The Craft of Innovative Theology. Группа авторов
very obviously to be hybrid – who accept the hyphenated life, whose histories, vocations, relationships, families, sense of self, and hopes for the future are thoroughly soaked in the water and wine of interstitial, liminal, hybridity –pluralistic theology does not represent an endlessly deferred alterity and alienation, but rather articulates the thrilling pluripotentiality of multiple belonging, of an excess of freedom, of ludic liberation, and authentic becoming. Surely, a program for creative theology should covet such an outcome.
Notes
1 1 Due to space I cannot here justify this claim fully, though even a cursory reading of most of the world religions’ founding texts shows regular references to a religiously plural context. Ancient theologians are also well aware of their pluralistic context. For instance Clement attributes to Xenophanes the view that the Thracians “gods are red haired and blue eyed, the Ethiopians’ black as apes” in the process of his argument that the “heathens made Gods like themselves, whence springs all superstition” Stromata VII, chapter 4.
2 2 I take this as a central thesis of J.Z. Smith’s famous characterization of religion in his Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi.
3 3 I realize the irony of proposing a somewhat radical program to transform theology into something I point out it already exhibits. My argument is not that theology must become pluralistic in a way it never was, but rather that it should fully and thoroughly recover the vigor and creative potential of the pluralism out of which it was born.
4 4 See for instance Isaiah 55:8–9; Acts 17:24; 1 Kings 8:27; Job 38–42.
5 5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.2.a.2; Augustine of Hippo Confessions 7.10.16. For a discussion of the roots of apophatic theology, see Andrew Louth, “Holiness and the Vision of God in the Eastern Fathers”, in Holiness: Past and Present, ed. Stephen C. Barton (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 217–239.
6 6 See Janet Martine Soskice’s Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
7 7 Augustine, Sermons 117.3.5.
8 8 I suggest that analogy is a species of metaphorical predication however cannot develop this view fully here. It is worth distinguishing, at this point, polysemy with hybridity: the prior belonging to a term’s reception and the latter its semantic content.
9 9 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Theology in a Post-Liberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox press, 1984), 33–34.
10 10 I follow Rorty’s development of a pragmatic theory of truth as found in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 35th anniversary ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) and elsewhere in his writing. While the pragmatic theory of truth he presents there has undergone much critique and development, I suggest the nub of his argument presented in this book remains compelling, particularly for the project of pluralistic theology. Correspondence theories of truth cannot simply apply to religious propositions since it would require an impossible Archimedean vantage point and coherence theories fail to break from the perhaps more serious threat of non-realism.
11 11 Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, trans. A. Dru (London: Collins, 1958), 44.
12 12 Søren Kierkegaard, “Truth is Subjectivity,” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. A. Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 171.
13 13 In William James’s construal of pragmatic theories of truth, this test, negotiation and contestation is the verification treasured by proponents of correspondence theories of truth. See lecture IV in his Pragmatism where he states: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot”.
14 14 I use the term “poetic” to refer to poesis/poiesis, the Greek term for “making.” The poetic here signifies the movement from potentiality to actuality, a movement effected by a poet, or maker.
15 15 This is Janet Soskice’s definition, which while wholly in line with Ricoeur’s, is more succinctly expressed. See Soskice, Metaphor and Religions Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) and Ricoeur The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
16 16 While metaphor is not limited to this dyadic structure, it is useful here to explain it in these terms.
17 17 This is an important point for those who fear that in a full-blooded pluralistic theology, Christian distinctiveness may be obfuscated. The dialectic at the heart of pluralistic theology must maintain the coherence and alterity of its sources.
18 18 There is some debate in the literature as to whether Voloshinov is a pen name for Mikhail Bhaktin.
19 19 Francis X. Clooney S.J., Theology after Vedanta: An Experiment in Comparative Theology (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 5.
20 20 It is not required that a pluralistic theology bring together analogous notions of prayer, ritual, etc. Such comparative exercises too often form the basis of illegitimate cultural appropriation. The dialectics of metaphor can be used to avoid such substitutionary appropriation. I focus on analogous notions of prayer here for illustrative purposes only.
21 21 I should note that Rorty would add within the concept of sufficiency, the call to solidarity with those who suffer.
22 22 Plato, Philebus, accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1744, 278.
23 23 Plato, Gorgias, accessed April 20, 2020, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html.
24 24 The biblical virtue of kenosis drives the authentic pluralistic theologian.
25 25 William McDonald, “Søren Kierkegaard,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2017), accessed February 4, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/kierkegaard, accessed 4 Feb 2020.
26 26 William James, The Will to Believe, a lecture first published in The New World Vol. 5 (1896): 327–347.