One of the most troubling things about reading Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel is realizing that anti-Judaism isn’t just some anomalous bug of Christianity that can easily be tossed out. It’s more or less a constitutive feature of the patristic-medieval-Reformation-modern Christian consensus. As Christianity gradually emerged as a separate religion, the church defined itself, in myriad ways, as the anti-Judaism. Jews were, according to this line of thinking, “carnal,” legalistic, hypocritical, particularistic, ethnocentric, unfaithful, etc., while the church was “spiritual,” grace-full, upright, universal, faithful, etc. This stuff is all over Tertullian, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, the medievals, Luther, Calvin (although, according to Williamson, Calvin actually comes off better than nearly anyone else in the tradition on this score), the anabaptists, liberal theologians, neo-orthodox theologians, liberation theologians–pretty much everybody. It infects the church’s view of covenant, its doctrine of the authority and interpretation of scripture, its Christology, its doctrine of God, its view of the sacraments, and its approach to mission. This is why Williamson thinks that a more radical re-thinking of the church’s theology is necessary in a post-Holocaust (or post-Shoah) context than most Christians have been willing to countenance.
Category: Books
-
Summer reading list update
Well, we still have over a month of summer left, calendar-wise anyway. Since my last update I finished Moby-Dick and read the better part of a collection of critical essays. I finished Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas and decided to follow up with his Religion in the Making. As a supplement to all this Whitehead, I also started and have nearly finished Cobb and Griffin’s Process Theology: An Introductory Expostion, which sheds some light on Whitehead’s thought, particularly as it relates to religion. (Though Cobb and Griffin are also pursuing a constructive theological project of their own; it’s not simply commentary on Whitehead.)
Another piece of supplementary Moby-Dick reading that I’m planning to get to soon is Watching Giants: The Secret Lives of Whales by Elin Kelsey. Also on deck we still have Harvey Kaye’s Thomas Paine and the Promise of America and Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal. Finally, I picked up Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel: Post-Holocaust Church Theology, which looks very interesting. I think I need to make room for some lighter fare in here: a friend suggested a put down the Whitehead and pick up a “James Patterson barn-burner.”
-
Death of the seas
The WaPo ran a good review this Sunday of two books on the slow-motion environmental catastrophe taking place in the earth’s oceans.
-
Melville’s prophetic mission
Melville does not attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas; his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life. He is a forerunner of religious writers in our own time, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Elie Wiesel, whose keynote is the maintenance of discourse concerning ultimate realities in the face of horrors so extreme as to confound religious meditation altogether, to threaten it with extinction. Yet unlike Bonhoeffer and Wiesel, Melville does not speak for a community of religious teaching and observance. He invokes traditional theological materials in such a way as to produce a characteristic dissonance, in which conflicting perspectives are pressed upon the reader simultaneously. By this means, Melville continuously establishes and disestablishes the reader’s relation to his narrative; at every point, we find ourselves struggling to find a framework in which to place what is being said.
Melville thus draws us into a religious struggle. The traditional perspectives at work are biblical and theological, pointing toward the ultimate boundaries of experience; and Melville places the unresolvable conflict of these perspectives at the book’s own outermost horizon, embracing within that horizon a discourse concerning final questions, the meaning or unmeaning of life and death. Engaging in that discourse, as it goes on in passage after passage, calls up a religious consciousness; and as we attempt to place Melville’s local meanings within the context of the work as a whole, we are carried to the frontier at which the churning of interpretive frameworks goes on, Melville’s dismantling and re-framing of the world.
— T. Walter Herbert, Jr., “Calvinist Earthquake: Moby-Dick and Religious Tradition,” in New Essays on Moby-Dick, edited by Richard H. Brodhead, pp. 113-114.
Far from being a simple adventure yarn, Moby-Dick is driven by a metaphysical/theological quest: is the universe friendly toward us? Indifferent? Hostile? What is the nature of God and can we peer into that nature through the cracking open of our perception that occurs in certain moments of transcendental insight? The fact that this is the kind of stuff I’ve been obsessed with since I was about 19 may partly explain why this book had such an effect on me.
-
Hearts alive
Finished Moby-Dick this weekend – wow, what a book! The literary genre-hopping, the cosmological speculations, the epic scale, the humor, the unforgettable characters, the ornate, rhythmic splendor of the language – is there any other novel like it? (I’m not even sure it is a novel!) I think it may have supplanted The Brothers Karamazov as first in my heart.
-
From hell’s heart I stab at thee
Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!
– Moby-Dick, chapter 135
And, the original:
-
Cannibals
It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.
– Moby-Dick, chapter 65
-
Gender and God-talk
Derek posted a couple of pieces on the language we use to talk about God, which sparked a good bit of commentary. (See here and here.) Partly, this ended up being about the propriety (or not) of using feminine symbols and pronouns to talk about God.
The best discussion of this I’ve come across is Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. I blogged about Johnson’s book at some length here, here, here, and here. You can also read a briefer version of her case for “God-she” here.
I think one of the deeper issues at play here is whether or not all our language about God is, to some extent, “constructed.” Johnson writes:
As the history of theology shows, there is no “timeless” speech about God. Rather, symbols of God are cultural constructs, entwined with the changing cultural situation of the faith community that uses them.
Some people are very uncomfortable with this and maintain instead that at least some langague is directly “revealed” and not time-and-culture bound. I don’t think this is a tenable view of how language works, though; even if some set of images or words was directly revealed in the Bible or wherever, the meaning of words is inextricably bound up with the context in which they’re spoken.
-
Inflamed, distracted fury
Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.
— Moby-Dick, chapter 41
A Thinking Reed 