Work and Its Discontents: On Contemporary Theology’s Response to the Question of Work

I begin this essay by articulating capitalism’s problematic work ethic, to which a host of contemporary theologians are rightfully responding. I then establish a pattern that structures a host of those contemporary theological responses. Theologians working out of the “God as Worker” model aim to address work‐related problems by calling for workers to imitate God’s work. Making use of Augustine’s doctrine of transcendence, I problematize that mode of response on two fronts: (1) those proposals are based on too quick an appeal to theories of divine action, which the authors problematically assume provides a model for ideal forms of human action; (2) those proposals lack clarity regarding the precise nature of “work” and thus fail to develop a proper analysis of the cursed mode of agency. Thinking with Augustine and a classical theological schema wherein God is the transcendent cause (and final end) of all creatures thus prohibits the attempt to address questions of work by identifying just modes of work in God’s productive agency. In contrast to this model, I argue that an Augustinian response must treat work as both a distinctly creaturely and a cursed activity.     

DESIRE AND THE ORIGINS OF CULTURE: LONERGAN AND GIRARD IN CONVERSATION

This paper explores differing accounts of the nature of desire, found in the works of Bernard Lonergan and René Girard, and their implications for our understanding of the origins or socio‐cultural order. Using Lonergan's distinction between natural and elicited desires it argues that Girard's account of desire as mimetic may account for elicited desire, but may not account for natural desire, in Lonergan's account, as desire for meaning, truth and goodness. It then considers the implications for this distinction in our understanding of our socio‐cultural origins.     

Calvinist Predestination and the Spirit of Capitalism: The Religious Argument of the Weber Thesis Reexamined

The paper reconsiders the Weber Thesis of a linkage between Calvinism and capitalism. It first restates this sociological Thesis in terms of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination as its theological core and premise in virtue of being treated as the crucial religious factor of the spirit of modern capitalism. Consequently, it proposes that the Weber Thesis’ validity and consistency depends on that doctrine, succeeding or failing as a sociological theory with the latter depending on whether or not it is unique in theological terms, as well as economic-social consequences. For that purpose, it reexamines and compares the Calvinist doctrine of predestination with the pre-Calvinist versions and infers that it is basically identical to or compatible with these. It then draws the implications for the Weber Thesis in respect of the degree of its validity or consistence. It concludes that the Weber Thesis likely is fail as a sociological-economic theory with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to the extent that the latter is its theological ground and revealed not to be unique and new theologically and probably in terms of its societal effects.     

THE ENCHANTMENTS OF MAMMON: NOTES TOWARD A THEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF CAPITALISM

Tales of “disenchantment” dominate modern intellectual life, and especially accounts of the cultural history of capitalism. Yet Weberian sociology, and especially Marxist notions of “commodity fetishism”, point to the persistence of “enchantment” in the capitalist imagination. If we reformulate these notions of “enchantment” and “disenchantment” in theological terms of sacrament, then we can write new histories of capitalism, as well as articulate new forms of political and cultural criticism. Borrowing from “radical orthodoxy”, the author takes a Cook's Tour of “disenchantment”, explores the possibilities afforded by “sacramental” conceptions of materialism, and gestures toward an account of American cultural history shaped by a sacramental materialism.     

Reciprocity and Rivalry: A Critical Introduction to Mimetic Scapegoat Theory

This paper presents a critical overview of René Girard’s mimetic theory, identifies several concerns about the adequacy of mimetic theory’s account of human agency and interdependence, and suggests ways this account might be clarified and enhanced. We suggest that mimetic theory tends to reify or hypostatize the core reality of mimetic desire, which sometimes is spoken of as a kind of trans-individual entity that directs human action, no doubt because of Girard’s concern to avoid any taint of individualism or subjectivism. We argue, however, that hermeneutic and dialogical philosophies like those of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikhail Bakhtin explicate profound human relationality and interdependence in a way that obviates individualism without overriding or obscuring personal responsibility. The concern of many Girardian theorists that hermeneutic philosophy covers over or even rationalizes conflictual and violent human dynamics, we contend, is unfounded. However, we insist that most contemporary social theory, including hermeneutic thought, fails to do full justice to the challenges posed by envy, enmity, and scapegoating violence in human affairs and to the struggle for a good or decent life that mimetic theory richly portrays. Thus, we explore some of the possibilities for a fruitful cross-fertilization of mimetic theory and hermeneutic/dialogical viewpoints. Similarly, we argue that recent work on virtue ethics in theoretical psychology contains rich resources for elaborating what would be involved in a so-called “positive” or “creative” mimesis that moves beyond the destructive kinds of mimetic entanglement upon which Girardian thought has tended to concentrate. Finally, we suggest that any effort of this sort to clarify what Girard terms our “interdividual” human reality and to investigate positive mimesis would be greatly assisted by Eugene Webb’s delineation of a fundamental kind of “beneficient motivation” or positive “existential appetite,” a third species of human desire in addition to the two that Girard clearly identifies, namely finite needs and the kind of insatiable, artificial craving that the term mimetic desire usually designates.     

