I (Joel) have been invited to participate in a new blogging community called Flux of Thought. There you can find brief discussions on theology, philosophy, political theory among other related things.
You can read here: Flux of Thought
You can follow the blog on Twitter here: @fluxofthought
I’ll still be writing and posting at A Church Unbound as well since FoT is going to be made up of much shorter posts, and I can’t help but be long-winded sometimes.
A friend of mine on Facebook shared this post from Mark Driscoll yesterday:
“In a society where there is no truth, the greatest ‘sin’ is saying someone is wrong.”
Pastor Mark has seen his fair share of beatdown over the last month, so I’m not looking to contribute to that. The post itself, which expresses a sentiment that could belong to any conservative Christian, is what I’m interested in. Normally, I don’t think that such a weak, late 20th century banality would have caught my attention. I’m sure Mark Driscoll is posting this kind of superficial garbage parading as insight multiple times a day, but it appeared just below a post by Bo Sanders of Homebrewed Christianity responding to Roger Olson’s recent blog that has caused a bit of controversy where he describes what he sees as the problem with liberal and progressive theology (two terms that he conflates.)
There are similar sentiments at work in both the Driscoll post and the Olson blog: There is such a thing as Truth, and they have it. Olson makes the following two points (which Bo objects to very nicely in his post) that I find to be completely incoherent:
“I look at their approach to “doing theology.” How do they approach knowing God? Do they begin with and recognize the authority of special revelation? Or do they begin with and give norming authority to human experience, culture, science, philosophy, “the best of contemporary thought?” That is, do they “do” theology “from above” or “from below?” Insofar as they do theology “from below” I tend to think they are liberal theologically.”
and
“If I ever wake up and find that I think like a true theological liberal, I hope I will be honest enough to stop calling myself ‘Christian.’ “
I’ve written many, many posts that deal with the sort of complaint that Olson is raising. In the first point, he’s assuming that there’s no mediation between special revelation and an articulate knowledge or theology–no interpretive work. That is, if one is doing “correct” theology, one is simply the mouthpiece of God. Whereas the theology of the liberal “Christian” is based upon the contingent, immanent, imperfect disciplines he lists, Olson’s theology is somehow not based on anything except the authority of special revelation. His own contingency, personal experiences, education, etc. don’t play into his theology. In the second point, he’s stating explicitly what Driscoll does implicitly: “There is such a thing as Truth, and I have it, so don’t be mad when I tell you you’re wrong (and not a Christian.)” Frankly, I’m just so tired of hearing this sort of arrogance come out of the mouths of people who profess the love of Jesus Christ.
Listen:
Put aside what you think about postmodern notions of truth, whether or not you think any relativity in truth is absolute relativity, etc. for a moment. Christians simply cannot continue to hold the positions that Driscoll and Olson espouse anymore. The history of the church from the very outset is marked with accepting radically different beliefs and practices (or lack of practices) into the church community. That doesn’t mean there should be no attempt to talk about normative practice or belief. But that normative activity is fluid, not solid. It has to be able to flex, to grow in order to account for human history, for new cultural contexts. When Roger Olson or Mark Driscoll place a boundary around what it is to be Christian, around what truth is, they are actually placing limits around what the gospel can do more than what it should be. You, me, Driscoll, and Olson are human beings. We are thrown into a particular time and place from which we must think and write. We may believe that the gospel message transcends that, can speak across history and culture, and that’s great, but don’t for one second believe that you do.
A few years ago, I was teaching college freshmen how to write argumentative research papers: Taking a side of a particular issue and using actual research to make a compelling case for that side. Invariably, I would have a student who was especially passionate about a particular topic: legalizing marijuana, abortion rights, and lowering the drinking age were what drew the most attention. These papers were always well researched; it seemed as though students thought that if they could convince me, they would have an impenetrable case for something that was deeply important to them–a worthwhile endeavor. The most glaring issue with a large number of these papers, however, was that they typically failed to take into account the opposing viewpoint. The university at which I taught even had a database called Opposing Viewpoints as part of its library resources which linked students to a variety of periodical and peer reviewed sources. As a result many of these papers ended up being a victory parade before any challenger was ever faced: a self-congratulatory exercise. The best papers I received always took their opposition seriously and tried their best to meet those challenges head on, whether they were entirely convincing or not. Sometimes engagement with the other side even led a student to change his or her position.
I want to state a case for something very simple that has been important in the philosophical understanding of rhetorical argument but which I very much doubt has ever been a consciously recognized tool in popular argumentation. Dialectic, which I will define in a minute, is a tool as old as Plato that would be immensely helpful if applied publicly. By “publicly,” I don’t mean in the political sphere necessarily (though it certainly couldn’t hurt), or the Media at large (because critical thought is not what they’re in the business of selling), and I’m not really interested in arguing for its importance within the Church as such (then again, a little could go a long way); my aims aren’t that grandiose. I just want my friends to use it, at least think about using it, in social media when they’re arguing about issues like gun control, gay marriage, or any other myriad of hot topics that seems to flood my newsfeed daily.
Argument is a techne, to use Aristotle’s term–an art. It requires finesse, guile, and above all a level head in order to see how one can appeal to those one is attempting to reach. It seems over the last five years or so with the exponential rise Internet message boards and social media comment threads, we’ve been bombarded by voices upon voices screaming their viewpoints at the top of their lungs. At the risk of oversimplifying, there seem to be two options: Ignore those sorts of conversations altogether, or change the disposition with which we enter them in the first place. What I want to propose here is called dialectic, but it doesn’t even need that name. It’s simply taking a viewpoint opposed to yours seriously enough to critically reflect on it and honestly ask yourself if there is something worthwhile there that you may be missing. This isn’t as a hard and fast system of rules by which we must abide; it’s a guide and a means for opening the door to productive discourse in the first place.
Dialectic consists of three parts: Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. If you ever participated in a “Socratic Seminar” method of classroom discussion in high school or college, then you’ve probably encountered this either explicitly or not. The idea is that one person offers a claim, a thesis statement. This is countered by another statement, the antithesis. The method, recognizing that there is probably value in both statements, seeks to draw out the truth kernel in each and form a synthesis of both, thus creating a new thesis statement. The process then starts over until, as Socrates [Plato] hoped, one arrives at Truth itself where no more antitheses may be offered against the True thesis statement.
