theology, hermeneutics, and shattering of foundations - carl raschke
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Theology, Hermenutica, and theShattering of Foundations
By Carl Raschke
A man who marries the spirit of his
age soon finds himself a widower.
DEAN INGE
ACCORDING TO an ancient Chinese tale, a man once heard a rumorthat somewhere in the high and remote mountains lived a sage who had dis
covered the secret of immortality. The man sold all his possessions, severed
all ties, and went in quest of the sage. After years of searching, he finally
was directed to the home of the famed wise man. But upon arrival he was
informed that the sage was dead.
The story can be construed as a parable concerning the fate of theology
in the twentieth century. Just when theology through the tutelage of such
figures as Bultmann, Tillich, Harvey Cox, Wolfhardt Pannenberg, and Da
vid Tracy has edged away from Scripture and doctrine and toward some
thing known as "secular experience" as the rallying point for its delibera
tions it finds that such a foundation is cracking in its very depths. The "sci
entific" stance which allegedly undergirds and legitimates the world view
of secular humanity and which is supposed to undrape the universe as a
system of calculable regularities is now turned inside out not by mystics or
spirit-seers, but by scientists themselves. Thus Gary Zukav in his book
The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, which digests many of the novel, bizarre, and
seemingly "nonsensical" hypotheses of the "new physics" can refer in goodconscience to "the end of science."1 Similarly, a number of the liberal so
cial and political precepts fashionable over the past twenty years and as
sociated with the "secular" standpoint have fallen under suspicion of late.
In his latest work The Heretical Imperative the sociologist Peter Berger de
cries "any renewed effort to make Christianity palatable to what is deemed
fo be the secular consciousness of modern man." The attempt is fruitless,
Berger insists, because "this modern secularity is in crisis today."2
1. See Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (New
York: William Morrow, 1979).2. Peter Berger,The Heretical Imperative (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980), p.166.
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402 Encounter
In an ironic twist, however, the crisis of secularity and the perplexities
of theology have been wrought by a single, underlying shift that is occasion
ing upheavals throughout the different strata of modern thought. The shift
can be compared to a sudden slippage in the continental plates, as seems to
be happening right now on the West coast, generating widespread and in
tense seismic activity, not to mention unpredictable volcanic eruptions like
that of Mount St. Helens. What we are witnessing is the final shattering of
the foundations of modern consciousness. But these foundations will not
soon be replaced by new ones with a comparable stability. For the infirm
ity of modernity stems from its very preoccupation with securing founda
tions for reflection and action in the first place. It is this persistent "fundamentalism" which, according to Fritjof Capra, has made the scientific estab
lishment as balky toward many of the latest breakthroughs in theoretical
physics as the Roman Catholic inquisitors were when summoned to peer
through Galileo's telescope.3 Such a fundamentalism has also roped off
ready access to what Berger dubs "the fullness of human religious possi
bilities," which has been neglected most egregiously by theologians them
selves.
The origin of such fundamentalism is what I would call our long-stand
ing "Roman" habit of mind. According to the late political philosopher
and social historian Hannah Arendt, Roman civilization was molded on the
idea of the "founding" of urbs aeterna (the "eternal city"). Upon this
foundation rested the "tradition," its evolution and interpretation. The
foundation and its elaboration served as the larger structure of "authority"
against which new developments and notions could be validated. The Ro
man Church with its stress on dogma, papal sovereignty, apostolic succes
sion, and ecclesiastical precedent adopted this outlook wholesale. The Prot
estant reformers, by the same token, did not shed the "Roman" mentality,but merely changed the terms of the situation. Papal authority was trans
lated into the principle of sola scripture ("by Scripture alone"), cumulative
tradition into Gospel witness. One might say the Reformers simply made
the "foundation" of Christianity Pauline instead of Petrine. Protestant con
servatism buttressed by biblical fundamentalism turned out to be nought
but a primitive example of what philosophers nowadays denote as "founda-
tionalist" thinking.
The transmutation of Christianity according to the Roman prototype
is sketched by Arendt.
