Raschke Critical Theology

Introducing an Agenda for an Age of Global Crisis
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9996-8
Verlag: IVP Academic
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 175 Seiten

What is the future of theology in the midst of rapid geopolitical and economic change?Carl A. Raschke contends that two options from the last century-crisis theology and critical theory-do not provide the resources needed to address the current global crisis. Both of these perspectives remained distant from the messiness and unpredictability of life. Crisis theology spoke of the wholly other God, while critical theory spoke of universal reason. These ideas aren't tenable after postmodernism and the return of religion, which both call for a dialogical approach to God and the world. Rashke's new critical theology takes as its starting point the biblical claim that the Word became flesh-a flesh that includes the cultural, political and religious phenomena that shape contemporary existence.Drawing on recent reformulations of critical theory by Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou and post-secularists such as Jürgen Habermas, Raschke introduces an agenda for theological thinking accessible to readers unfamiliar with this literature. In addition, the book explores the relationship between a new critical theology and current forms of political theology. Written with the passion of a manifesto, Critical Theology presents the critical and theological resources for thinking responsibly about the present global situation.

Carl A. Raschke (PhD, Harvard University) is professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, specializing in continental philosophy, the philosophy of religion and the theory of religion. He is an internationally known writer and academic who has authored numerous books and hundreds of articles on topics ranging from postmodernism to popular religion and culture to technology and society. Raschke is the author or coauthor of books such as The Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event, GloboChrist, The Next Reformation, Faith and Reason: Three Views, Painted Black, The Interruption of Eternity, The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University, Fire and Roses: Postmodernity and the Thought of the Body and The Engendering God. He is co-founder and senior editor of The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory and he is a regular blogger and current affairs editor with Political Theology Today.A well-known expert on religion and higher education, Raschke has been interviewed at least nine hundred times over two decades. During the late 1980s and early 1990s he advised the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC, on matters involving core curriculum, serving for several years as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Core Curriculum. He has also served on the board of directors and various national committees of the American Academy of Religion. Raschke is a permanent adjunct faculty member at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology as well as the Global Center for Advanced Studies, and has been a visiting scholar and lecturer at the University of Vienna. He is co-proprietor of Wingsoar, a lecturing, writing and seminar company, and he is co-founder of the Global Art Ideas Nexus. He and his wife Sunny live in Denver, Colorado.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Raschke, Carl A.

Leseproben

2

The Need for a New Critical Theology

Man is not imprisoned by habit. . . . Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis—once that crisis can be recognized and understood.

Norman Cousins

Critical Response in an Age of Crisis

Whether it is actually the best of times or the worst of times or somewhere in between, a seemingly irresistible parlor game for pundits, does not count as much as the general perception that a deep and far-reaching crisis is unfolding. Now that the euphoria of the 1990s over the end of the Cold War and the rosy prospects for democracy and the expansion of market economies have shriveled into yellow, cracked scraps of parchment, the new pessimism provides immense opportunity for the making of Norman Cousin’s “great changes.” Crisis thinking has always been the flair of those who wind up making a significant difference in the world. Recognizing that there is a crisis itself is the task of competent thinkers. Understanding the origins, complexity and interworkings of the crisis requires even further talent and skill. Those thinkers, or religious geniuses, who arise from time to time and whom we name “prophets” demonstrate the capacity for both such discernment and analysis. Even more broadly speaking, we call this kind of probing insightfulness “critical thinking” or “critical intelligence.”

The terms crisis and critical, of course, derive from the Greek krino, meaning “judgment.” A critical mindset is one with an inherent ability to discern and comprehend things that the ordinary person would overlook, ignore or refuse to accept as contrary to “common sense.” Critical thought, inevitably, is met with strong resistance, particularly among those who share much of the same world picture and system of assumptions. That regrettable truth lies behind Jesus’ famous saying that a “a prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home” (Mk 6:4 NIV). It is in the very nature of a crisis that most people do not see things or “connect the dots” in the same manner as the prophet, or critical thinker. Sudden or anomalous events are construed in a more conventional manner, thus impairing the effectiveness of the leader, or decision maker, who might be able to act with deliberation and determination, in doing the right thing, and having any kind of calculable impact on the situation. A renowned historical illustration is the reaction of the French monarch Louis XVI to the news that a mob had ransacked the state prison in Paris known as the Bastille in 1789. “It is a revolt?” Louis inquired rather insouciantly, knowing that uprisings among the population were not at all uncommon and usually ended in brutal suppression by royal agents. “Nay, sire,” came the reply. “It is a revolution!”1 Because Louis XVI neither discerned that a revolution was brewing, nor had any idea of how to stop it once it was in full sway, he literally lost his head.