The problem with most popular political debates is that they begin from the point of Truth. That is, the first argument offered is itself Truth in the mind of the person offering it. There is nothing more to be said except subpoints which can do nothing but support the initial truth claim. Those themselves are of course true because the initial statement is. This is called circular reasoning. At the risk of being incendiary, take this example:
P1: All marriages are between man and woman.
P2: All homosexual relationships are between man and man or woman and woman
Q: Therefore, all marriages exclude homosexual relationships.
This simple syllogism (a kind of logical philosophical argument) is logically valid but not logically sound. It’s valid because we have two premises and a conclusion drawn from them that doesn’t contradict either. But if we think about the premises, we might see a problem. Both are definitional, but only one is what we would call a tautology: P2. Put simply, a tautology is a statement in which the predicate repeats what the subject is in all possible interpretations. In other words, we define a homosexual relationship as a relationship between two people of the same sex. There is no other way to interpret the term “homosexual relationship.” But consider P1. A person making this argument would probably assume that P1 is also a tautology. But it begs the question: Is it? Is marriage only between man and woman? This is indeed the very crux of the debate itself. P1 is not an agreed-upon definition for marriage; to state it as such is to inevitably draw a fallacious, unsound conclusion. That’s not to say one couldn’t make a case for why P1 should be accepted, and if you’re compelled to quote the Bible or talk about God’s covenant, then I’ve done my job–you realize that further proof is needed for P1.
Dialectic demands two things of us in an argument. First, we are required not to begin with Truth, but to realize that one’s initial proposition is simply a thesis that one expects to be rebutted with an intelligent antithesis. (The word “intelligent” is problematic, of course, in these sorts of disagreements because the assumption on both sides is almost always that the opposition is not intelligent; for our purposes, however, we will proceed as if the opposition does have some degree of intelligence. We want to be generous dialecticians.) Second, the method forces us to listen to the opposing viewpoint receptively. Dialectic doesn’t work if we’re not actively trying to draw out what might be true in what the other person is saying.
That’s all I’m after here. What would a social media debate look like if two (or more) people engaged in this type of discussion or, at the very least, allowed it to inform how they enter into these sorts of disagreements? I’d like to go one small step further and submit that even if a person on the other side of the fence seems unwilling to engage in this sort of discussion, begins with a mild insult, etc., it is still possible to treat that person’s propositions as theses to be considered and synthesized if for no other reason than to exercise our own critical thought muscles. I want to expand our notion of what is engageable in argument and how we should go about engaging others (to an extent and within one’s own practical limits of course. There are most certainly very serious exceptions where a proposition is simply abusive, offensive, and genuinely offers no usable insight, but at that point, one should feel no guilt about simply exiting the thread.)
With these very basic principles of argument in mind, even engaging someone like this Sam Elliot meme should be possible.
Friends, 2012 was a HUGE year for me (Joel), and before I knew it, the year had gone by, and only 4 new posts were made to A Church Unbound! For any of you who have been wondering what happened, allow me to briefly recap:
In January, I was accepted to Northwestern University to earn a PhD in Religious Studies. As more responses from other schools came back, it became clear that Northwestern was going to be the place for me. In May, I announced my departure to the church I served for three years while at Fuller Seminary. This summer was packed with full time youth ministry, preparing for my wedding (married August 4), and moving to Chicago. My wife and I left Pasadena on September 1 and have been in Chicago now since September 8.
Between all of that and beginning the program at Northwestern, I’ve been hard pressed to find time to post things here! This blog never been meant to be anything more than a resource for people to stumble upon and hopefully find useful in some way for engaging meaningfully in conversations about the future of the church and faith. I have some ideas in the works for the blog, and 2013 will hopefully prove to be more productive in the way of continuing to provide those resources!
I would resist this notion. While it is certainly problematic to place too much emphasis on the “morality” of Vonnegut’s novels (or the genius of them for that matter) because such a reading is in danger of ignoring the actual cynicism of the real-life Vonnegut, we must recognize that there is a redemptive quality that speaks both to theological anthropology as well as a theology of evil. In the midst of the tragedy of Vonnegut’s novels, particularly the middle and later works, emerges an understanding of humanness and culture that can fruitfully be put into conversation with theology. In this paper, I will be offering a close reading of Vonnegut’s sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, in conjunction with an understanding of the relationship between theology and culture as presented by Kevin J. Vanhoozer and James K.A. Smith. The violence of Slaughterhouse-Five, presented to the reader through the technique of defamiliarization, serves to gesture toward itself as absurdity, to the point where the text becomes saturated with the absurd and the horror of war is equated to the death of bottled champagne. Juxtaposed to this violence is the recurring sentiment that life can and should be viewed in the totality of its most beautiful moments. Taken together, these two elements can operate as a critique of a theology of culture that would claim the world as wholly sacred, addressing any notion of the profane with violent hate or complete desensitization, resulting in the oppression and death of others in order to uphold the ideology of the world’s sanctification. The novel thus vacates God from a culture of totalizing beauty and places him as necessarily present in the profane-made-sacred.
Methodology
I will begin with an overview of the theories of the theology of culture that I will employ in the paper. First, a word on the general project of reading cultural artifacts theologically. I concur with Vanhoozer and Smith that culture, in its broadest sense is a gesture toward the good life.[4] In this view, the products of culture are intended to move us closer to our own (or our broader society’s) notion of what the good life is. That is, we desire the good life, as Smith points out, and engage with the cultural products we believe will get us there. When we believe strongly enough that certain cultural artifacts will produce the good life, our engagement with them can quickly become ritualized. Smith uses the example of the mall. If desire is at the core of what it is to be human, then the mall as a cultural text has quite a bit to say to us. We can see that every store as well as the concept of “the mall” as a whole institution affects what we desire and who we should then be. Retailers want us to believe that their products will make us better people, will finally grant us the good life that we’ve sought after so desperately and that without their product, we run the risk of missing out on the good life.