Th b i f th Ch h it f b li d bli i ti
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Theology, Hermeneutics, and the Shattering of Foundations 403
faith remained its content) or the Hebrew obedience to the commands of
God, but rather the testimony of the life, of the birth, death, and resur
rection, of Jesus of Nazareth as a historically recorded event. As witnesses to this event the Apostles could become the "founding fathers" of
the Church, from whom she would derive her own authority as long as
she handed down their testimony by way of tradition from generation
to generation.4
Yet this fundamentalism, or "foundationalism," is not restricted to re
ligion entirely. A century after Luther tore up and laid afresh the grounds
of theological inquiry, Descartes dismantled with his method of hyperbolic
doubt the unwieldy edifice of Medieval philosophy and sought a new "Archi-
median point" or foundation for human understanding in the guise of hiscogito ("I think"). Descartes initiated the secular divorce of philosophy
from theology and helped to release the former from its role as a hand
maiden to the latter, while conscripting it instead into the service of the
empirical and mathematical sciences. Descartes narrowed the modern
philosophical enterprise to the domain of epistemologythe examination of
the basic principles and criteria of knowledge.
Recently the philosopher Richard Rorty has gained attention by force
fully arguing that epistemology itself,which he views as just another species
of foundationalism, must be called into question. Whereas philosophy from
the seventeenth century onwards presumed that its judgments could be anch
ored in the bedrock of certain indubitable "facts" or "clear and distinct
ideas," the new awareness of both conceptual and methodological relativism
has undercut any search for fundamental truths. In Rorty's words, "the
application of such honorifics as 'objective' and 'cognitive9is never anything
more than an expression of the presence, or the hope for, agreement among
inquirers."5 Modern epistemology, from Immanuel Kant to Bertrand Rus
sell, has labored under the illusion that it can gauge all propositions andclaims to knowledge against what Rorty refers to as "privileged representa
tions"i.e., notions or criteria which, because of their prestige and ready
applicability, can be invoked without dissension to ascertain what is genuine
and what is counterfeit in human experience. Such privileged representa
tions, however, proved to be little more than cathechismal formulae sanc
tioned by the clerisy of letters and science to enforce a common and ex
emplary kind of "rational" discourse as the lingua franca of advanced civi
lization. The upshot of the Enlightenment critique of institutional Chris
tianity was not the elimination of dogma and priestcraft. The result wassimply a substitution of the logic textbook for the breviary.
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404 Encounter
Rorty's assault on foundationalism and "objectivism" in philosophy,
moreover, has been matched by a comparable "revisionary" movement in
scientific cosmology, especially among physicists.0 Physicists in the modern
era have been pace-setters for new trends in scientific thinking at large, and
we should not expect anything different this time around. Just as Newton's
descriptions of the movements of celestial orbs and falling bodies eventually
served as the scaffolding for mechanistic explanations of everything from
molecular behavior to human actions, so the new physics stands fair to alter
drastically our now "common sense" and "self-evident" views of the greater
universe, many of which are justified every day in the dame of "science."
We are all familiar with Einstein's theories concerning the relative characterof observation and motion, not to mention his demonstration of the contingent
character of time and space, which both Newton and the average person have
taken to be immutable and absolute. Yet we are not so acquainted with
some of the most recent developments in quantum physics, which has de
molished such "foundational" assumptions as the existence of "matter."
According to Capra,
. . . classical concepts like 'elementary particle,' 'material substance' or'isolated object,' have lost their meaning; the whole universe appears asa dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns.7
Some physicists would argue that even "energy" is too substantialist a term.
Like Rorty, today's physicists are insisting that there can be no such thing
as a correspondence between an idea and an object. Indeed, they call into
question whether there are "objects" in the world to be cognized at all.
Unfortunately, contemporary theology seems not to have even become
acquainted with, let alone profited from such discoveries. Set adrift from
the breakdown, first, of traditional belief and the breakup, secondly, of the
mortar of secular intelligence contemporary theologians have desparatelyendeavored to rescue themselves by merging their agendas with specific
cultural concerns (e.g., "political theology"). Yet those ploys are tanta
mount to grabbing a chunk of flotsam before plunging over the waterfall.
Foundationalism is, like Rome, inherently imperialistic (or, more mildly
phrased, "hegemonistic"); it asserts the absolute priority or inviolability
of some mode of knowledge. It is either rigidly retrospective and shackled
to tradition or it remains bewitched by present fads. Faddism itself arises
as a desperate stab at maintaining pride of place when one's former position
and privileges have slipped away. Loss of identity, methodological frag-
6 S i l "Th N C l d h O i f M h i " Phil h
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Theology,Hermeneutics, and theShattering ofFoundations 405
mentation, and topical superficiality are camouflaged by sundry efforts to
craft a distinctly "theological" perspective on the ever fluctuating desiderataof secular sensibility. When theological argument can no longer appeal to
theDeus vult ("God wills it"), it can at least fall back upon theconsensus
gentium.