Celebrated twentieth-century political theorist Hannah Arendt, student and lover of the even more famous philosopher Martin Heidegger, exhibited such “critical” insight. An award-winning movie about her life, produced in 2012 by German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, focuses on how the Jewish philosopher, who was already quite famous for her work on the Nazi phenomenon The Origins of Totalitarianism, laid bare for the first time, in a series of onsite reports on the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the personality and motivations of one of the masterminds of the Holocaust, or what the Nazi hierarchy dubbed the “Final Solution.” After carefully observing Eichmann’s testimony, she drew the highly unpopular conclusion that he was not some larger-than-life evil genius, but a mindless bureaucrat who appeared to be simply doing his job and executing orders from above, like any middle manager, in authorizing mass exterminations of Jews and others the Nazis marked for genocide. In her literary dissection of his modus operandi in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt minted the phrase, which has become almost a cliché over the years, the banality of evil, which referred to the glib ease with which Eichmann could rationalize away, and deny responsibility for, his monstrous crimes against humanity.

When the book appeared in 1963, many of Arendt’s former admirers were incensed over what they considered her all-too-detached attitude regarding Eichmann’s motives, and they publicly denounced her. Even many of her faculty colleagues at the New School for Social Research in New York wanted her relieved of her teaching duties. But Arendt stuck by her convictions and, as dramatized in the movie, gave a powerful and moving defense—what the Greeks and early Christians termed an apologia—for why she had made the case about Eichmann in the way she did. The seed of “radical evil” in Eichmann and his actions, according to Arendt, was due neither to some demonic pathology nor to a willful perversity, but to Eichmann’s cluelessness about, and open refusal of, the demand to think. Arendt’s preoccupation with the power and importance of thinking came directly from Heidegger, who in his last series of university lectures in 1951 to students at the University of Freiburg delivered the memorable line, “Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” A few lines later Heidegger clarifies this mantra-like statement throughout the lectures with the following observation: “This [assertion] now means: We have still not come face-to-face, have not yet come under the sway of what intrinsically desires to be thought about in an essential sense.”2

Arendt, the Jew, of course took the challenge of thinking in a wholly different direction than Heidegger, the German who flirted briefly with Nazism. For Heidegger, the unthought of thought is the meaning of Being itself, the most fundamental question of philosophy. For Arendt, the challenge comes down to devising the courage for a most radical kind of thinking and the risky decisions accompanying it, especially when confronted with fateful political choices, or the moral dilemmas of life and death. Thinking, therefore, is never abstract, but occurs in the exigency of the lived moment. As Arendt herself stressed, thought always situates itself within the perplexities of our experience. And these perplexities can sometimes be overwhelming, where if we make the wrong call (as in the parable of the “The Lady, or the Tiger?,” in which a man who is asked to select a door to open behind which may be lurking either a beautiful woman to coddle him or a ferocious beast to devour him), the consequences may be devastating. Real thinking, therefore, as Bethania Assy notes in her analysis of Arendt’s philosophy, inheres in what Immanuel Kant designated the “faculty of judgment,” not a logical judgment, where we reason from the general to the particular and back to the general, but from the crisis to a choice of principles by which we make the proper response and back to a deeper understanding of the crisis itself.

As Arendt herself insisted with a panache that was captured in the concluding dramatic scene of the movie, in which she lays out her defense for what she wrote about Eichmann,

If thinking . . . actualizes the difference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby results in conscience as its by-product, then judging, the by-product of the liberating effect of thinking, realizes thinking . . . in the world of appearances, where I am never alone and always too busy to be able to think. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes.3

As already noted, such “judging” is what is meant by the root word for crisis and critical. Critical thought depends on a deep discernment that leads to unprecedented reflection and unparalleled decisions. It is the key, henceforth, to averting “catastrophes.” Eichmann committed unspeakable atrocities and contributed to what remains today the greatest modern human catastrophe, so far as Arendt was concerned, because he was capable only of conventional reasoning. He knew from his German public-school education that one was supposed to do a good job, obey one’s superiors and provide for one’s family. His argument at the trial was that he was doing everything he was expected to do under the circumstances (the so-called Nuremberg defense) and it was not his business, or even his right, to ask questions about the implications of conducting his duties, let alone act on conscience to resist it.

For all the scorn heaped on Arendt for contending that this defense made sense, today in hindsight—after all, the horrors of the Holocaust were much fresher and more shocking in the minds of her contemporaries a half century ago—we have to take it seriously. For is not rampant “political...