I will not be discussing worldviews, then, as they relate to culture; rather, I will follow Smith when he writes, “In order to recognize the religious power and formative force of the mall, we need to adopt a paradigm of cultural critique and discernment that thinks even deeper than beliefs or worldviews and takes seriously the central role of formative practices.”[5] In relation to Vonnegut, my method will be to extrapolate the ways the novel speaks to the formative practices that have created the theology of culture described above in order to demonstrate how it offers a critique of both the practices and the theology they produce. Vanhoozer is helpful in this regard. It would be easy to restrict a reading of Vonnegut solely to “cultural hegemonies” particularly because the novel is so overtly against war, capitalism, and the American Dream as ideologies. While such a reading is important as a preliminary understanding of the way in which the novel itself engages with and is shaped by the culture of its time, it will also be valuable to put the novel in conversation with theology. Vanhoozer writes: “To understand a cultural text truly thus requires putting it into theodramatic context—reading it in light of the control-script; viewing it thrice over in terms of creation, fall, and redemption.”[6] Thus a situating of Vonnegut both within his cultural milieu as well as within this theodramatic framework will be necessary. That is not to say that other, similar texts of its time do not speak to us theologically—only that I see Vonnegut’s work, particularly Slaughterhouse-Five saying something different.
Vonnegut in the Context of Anti-War Fiction
Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s most famous work, is an anti-war novel, and along with Cat’s Cradle, is usually compared with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Historically, both Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse fall between the two, Catch-22 published in 1961, Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973, Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse in 1963 and 1969, respectively. One of the key characteristics of all four is that each narrative is massively fragmented in some way in order to explore the utter meaninglessness of the atrocities committed during war. Catch-22 is told from multiple perspectives and jumps back and forth in time. Cat’s Cradle is broken up into 127 chapters, though it is fewer than 300 pages. Slaughterhouse-Five relies even more heavily on time, incorporating the actual time travel of the main character, Billy Pilgrim, as the reader is left to try and piece together Billy’s life and more importantly, his experience in WWII and the firebombing of Dresden. Gravity’s Rainbow has close to four hundred named characters, and even though the reader primarily follows Tyrone Slothrop, Slothrop’s story is erratic, disjointed, and ultimately the validity of certain aspects becomes questionable in the reader’s mind. The novel is also broken up into four parts and 73 ‘episodes.’ By the end, it seems the only character story the reader can trust is that of the V-2 rocket, named 00000, as by the end, it is the only “character” left from the beginning.
Ultimately, this fragmentation points to the loss of meaning, just as Modernist texts do, but the novels go further to subvert any attempt to try and re-establish or recover meaning because they suggest that there is actually no meaning to be found and that such attempts are absurd.[7] In Pynchon’s and Heller’s work, the reader is confronted directly with a complete loss of meaning without any hope for discovering it. The arc of the V-2 rocket itself in Gravity’s Rainbow represents an utter hopelessness, an inevitability of meaningless violence. Yossarian of Catch-22 deserts at the end of the novel because he cannot cope with the meaninglessness of war. He says, “Let the bastards thrive since I can’t do a thing to stop them but embarrass them by running away.”[8] There is an acceptance of this loss, almost a reveling in it especially with Heller.
Vonnegut’s relationship to these authors is complicated. There are certainly shared elements, particularly the loss and satirizing of meaning in the face of unspeakable atrocity. However, with Vonnegut, as I shall demonstrate in this paper, there is also a gesture towards a solution—a redemption. This gesture does not come in the form of a modernist hero or glimmer of hope; rather, it comes through facing and accepting the profane for what it is, thus allowing oneself to find the sacred beyond the profane. Much of Vonnegut’s middle work supports this reading. Sacred and satire are held in tension together. The human attempt to create meaning often results in absurdity in Vonnegut’s work; however, the destruction of life is clearly a terrible thing to Vonnegut. The refusal to recognize the “constructedness” of reality and meaning is what becomes the primary target of satire. In the face of such a disturbing, absurd destruction of human life, what do we do? This is the question raised in Slaughterhouse-Five right from the beginning.
Absurdity
At the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator describes Billy’s job as the chaplain’s assistant and says that he played a small organ and was in charge of a portable altar. The narrator then provides the reader with this seemingly unnecessary information: “The altar and the organ were made by a vacuum-cleaner company in Camden, New Jersey—and said so.”[9] The effect of this is a “profaning” of the sacred with the purpose of demonstrating that objects are made sacred and are not inherently sacred. This is a constant subject of concern for many of Vonnegut’s narrators, and the narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five is no different. Behind this concern for the construction of the sacred lies an even greater concern for Vonnegut: That everything is ultimately meaningless and uncontrollable. The narrator, toward the end of the narrative, writes of the novel itself, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless play things of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.”[10] There is an important affinity here, expressed well in this passage, between Vonnegut and the work of atheistic existentialists particularly the work of Albert Camus (namely, the concept of the absurd.) However, there is also a vital difference, which will be important for the theological case that will be made later.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes the conditions that constitute the absurd: “The world is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.”[11] Camus is pointing to the immensity of the universe and not only the inability of our narratives to account for it or contain it but the desire for them to do so. When one recognizes this immensity and sees the failure of our human constructs to explain it, one experiences the absurd.
Vonnegut’s treatment of death in Slaughterhouse constitutes a response to the absurd. Camus gives other practical examples: “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them. [. . .] A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive.”[12] For Camus, both man and nature “secrete the inhuman”[13] at times. When one stands at the edge of Niagra Falls, for example, one may be taken by the immense beauty of nature but may also suddenly realize that this same nature could also utterly destroy the human body. This realization of human frailty in the face of the immense universe constitutes the absurd. Camus’ solution to experiencing the absurd is to invent meaning. The power of Sisyphus,[14] says Camus, lies in the fact that he would not succumb to death, but persevered though his situation was unbearable and maddening. In that way, he defeated the gods who sought to defeat him. In the same way, human beings must continually overcome the inhuman that becomes unveiled in the universe, especially in our own selves, by creating meaning and identity for ourselves. While the creation of meaning is positive for Camus, Slaughterhouse-Five wants to draw our attention to the problem of treating made meaning as inherent meaning. This isn’t to say that meaning creation is bad—only that it can be bad and often is. The primary mode of meaning creation satirized in Slaughterhouse certainly is, as we shall see.