A perhaps irremediable weakness of theology is that it is foundational
by its very nature. Aristotle, who was the first to use the word "theology"
consistently, characterized it in his Metaphysics as the investigation of
archai, which can be translated as "ultimate foundations." Christian the
ology has always appealed in some measure to Biblical revelation as its
foundational starting point. Or it has calibrated Christian symbols andconfessional statements against some authoritative set of secular categories,
as in Tillich's "method of correlation." Thus the closure of the era of
foundationalist thinking betokens what I in my own book The Alchemy of
the Wordhave termed "the end of theology."8 The end of theology, like the
"end of science" in Zukav's sense, implies not the cessation of what might be
loosely imagined as "theological" conversation, but abstention from any
"theologizing" that recurs to privileged representations such as kerygma,
doctrine, or even "God" in the doctrinaire meaning of the word.
But what is left standing when the foundations have been decisively
fractured? In philosophy, Rorty tells us, the movement must be from
foundationalism to "hermeneutics." Within the ambit of foundationalist
theology "hermeneutics" has meant the interpretation of some ancient credo.
That is why in Protestant thought hermeneutics has been controlled by Bib
lical exegetes. Rorty, however, views hermeneutics as an ongoing "conver
sation," shorn of presuppositions, between rival methods and viewpoints as
an ever unwinding thread of continuity within the intricate tapestry of
pluralism. But even Rorty's commendation of the hermeneutical alternative misses some of its more intriguing prospects.
"Hermeneutics" derives from the Greekhermeneinwhich can be trans
lated literally as "to interpret." But it has a more original and important
connotation as well. It can also mean "to manifest" or to "appear unex
pectedly." Every "hermeneutical" insight is a kind of unbidden disclosure,
the decoding of a secret message on the runes of time. The Greek god
Hermes was the bearer of tidings from the underworld. The radical mean
ing of "hermeneutics" is akin to that of "revelation." It does not indicate"revelation" in the confessional or even the Scriptural vein, but with regard
t t di ti d ti i t d fl h f di i i ithi
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406 Encounter
the existing order of things. Hermeneutics, therefore, is an invitation to the
viewing of the divine inbreaking in hidden places, a ticket to the theater of
God's surprises. Theological foundationalism has assumed for more than
a millenium that "revelation" was an event from the irretrievable past; but
the openness of the hermeneutical attitude permits divine showings and the
activation of cosmic connections within the "unified field" of nature and
history.
Moreover, it is precisely the hermeneutical, as opposed to the founda
tionalist, perspective which prevails in the new physics. The older New
tonian mechanism was hewn from a foundationalist paradigm. The newphysics, however, is "hermeneutical," because it trades on the ancient, Greek
meaning of the word physis which can be rendered as "growth," "emer
gence," or "manifestation." Or, as Zukav observes, within the new physical
paradigm, individual "things" or events
. . . are no longer separate entities. They are different forms of the same
thing. Everything is a manifestation. It is not possible to answer the
question, "Manifestation of what?" because the "what" is that which is
beyond words, beyond concept, beyond form, beyond even space and
time. Everything is a manifestation of what which is9
Hermeneutical vision catches sight of the divine, the "that which is," in its
multiple intimations and linkages. The new cosmology centers around what
the British physicist David Bhm has designated as "the implicate order."
In such a universe, according to another physicist Jack Sarfatti, "all things
are interconnected."10 The new physics, like the ancient religious mystics,
conceives not a "block universe," as William James put it, but an open ex
panse of infinite possibilities.
If physics, the queen of the "hard sciences," can attune our minds to
the ever impinging mystery that homo religiosus has symbolized and wor
shipped as "God," then theology has much catching up to do. The shatter
ing of the foundations of secular thought represents both an ending and be
ginning for modern civilization. Through the fissures in the weathered slabs
of the ruined temple springs of new vegetation must struggle toward the
sunlight. This shattering constitutes an end to our conventional presump
tions and certainties about the texture of reality and the beginning of a far-reaching "space probe" across the outer limits of human understanding and
beyond Theology as well as modern thinking must relinquish any nos
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Theology, Hermeneutics,and theShattering ofFoundations 407
talgic yearning for the erection of new "foundations." For knowledge can
neither be segmented or grounded. We may take to heart the words of theGerman poet Schiller:
Only the totality leads to clarity,And in the abyss alone dwells truth.
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