Fragment of a Thought on Theological Practice
What
is the status of theological thought?
Who “owns” it, i.e. who has the right to engage in and utilize it? Is it the special possession of faith
traditions, somewhat like the specialist knowledge and apparatuses of various
scientific disciplines, or can non-faith participants legitimately “do”
theology? To put this another way, does
it have the same status as communist egalitarianism, as pointed out by Rancière
in connection with failed communist communities:
They did not
fail, as the opinion goes, because individuals could not submit to the common
discipline. On the contrary, they failed
because the communist capacity could not be privatized. The sharing of the capacity of anybody could
not be turned into the virtue of the private communist man.
Ranciere’s point is
that so many categories of communist discipline, whether it be emancipation
from oppression or the communal sharing of labour, do not belong to the
particular predicate “communism” as if only
a communist could properly assume their practice. They belong precisely to the “capacity of
anybody” by virtue of their universality, and therefore cannot be privatized or
held pretentiously as particular communist virtues.
Insofar
as egalitarianism, ethics, and the event (in the sense of creative novelty) are
concerned, can the Church not admit that in the past it has likewise “privatized
the capacity of anybody,” has made these categories virtues of the religious
community as if without the Church everyone would only do “what was right in
his/her own eyes,” as if there could be no new subjective creation without faith
in Christ? Such a suggestion can only be said to be preposterous in view of the
empirical evidence. It was Alan Watts,
that once Anglican minister turned Zen Buddhist, who summed up the state of
homily during his time in the Church: “So much preaching we hear on Sunday
morning comes down to this: ‘My dear people, be good!’” So much should be admitted. The real problem, however, is that such
actual homiletic practice is a reflection of an underlying theology that has
become little more than the repetition of the everyday humanistic parlance of
modernity. Obsessed with seeming
relevant, much contemporary theology is found in the position of having given
up on the deeper core of Christian thought, in, for instance, the historical
status and meaning of the resurrection. Nor
is the problem merely implicit or subterranean in the life of the Church, for
the Church itself has its own resurrection “reactionaries.” For them, the resurrection is not theologically
meaningful as an historical event, but merely provides a hermeneutical
substrate for what is truly important: theory and practice regarding the human
subject/community. This sort of theology
is so obviously a compromise with modernity that it is difficult to take it
seriously as theology. It would surely cause the one who said, “…if
Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in
vain,” to roll over in his grave (1 Cor. 15:14). Perhaps it is best seen as a reflection of
the consciousness of a certain cultural type, or a certain “class.” As a result of the life of relative
comfort lived by this class, it can no longer identify with the words that
follow those just quoted: “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are
of all people most to be pitied” (v.15).
In short, it reflects a decadent class theology.
Quoted section: Jacques
Rancière, “Communists Without Communism?” in The Idea of Communism (New York: Verso, 2010), 169.