Sacrifice and Suffering: Beyond Justice, Human Rights, and Capitalism

This essay recovers the redemptive significance of "sacrifice" as the form of Christian resistance to global capitalism. The argument unfolds by way of a comparison of sacrifice, as presented by Anselm, with one of the most compelling contemporary theological accounts of justice and human rights—that of the Latin American liberationists. After showing how the liberationists' vision is implicated in the capitalist order, I argue that Anselm's account of sacrifice displays the advent of the aneconomic order of divine charity and that it is only the recovery of life in this aneconomic mode of donation and gift that can deliver us from capitalism.     

Capitalism and the Banality of Desire

ABSTRACT

This paper elaborates on Todd McGowan’s perspicacious, psychoanalytic explanation of capitalism’s resilience, due to its formidable ideological insinuation into the banal micro-desires of consumers. I outline his contention that capitalism’s false promise of future satisfaction is subverted by the psychical change indicated by Freud’s re-evaluation of the desire/satisfaction relationship. This is elaborated on via Lacan’s claim, somewhat underplayed in McGowan’s reflections, that desire is essentially narcissistic. Lacan’s claim raises the stakes of capitalism’s psychic appeal, but also indicates how Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a point of intervention. I briefly point to the consistency between Lacan’s conception of the actualized subject and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s articulation of desire in terms of “the process” and the complex metaphor of “desiring machines”. I finally turn to ?i?ek’s conception of the developing world as “the place of rupture” and a major fault line internal to capitalism that threatens to disrupt its operation.     

On Becoming Creatures: Being Called to Presence in a Distracted World

In the biblical creation story human beings are depicted as beings ejected from the true home given to them in creation and entrapped in the dynamics of their flight from God. Franz Rosenzweig suggested that modern life is best understood as a type of chronic living death characterized by an animate but nevertheless sterile experience of loss. Following Eric Santner's presentation of this theme in Rosenzweig, this article will explore what it might mean to recover a sense of the goodness of place and particularity. I will examine Santner's suggestion that to become present to ‘place’ is to have undergone the ‘undeadening’ intervention of another person, who offers us an exit route in the midst of the tangle of our lived lives. I will then show how the main lines of his analysis both parallel and offer ways to sharpen important aspects of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's account in Creation and Fall of the dynamics of the Fall and the healing of creatures. Human beings are depicted by Bonhoeffer as in need of being transformed into creatures, a theological insight resting on a complex account of creation, and which I will suggest, in conclusion, is a particularly important theme of a Christian gospel that can speak to a world saturated by the desire to be elsewhere.     

METAPHYSICS AND THE REDEMPTION OF SACRIFICE: ON RENÉ GIRARD AND CHARLES WILLIAMS

René Girard is something of a Janus for philosophers and theologians interested in the question of sacrifice. On the one hand, few thinkers in any century have made such a compelling case for the importance and centrality of sacrifice within all human culture. On the other hand, Girard has steadfastly insisted that sacrifice be understood in exclusively anthropological terms thus foreclosing the metaphysical and theological questions that prima facie seem to attend any robust consideration of sacrifice. In this essay, I seek to move beyond this Girardian impasse by supplementing Girard's late-thought with a more robust metaphysics of sacrifice as found in the work of the novelist, literary critic, and theologian, Charles Williams (one of the Oxford 'Inklings' and a close companion of C.S. Lewis). To begin with, I first explain Girard's understanding of the mimetic mechanism and the sacrificial origins of human culture. I then consider a number of the criticisms with which he has been charged, especially the accusation of methodological reductionism. I explore the way that Girard's late work has responded to a number of these criticisms but argue that Girard's responses fail to diffuse the charges. By way of conclusion, I suggest that Girard's insights can be saved when supplemented with the kind of relational metaphysics found in Williams' most perfectly realized novel, Descent into Hell . Rather than dispensing with ontology in favour of praxis, Williams transforms the profoundly Girardian themes of mediated desire, the doppelganger, mimetic rivalry, ritual, and the function of sacrifice by placing them in the context of what he calls the metaphysics of 'co-inherence.' This allows Williams to provide a far more positive account of both mimesis and sacrifice (even in its substitutionary mode) than Girard, not just non-retaliation but the actual bearing of one another's deepest burdens in communion, prayer, and love.     

Sexuality and Devotion: Mystical Readings of the Song of Songs

Abstract

This article considers the rich interpretative tradition that has grown out of the Song of Songs. Particular attention is given to the Targum on the Songs which identifies its narrative as an account of the marriage between God and Israel. Although the Targum post-dates the earliest Christian exegesis, the correlation made between the Bride and Israel is likely to have predated the text and influenced the first Christian interpreters.

Two influential commentaries on the Song, offered by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, are then examined. Although there are significant differences between these, both preserve a sense of the correspondence between the motions and movements of the soul and the sense organs of the body. It is argued that this represents a positive embracing of sexual discourse as appropriate to describe the human approach to God. This movement is carried forward into contemporary spirituality via hymnody and popular devotion. The necessity to frame the spiritual language of desire in terms that transgress gender norms enables people of different sexual orientations to name their love of God through their physical passion.     