Furthermore, for Camus (and others such as Jean-Paul Sartre) the creation of meaning is strictly a human affair for oneself. That is, Camus is interested in “Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal.”[15] In other words, Camus is not interested in an exterior transcendent, but an interior one—man’s own transcendent self, his goals, etc.[16] There is a clear distinction on this point between Vonnegut and the atheistic existentialists that will be helpful as we turn to the theological significance of the novel. Man’s own transcendent self, for Vonnegut, is what gets in the way of creating the sacred because Vonnegut sees that quite often the creation of the sacred according to man’s own goals is precisely what constitutes the absurd. Recall the organ manufactured by the vacuum cleaner company or consider the monograph of Howard J. Campbell in which he describes what it is to be poor in America:
It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. [. . .] Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money.[17]
Here we have quite a negative view of a transcendent ideal (that to be rich is to be wise and to be poor is a crime) that humans place upon themselves. Vonnegut’s work does point to a transcendent “part” of human beings, but questions whether or not that transcendence is given by man to himself. In contrast to the above passage, consider this passage from Breakfast of Champions where artist Rabo Karabekian describes his most famous painting:
‘I now give you my word of honor [. . .] that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal—the “I am” to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.’[18]
One could argue that this awareness is exactly what Camus is talking about: our ability to recognize the absurdity of our situation and continue on in the face of it. However, Vonnegut’s work pushes against the notion of a self-dubbed sacred humanity and instead points to sanctification coming from the o/Other.
This also pushes against the idea that our response to horror should always be to make positive meaning out of it, a point explored at great length shortly. Ultimately, what matters to Vonnegut are the human beings who are caught in the “amber of the moment”[19] not the “why” that humans want to attach tragedy. “There is no why,”[20] I would argue, is an appropriate theological response to tragedy.
Defamiliarization
Before I begin an examination of the novel, I must first define one technical literary device that Vonnegut employs throughout the novel, which is vital to an understanding of the effect that the novel produces. Defamiliarization is a term coined in literary studies by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, in a 1925 essay entitled “Art as Technique.” There, Shklovsky writes, “as perception [of an object or concept] becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. [. . .] all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic. [. . .] In this process [. . .] things are replaced by symbols.”[21] In other words, we cease to see the meaning or implication of objects—they are reduced to their utility. Shklovsky continues: “By this ‘algebraic’ method of thought [referring to the unconsciously automatic transforming objects into symbols] we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics.”[22] Defamiliarization occurs when we are brought abruptly out of this mode and forced to see the object in a new light, reevaluating its details and gaining a new, more detailed understanding of it.[23] The effect typically forces us to see how objects were at one time assigned meaning or new meanings that the object perhaps did not have before.
In Vonnegut, we see this occur surrounding moments of death, particular because of the use of the phrase “So it goes” following most deaths in the novel. Death becomes defamiliarized particularly because the phrase follows and draws our attention toward not only natural deaths but “deaths” that turn to satire (i.e. the death of champagne or water.) Death is not only reduced to neutral phenomenon, but the process of defamiliarization seeks to reduce those who die to the level of neutral object, or as the narrator of Breakfast of Champions says, “machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.”[24] This forces us to see those moments as terribly cold or callous, thus calling our attention to the ways in which we make death meaningful—which, in this case, turns out to be affirmed by the novel.
Vonnegut’s use of defamiliarization is often complex and thus difficult to understand. It is not enough to say simply that the intention behind the technique is to satirize that which is being viewed through defamiliarization. In some sense, the neutral response to death is an object of satire. Satire is often critical sometimes even polemical, and the equivocation of dead champagne to dead people is a clear example of this. However, satire also always contains a kernel of truth. That is, there is also a sense in which Vonnegut’s use of this technique reveals the way things actually are. While we may not respond to the “death of champagne” in any classifiable way, Vonnegut rightly points out that there is a certain ambivalence when it comes to the death of human beings, particularly when that death is on a horrific scale. When death is defamiliarized, our attention is drawn to the artifice of meaning; however, a response of non-meaning is also criticized. The two are held in tension together.
Theodrama. So it Goes.
Our task now is to examine the features I have described above within the context of the theodrama of creation, fall, and redemption as described by Vanhoozer. Slaughterhouse-Five presents the reader with a tangled, yet theologically appropriate vision of creation and fall. That is, the novel holds a dual vision of creation as valued yet also fallen and tragic. At the beginning of the third chapter, the narrator relates the following episode that illustrates this tension well:
His bandy legs were thrust into golden cavalry boots which he had taken from a dead Hungarian colonel on the Russian front. So it goes. [. . .] One time a recruit was watching him bone and wax those golden boots, and he held one up to the recruit and said, “If you look in there deeply enough, you’ll see Adam and Eve.”
Billy Pilgrim had not heard this anecdote. But, lying on the black ice there, Billy stared into the patina of the corporal’s boots, saw Adam and Eve in the golden depths. They were naked. They were so innocent, so vulnerable, so eager to behave decently. Billy Pilgrim loved them.
Next to the golden boots were a pair of feet which were swaddled in rags. They were crisscroseed by canvas straps, were shod with hinged wooden clogs. Billy looked up at the face that went with the clogs. It was the face of a blond angel, of a fifteen-year-old boy.
The boy was as beautiful as Eve.[25]
The interplay of the perfect boots, where the boots came from, the innocence of Adam and Eve become quickly smashed together in the image of the teenage boy, feet wrapped in rags stuffed into wooden clogs, yet beautiful. Beautiful and broken at the same time. His location further compounds this. He is a teenage boy at war, most likely destined to die. His beauty becomes conflated with Ronald Weary’s “cruel trench knife” as the thieving corporal calls it “a pretty thing.”[26] The clear lines between innocence and violence that were being drawn at first are broken down so that the beautiful is no longer pure—it “secretes the inhuman.”[27]
There are many more examples throughout the novel where beauty and horror, humanity and inhumanity, sacred and profane become blurred. Theologically, this seems to be an accurate depiction of our condition as fallen human beings. In other words, our ability to produce or experience the beautiful or the sacred is always going to be mediated by our brokenness. We do not have the ability create or experience these things without the aid of God nor do we have the ability to experience or create them the way that God would without the transformative power of redemption. The picture that the episode above paints is one of broken beauty. Innocence that is slightly off-center. It is beauty that is in need of redemption.
However, our brokenness and, more specifically, the results of our brokenness cannot always be described theologically. That is, although brokenness and tragedy point to the necessity of redemption in the theodrama, the causes of and God’s action in specific moments of tragedy and brokenness do not need to be explained in terms of God’s theodrama apart from the more general sense of the Fall of creation—which brings us to the crux of the theological force of Slaughterhouse-Five. To do so is to create a naïve theology of culture in which all tragedy is ultimately positive and all victims are ultimately made objects of God’s plan rather than subjects acting in it.
