‘If we perceive this distinction clearly, we shall lament the blindness of those who only allow the validity of tradition in physics instead of reason and experiment; we shall be horrified at the error of those who in theology put the arguments of reason in place of the tradition of Scripture and the Fathers.’ But why does astonishment over the world not lead us to the fear of the God, and the fear of God not to astonisnment over the world?”

– Jurgen Moltmann, in “Science and Wisdom,” Theology Today, July 2001