This point will require further explanation. One of the most central moments in the novel occurs when Billy Pilgrim is struck with an epiphany as his wife is asking him about the war: “A crazy thought now occurred to Billy. The truth of it startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim—and for me, too. [. . .] “EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT.”[28] Why should this be “true” to Billy Pilgrim? Looking broadly over the entire novel, it should not be. The epitaph is true only for a dead Tralfamadorian—the extra-terrestrials who kidnap Billy Pilgrim to put him on display in their zoo. When Billy asks his zookeeper how it is their planet can always have peaceful days, the alien responds:
“Today we do. On other days we have wars as horrible as any you’ve ever seen or read about. There isn’t anything we can do about them, so we simply don’t look at them. We ignore them. We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments [. . .] That’s one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”[29]
The only response Billy can muster is “Um,” and it is completely appropriate. Although this Tralfamadorian worldview is what ultimately spawns Billy’s epiphany, this is not and can never be Billy’s experience. Like the Tralfamadorians, Billy is “unstuck” in time, traveling sporadically from one moment in his life to the next. However, unlike his alien hosts, he has no control over where he will go or what he will see. Instead, he is always reliving the most beautiful, horrific, and mediocre moments of his life. Thus, the thought that everything is beautiful and nothing hurt could not be an accurate description of Billy’s life. He has to instead take every moment as it comes again and again—as we all do.
The novel ultimately critiques this worldview through the defamiliarization and satirizing of a neutral response to death through the phrase “So it goes.” Like the epitaph, this phrase is also connected to the Tralfamadorian worldview. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator relates a letter to the local newspaper that Billy had written describing his inter-galactic friends and in particular, their views of time and death: “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.’ ”[30] We can see how this worldview, which Billy Pilgrim attempts to adopt, ends up becoming a critique of itself through the devices of defamiliarization and satire.
Theologically speaking, this is a worldview that would mold all aspects of culture to be a part of “God’s will.” Under this view, the statement “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt” entails, theologically, that God be present in all events, both beautiful and tragic, for the ultimate purpose of good. In other words, even the most horrific tragedies, the bombing of Dresden to put this in terms of the novel, are explainable ultimately in terms of God’s greater good. Such a view, however, is inconsistent with Vanhoozer’s notion of theodrama because it does not allow for a robust understanding of fall and redemption. If even the “most fallen” of human endeavors and events ultimately serve God’s good purposes,[31] then the act of redemption, though still present and necessary, is severely twisted since it suggests that God will use human fallenness in his act of redemption rather than ultimately transforming that fallenness.
We can also put this in conversation with the desire for the good life. The novel critiques this theological view in relation to the good life in a number of different ways. First, if this sort of theology of culture is adhered to as a means of achieving the good life, then it will have great difficulty engaging with and discerning between institutions as means to achieving the good life. A theology that sees everything as beautiful can hardly see anything as ultimately bad. Thus, when Smith discusses the ways in which particular institutions such as consumerism, patriotism, and education come to shape our identities, one could ultimately argue from the “Everything is Beautiful” position, that these institutions cannot negatively form our identities because God will ultimately use them for good. Returning to Howard Campbell’s monograph, we can see how works and ends up creating a narrative of oppression against the poor:
“Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. The inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.”[32]
This belief among both the wealthy and the poor is what serves to create the immense oppression that Campbell describes in his monograph—and seeing things this way has formed a certain kind of person. Comparing the Tralfamadorian way of seeing things to the way that Smith talks about formative practices, we can examine the ways in which such a theology would shape our desires and our identity negatively in relation to Christ-like Christian practice.
The desire that drives the Tralfamadorians is the good life achieved by only existing in the good. The joke of this part of Vonnegut’s novel is that the Tralfamadorian social imaginary sounds so good—who wouldn’t want to live that way? Much like the promises of consumerism, which Smith describes, such an imaginary could never be realized, and Vonnegut makes it very easy for us to see that since the Tralfamadorians are nothing like us—they are time traveling aliens. That Billy Pilgrim believes he can adopt their social imaginary is a part of his tragic nature. The novel then calls us to question an imaginary among human beings that would attempt to ignore the bad and only see the good—or see the bad as good or neutral. It allows us to see how destructive that actually is. Vanhoozer summarizes this well when he writes that “theology and understanding alike are short-circuited if we are not able to discern (1) how our faith is affected by the world we live in and (2) how we are to embody our faith in shapes of everyday life.”[33] We are not living in the world if all tragedy is beautiful—if all bad can be explained in terms of God’s greater good. Rather, the brokenness of the world must be engaged on its own terms, apart from God’s action in order to arrive at the most robust understanding of God’s transformative redemption. We pass through the profane to arrive at the sacred.
Conclusion: Cross-Pressure in the Immanent Frame
I’ve suggested that the novel critiques a vision of the world that would see only the most beautiful moments, ignoring or attempting to destroy those that are not. Much of Vonnegut’s work struggles with this conflict between wanting to acknowledge the beautiful and not allowing the beautiful to dominate our vision. Another way of articulating the situation that Billy Pilgrim finds himself in over-against that of the Tralfamadorians is found in Charles Taylor’s notion of the immanent frame. For Taylor the secular distinction between the transcendent and the material is ultimately an immanent frame: “the different structures we live in: scientific, social, technological, and so on, constitute such a frame in that they are part of a ‘natural,’ or ‘this-worldly’ order which can be understood in its own terms, without reference to the ‘supernatural’ or ‘transcendent.’ ”[34] Billy’s desire to see everything as beautiful is in, many ways, an appeal to the transcendent. The Tralfamadorians have the ability to “transcend” time in that they can choose “when” they look at—they defy the metaphysics of presence, able to be present in any moment. Billy’s condition is misleading both for him and the reader in that he is still immanent despite his ability to travel through time. It really is no ability at all since he has no control over it, as discussed above. Thus, the tragedy that Billy must continually relive is simply a part of the structures he lives in. He cannot escape, and his attempt to ignore those moments is reflected in the objects of the more overt critiques the novel makes against American culture in general.
Taylor’s notion of cross-pressure in relation to how both believers and non-believers exist in the immanent frame together is also helpful in further understanding the dilemma that Slaughterhouse presents. Taylor writes that “those who want to opt for the ordered, impersonal universe, whether in its scientistic-materialist form, or in a more spiritualized variant, feel the imminent loss of a world of beauty, meaning, warmth, as well as of the perspective of self transformation beyond the everyday” and continues, arguing that on the opposite end are those “haunted by a sense that the universe might after all be as meaningless as the most reductive materialism describes. They feel that their vision has to struggle against this flat and empty world; they fear that their strong desire for God, or for eternity, might after all be the self-induced illusion that materialists claim it to be.”[35] Vonnegut situates his characters right in the middle of this tension.
Billy himself is flat, without an identity,[36] and the novel ends with a question, “Poo-tee-weet?” which signals the absurdity of attempting to draw meaning from something as horrific as the bombing of Dresden. The theologically minded reader feels the burden of the tension. Such a reader senses that Billy Pilgrim is in the first position, but Billy has already lost the world of beauty despite his desire to be Tralfamadorian. Furthermore, such a reader will identify with the second position in the face of the atrocity that the bombing of Dresden presents particularly when the response of both characters and narrator is one of indifference. If, however, we read those moments of indifference as satirizing such a response to atrocity, then the novel points us to a theological position where our response to tragedy is to understand it on its own terms and situate ourselves in the hope of God’s redemption.
by Joel Harrison
Bibliography
Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus, Trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1955, 1991).
Heller, Joseph, Catch-22 (New York: Random House, 1961).
Smith, James K.A., Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2009)
Tally, Robert T. “Kurt Vonnegut’s Last Laugh,” Continuum Literary Studies http://continuumliterarystudies.typepad.com/continuum-literary-studie/2012/03/kurt- vonneguts-last-laugh-guest-post-by-robert-t-tally-jr.html> 15 March 2012.
Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2007).
Vanhoozer, Kevin J., Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2007).
Vonnegut, Kurt, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Random House, 1973).
—, Slaughterhouse-Five ((New York: Random House, 1969).
[1]. Robert T. Tally, “Kurt Vonnegut’s Last Laugh,” Continuum Literary Studies http://continuumliterarystudies.typepad.com/continuum-literary-studie/2012/03/kurt-vonneguts-last-laugh-guest-post-by-robert-t-tally-jr.html> 15 March 2012.
[2]. Ibid.
[3]. The fashion among Vonnegut critics has often been to see him as one of his own tragi-comic characters, either Pilgrim or Kilgore Trout or another, who are always depicted in a “me versus the world” sort of way.
[4]. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2007) 45.
[5]. James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic 2009) 24.
[6]. Vanhoozer, Everyday Theology, 41.
[7]. A term to be defined and discussed at length later.
[8]. Heller, Joseph, Catch-22 (New York: Random House, 1961) 462.
[9]. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Random House, 1969) 31.
[10]. Ibid., 164.
[11]. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1955, 1991) p. 21
[12]. Ibid., 14-5.
[13]. Ibid,. 14.
[14]. In this myth, King Sisyphus is punished for his trickery against the gods by being made to roll an immense boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again.
[15]. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 60.
[16]. See Jean-Paul Sartre Existentialism is a Humanism.
[17]. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 129.
[18]. Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Random House, 1973) 226.
[19]. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 77.
[20]. Ibid.
[21]. V. Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique,’ J. Rivkin and M. Ryan (ed), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Blackwell Publishing: Massachusetts, 1998) p. 15
[22]. Ibid.
[23]. Jamie Smith uses this technique when describing the mall at the beginning of Desiring the Kingdom, 19-22.
[24]. Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions, 225.
[25]. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 53.
[26]. Ibid., 54.
[27]. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 14.
[28]. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 121-2.
[29]. Ibid., 117.
[30]. Ibid., 27.
[31]. This is, of course, also ignoring any complex discussions of theodicy.
[32]. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 129.
[33]. Vanhoozer, Everyday Theology, 16.
[34]. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2007) 594.
[35]. Taylor, A Secular Age, 592-3.
[36]. This is because identity is formed through the achievement of goals over time. Billy is unable to do this given his “unstuckness.”
Christianity has an odd sort of experienced atheism built into it, both in the Christ’s moment of god-forsakenness on the cross as well as the day that God was dead. In fact, to fend of your suspicion that there may be no God is not only dishonest with yourself- it also disconnects you from the pivotal moment of the Christian narrative. This Sunday, every pastor in the world will preach about Resurrection, and every person in every church (every pastor included) will ask the same questions: is any of this true? And what would it matter if it were not?
Holy Saturday is the day between Good Friday and Easter. In the Christian tradition, Holy Saturday commemorates the day that God was dead. This parable asks us to consider what would or wouldn’t change if Holy Saturday (or Nietzsche’s parable of the Mad Man in The Gay Science) were truly the case. Scholars have noted that the earliest copies of the first Gospel account, Mark, originally ended without a resurrection account. This parable asks what it would be like if original Mark was right. Would a certain way of living be worth it if there was no transcendental reward?
This is a parable written by Peter Rollins in his book The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales. It is a short and challenging book that I highly recommend purchasing.
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LATE THAT EVENING A GROUP OF UNKNOWN DISCIPLES PACKED THEIR FEW BELONGINGS AND LEFT FOR A DISTANT SHORE, for they could not bear to stay another moment in the place where their Messiah had just been crucified. Weighed down with sorrow, they left that place, never to return. Instead they traveled a great distance in search of a land that they could call home. After months of difficult travel, they finally happened upon an isolated area that was ideal for setting up a new community. Here they found fertile ground, clean water, and a nearby forest from which to harvest material needed to build shelter. So they settled there, founding a community far from Jerusalem, a community where they vowed to keep the memory of Christ alive and live in simplicity, love, and forgiveness, just as he had taught them.
The members of this community lived in great solitude for over a hundred years, spending their days reflecting on the life of Jesus and attempting to remain faithful to his ways. And they did all this despite
overwhelming sorrow in their heart.
But their isolation was eventually broken when, early one morning, a small band of missionaries reached the settlement. These missionaries were amazed at the community they found. What was most startling to them was that these people had no knowledge of the resurrection and the ascension of Christ, for they had left Jerusalem before his return from the dead on the third day. Without hesitation, the missionaries gathered together all the community members and recounted what had occurred after the imprisonment and bloody crucifixion of their Lord.
That evening there was a great festival in the camp as people celebrated the news of the missionaries. Yet, as the night progressed, one of the missionaries noticed that the leader of the community was absent. This bothered the young man, so he set out to look for this respected elder. Eventually he found the community’s leader crouched low in a small hut on the fringe of the village, praying and weeping. “Why are you in such sorrow?” asked the missionary in amazement. “Today is a time for great celebration.”
“It may indeed be a day for great celebration, but this is also a day of sorrow,” replied the elder, who remained crouched on the floor. “Since the founding of this community we have followed the ways taught to us by Christ. We pursued his ways faithfully even though it cost us dearly, and we remained resolute despite the belief that death had defeated and would one day defeat us also.”
The elder slowly got to his feet and looked the missionary compassionately in the eyes.
“Each day we have forsaken our very lives for him because we judged him wholly worthy of the sacrifice, wholly worthy of our being. But now, following your news, I am concerned that my children and my children’s children may follow him, not because of his radical life and supreme sacrifice, but selfishly, because his sacrifice will ensure their personal salvation and eternal life.”
With this the elder turned and left the hut, making his way to the celebrations that could be heard dimly in the distance, leaving the missionary.
This essay originally appeared in Fuller’s campus magazine, The SEMI. What follows here is a revised version of the original essay, which can be read on The SEMI’s website.
* * *
I have to begin by overstating the humility with which I’ve tried to write about the future of seminary. Like writing about the future of anything, we have to first say, “We don’t really know what is going to happen.” What I write about here is also deeply rooted in my personal experience of seminary. Of course, those who know me well know that I don’t believe in the possibility of an objective point of view, but I find it necessary to acknowledge that my observations come from what I and others I know have seen.
The future of seminary is vastly complicated because it is the only institution I know of that is affixed and must answer to a particular culture [Christianity] but also the larger culture in which the particular is embedded [both Academia and American/Western culture.] We have a double consideration, two standards, sometimes competing, held in tension together. That tension is worth exploring because it is within it that I believe seminary must forge ahead into the future.
When I think about the first consideration, our particular Christian culture, here’s what scares me, and many others I’m sure, about viewing the future of seminary pessimistically:
The perception of many today seems to be that Christianity, Western and American in particular, has regularly failed over the last century to address the serious questions and most pressing problems held by our larger culture in any relevant way mostly because of the rise of fundamentalism. Think about the focus of the media on very particular aspects of the Christian public persona. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, the false dichotomy painted by mainstream cable news networks [CNN, Fox News] all point to a severe mis-education [there is certainly no lack of bad education out there] of both Christians and non-Christians alike.
Seminary seems vital because, given this climate, we need educated pastors to speak the healing power of the Gospel into those situations because I believe that the Gospel narrative provides us with the tools to overcome empire, violence, and empty religion. I know Fuller offers that sort of education. I’ve seen it completely overwhelm fellow students to the point of breaking down as in some sort of conversion experience or manifest itself in a standing ovation for a professor who has masterfully and compassionately demolished pervasive and damaging readings of Scripture or understandings of doctrine. Fuller grads [and current students] are out in the world working for the sort of difference that I’m taking about, fighting against the public perception that Christianity is a religion of fundamentalism, whether directly or indirectly.
Yet, is seminary necessarily the location of that sort of learning? I don’t know that it is. I think it is a mistake to assume that people can’t learn how to properly read Scripture and be transformed by it and thus lead other people to the same transformation without a seminary education. Not just a mistake—it’s wrong on every level. It ignores history, and like many others have with the same hubris, such a belief claims the end of history. This is as good as it will ever get. It’s hegemonic. It assumes that millions of pastors around the world who are legitimately doing God’s work are under-qualified and what—perhaps not really doing God’s work? Is Fuller or any seminary in the world prepared to say that? Maybe some are, but I know Fuller isn’t. The question isn’t whether or not education itself is important. It is vital. I just see seminary as one option, born out of a particular culture and not as the pinnacle of all theological learning. Thus, any reflection on the future of seminary must first recognize that we are not the height of understanding when it comes to theology. There is no Babel here.
We also have to recognize that believing a seminary education is necessary for the practice of ministry, as most mainline and evangelical denominations do, also assumes that seminary adequately prepares students for pastoral ministry in the first place. It’s no secret that Fuller has struggled to make Ministry Division courses relevant to MDiv students. Those course requirements are one of the primary reasons many people switch from the MDiv to the MAT every year. Who wants to pay $10,000 or more in tuition and add another 18 months of time for courses that are teaching you something you are learning already in practice at your church? Maybe those courses simply can’t teach certain things that practice or even other programs can give students, especially for students who are planning to enter a specialized ministry area.
A friend of mine dropped out of Fuller this quarter. The news was surprising to me at first. He had already put over a year into his MDiv, so I wondered, Why now? When I asked him what he was going to do instead, he told me he was applying to MSW [Master of Social Work] programs. “So you want to be a case manager, work for the government?” I asked him.
“Oh, no way,” he replied. He had recently been brought on as the Pastor for Recovery Ministry at his church. “I just realized that an MDiv wasn’t going to give me the training that an MSW would for what I’m doing. I really wanted to believe that I could get that at Fuller. But I won’t.”
His decision is a really important picture of the future of ministry not only because he is proving one does not need an MDiv to do ministry, that other graduate programs may actually prove to be more useful, but also because it alludes to the reality that the days of the theology or Bible major who goes to seminary and becomes a pastor are dwindling. Look at the wide, wide, range of educational backgrounds students at Fuller come with. I know more fellow English majors than I do Theology, Bible, or Christian Studies majors. Part of that is Fuller seems to attract many students who are looking to expand their horizons beyond their particular perspective. Many of us are looking for an intellectual challenge, a forging of our faith rather than a confirmation of things we already think we know.
Still, it may only be a matter of time before most people who feel called explicitly to ministry simply go directly into church leadership, or non-profit work, or missions, bypassing seminary all together, allowing the church itself [organization or mission field] to be the training ground. More and more church plants seem to value real world experience rather than seminary experience in their pastors. [Note that I’m not talking about those churches that take an anti-intellectual stance towards theological and biblical study.] More and more church goers want to know that the person who is helping them through their struggles with the real world also lives in the real world, is affected by the real world, exists outside of the circles of Christianity—which can be vast and impenetrable to some people. I don’t think we lose anything if one day we end up going to a model that resembles this—as long as honest, critical education as opposed to indoctrination exists.
This is where seminary can maintain its relevance. All of what I’ve said so far may seem like I’ve been pointing to the growing obscurity of seminary. However, there are developments occurring outside the seminary in that second sphere, secular academia, which say otherwise and may help us reimagine the purpose of seminary—not as a location of practice but as a space to explore the significance of religion and theology in both academic and public life. Stanley Fish, in his New York Times blog, writes from time to time about the growing pessimism surrounding the humanities and the arts at colleges and universities around the country. The study of religion possesses the good fortune of being situated sort of on the border of the humanities and the social sciences. Religion is a social, human phenomenon and thus is an object of study of anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists, and so on—people who can secure major federal funding for their research projects. However, in recent years, it has also gained renewed interest among humanities disciplines, particularly literature, philosophy, and film studies.
Fish usually alludes to this intersection, and in this case from his December 26th post in which he is surveying the changing landscape of the latest MLA [Modern Language Association] Conference presentation catalog, Fish is referring to literary studies:
Religion is the location of, and for many the source of, renewal, aspiration, redemption and hope. The very fact that so many papers explore the intersection of literature and religion may be evidence that literary studies are attached to a value that will sustain them even in these hard times.
The hard times he is referring to are the questions of relevance that have been circling the humanities for the last decade like vultures. People make a number of arguments in support of the humanities: They produce more well-rounded citizens and workers, they enhance our culture. They give life a certain value that cold, fact-laden Science, simply cannot produce. But no one really believes those any more. English professors can’t pull in federal research dollars like physics professors can, and that really is the bottom line for university administrators, as Fish wrote in an October 2010 post regarding SUNY Albany President George Philip cutting the French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theatre departments from the university. What humanities discipline is safe? Maybe none. But perhaps the question of “relevance” occurs because we are too close, too caught up in Enlightenment thinking that has refused to die in culture—that scientific and science-related disciplines [finance, for example] are the only “practical” degrees offered. Perhaps it is also blindly tied to the inescapability of capitalism. You’re getting a science degree so you can get a job that pays well, or because it’s easy to find a job. You’re getting a degree in art or music because you can teach or you hope to be paid for your performance. We tend to measure seminary the same way: With the rising cost of tuition, is an MDiv really worth the money? How can a new pastor expect to be paid enough to begin paying off the debt he or she racked up in seminary? And if we’re talking about making a seminary education strictly academic, then doesn’t that make the problem worse?
Fish makes the case that these sorts of “outside” considerations—opinions about certain disciplines held mostly by the man-in-the-street—are not asking the right questions when it comes to their relevance. Instead of asking whether or not an academic discipline like theology or religion can compete practically in the free market with a degree in chemistry, we should be asking whether or not theology and religion are disciplines that the chemist would find useful, that would inform his work in a way beyond the sphere of personal spirituality. The seminary could be a place that more fully explores the intersection of religion and other disciplines. We already do that at Fuller. We’ve had courses on biomedical ethics, literature and theology, film and theology, theological anthropology. We have professors (Nancey Murphy, Robert Johnston, and Bill Dyrness all come immediately to mind) who are already able to explore the intersections of disciplines from the arts to the sciences with religion. Fuller offers two, sometimes three courses a term that could be deemed interdisciplinary. Imagine five or six more training students to flesh out the ways in which religion informs and is informed by other disciplines.
Of course, this is tricky, because theology can never be a purely second order discipline, which is what I’m describing above. Fish doesn’t take his idea of disciplines informing one another as far as theology proper. He uses examples like French or classics in conjunction with architecture or engineering. And he’s taking about universities with multiple colleges and departments. Theology is a special discipline and seminary a special case. We cannot forget about that first sphere. Here’s that tension coming back again.
Before coming to Fuller in 2009, I was living in Fort Collins, earning an MA in English at the University of Northern Colorado, working on a career as a composition instructor, and becoming increasingly fascinated with how post-structural thought related to the future of the Church. My closest friend while living out there, the associate pastor of the church I was attending, said this to me: “The study of theology has to come back to Earth somehow. Because the Bible isn’t something we just read and dissect; it’s something we live. The last thing the world needs is more scholars in ivory towers—especially scholars of Christianity.”
The most dangerous thing about suggesting that the seminary evolve into a space for the exploration of theology and religion’s intersection with and reciprocal impact upon other disciplines is that seminary could also very easily become a place that furthers a separation between academically elite Christians and those who are self-taught, devout followers of Christ. No location of theological education can become a purely academic institution. If taken to the extreme, what I’ve suggested would be terribly damaging because Christianity is first and foremost a lived faith, theology a lived discipline. This is where our education differs the greatest from other graduate programs. To illustrate this difference with an analogy, note how Fish describes the line between literary studies and literature appreciation:
The “Hamlet” you enjoy as a reader or a playgoer is one thing; the “Hamlet” laid out and etherized upon an academic’s table is another. The first needs no defense. [. . .] There is no reason that non-academics should understand or appreciate the academic analysis of the aesthetic productions they love with no academic help at all. The mistake is to think that the line of justification should go from the pleasure many derive from plays, poems, novels, films, etc., to a persuasive account of how academic work enhances or even produces that pleasure. It may or may not, but if it does, that’s an accidental benefit.
Replace “Hamlet” with “Jesus” or “Paul.” Replace “aesthetic productions” and “plays, poems, novels, films, etc.” with “biblical texts.” Replace “pleasure” with “understanding” [though pleasure can certainly be an effect of the Bible.] Suddenly, I’m not that comfortable with a defense like this for the study of Christianity. Should the Jesus or Paul I understand as a graduate student and aspiring scholar be different than the Jesus or Paul that the people in the congregation of my church, the students of my youth group, or even my own family understand? If so, then what’s the point of studying and making arguments about scripture? Fish can argue that such a study of literature or French philosophy or whatever can inform other disciplines. I’ve made the case that the study of religion can as well—but not without working toward a shared understanding among all believers. Christianity has absolutely no meaning apart from the believers who live it everyday. There is no such thing as theological analysis apart living it, no academic table apart from the pleasure of the text.
That is the crux, the greatest point of tension when considering the future of seminary: With the increasing irrelevance of practical training for ministry, how do we make the academic study of theology, Christianity, and religion in general practical and relevant for all believers? How do we return theology to Earth?
I don’t think anyone could ever answer that question definitively, but we should allow it to shape our imaginations as we consider the future of the seminary.
by Joel Harrison