CHRISTOPHER SOUTHGATE'S COMPOUND THEODICY: PARALLEL SEARCHINGS

Christopher Southgate proposes that a theological response to the suffering that is built into an evolutionary world requires a compound evolutionary theodicy, made up of four interrelated theological positions. This article proposes a fourfold response to the suffering of nonhuman creation that parallels Southgate's compound theodicy. In its similarities and differences, it is offered in the spirit of a tribute to Christopher Southgate.     

ACKNOWLEDGING A HIDDEN GOD: A THEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF STANLEY CAVELL ON SCEPTICISM

In his early work, the philosopher Stanley Cavell offers a sustained engagement with the threat of epistemological scepticism, shaped by the intuition that although (as the late Wittgenstein shows) ordinary language use is the practice within which alone meaning is possible (and which can thus not be further analysed or rationalised), it is also a basic human inclination to wish to escape the limitations of the ‘ordinary’. This, for Cavell, is the root of scepticism. Scepticism, on this view, thus appears not primarily as an epistemological but as an (injurious) moral stance, which cannot be refuted but must be continually confronted and overcome. Vis‐à‐vis scepticism, ‘acknowledgement’ is the practice‐based recognition of the world and other people in their continuing elusiveness, which ineluctably involves risk, but just so is the only way of knowing that is appropriate to and honours the (finite) human condition. One problematic aspect of this (very fertile) approach is that Cavell's secular viewpoint makes it difficult for him to say both why the desire for a ‘beyond’ arises in the first place, and why its expression as denial is morally wrong (rather than merely misguided). His approach thus invites a theological ‘supplementation’ which grounds the human condition in an original and real relation to God that is meant to draw the believer, through Christ, into the divine life itself. Such a reinterpretation both elucidates the concepts of scepticism and acknowledgement, and makes these concepts available for a theological outlook that is able to accommodate Cavell's profound insights into ‘the human’.     

Can the Created Co‐Creator Be Lutheran?A Response to Svend Andersen

Abstract : The author responds to Svend Andersen's article in this journal 43: 4(Winter 2004) 312–23, “Can Bioethics Be Lutheran?” in which Andersen criticizes the concept of humans as created co‐creators, particularly because it asserts an equality between God and humans; he recommends in its place Luther's concept of humans as God's co‐operators or co‐workers. It is argued here that the created co‐creator meets the critique offered. The concept can be both theologized and secularized, which Andersen overlooks. The concept can be integrated into the Christian theology of divine creation, but it introduces irony into theological formulation which is necessary, and which the idea of “God's co‐operators” fails to do. Finally, the chief and most difficult theological issues are framed: Why does God create co‐creators? and How can they receive grace within a Lutheran framework?     

The Economy and Money in Three Recent Mission Documents

While economic issues are not usually much debated in theology, three recent mission documents (The Cape Town Commitment, Together towards Life and Evangelii Gaudium) have directly addressed them, criticizing globalized capitalism more or less sharply and explicitly. However, all three lack transparency in that possible analysis which might provide foundation for the statements made is not visible. Additionally, the critique offered is vague and general except for some relatively concrete propositions in Evangelii Gaudium with seemingly social‐democrat overtones. Thus these documents do not readily connect with economic, political, and social scientific discourses, which reduces their applicability predominantly to the religious sphere and further supports an Enlightenment sacred/secular dichotomy that conflicts with the approach advocated in Together towards Life. In order to increase the relevance of theological arguments concerning economic issues to spheres beyond the churches, theologians need to cooperate with economists and familiarize themselves with economic theories and practices before prescribing policies based on theological argumentation.     

In Between Sex and the Sacred: The Articulation of an Erotic Theology in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion

Abstract

This paper explores Jeanette Winterson's manipulation of biblical stories, tropes and language in The Passion. Winterson herself has commented upon the considerable influence that Scripture has upon her imagination and this novel bears up her claim in the profusion of allusions it makes to Christian texts and practices. While there has been a considerable amount of criticism written upon her use of intertextuality involving Scripture, this paper seeks to confront the issue from a theological standpoint and ascertain the theological implications of her writing. In viewing Winterson as a theologian, the possibility is raised of disseminating a more unorthodox, creative approach to hermeneutics, which encourages both a recognition of the paternalistic, heterosexual and patriarchal rhetoric within Scripture and traditional interpretation, and the supplanting of it with a polyphony of voices, which reach beyond the boundaries of the original texts. The conclusion of this paper is that, by inverting traditional categories of the sacred and the profane, Winterson articulates a challenge to contemporary theology in its practice of reading, and also advances a new theological hermeneutic, which reclaims an affirming spirituality of the body and desire.     

Pluralism, Otherness, and the Augustinian Tradition

Recent work on religious pluralism profits from the systematic theological framework offered by the Augustinian tradition, which uses interrreligious dialogue in the service of its larger "conversionist" purposes. In so using dialogue, the tradition transforms our vision of the epistemic problem of pluralism into the theological problem of otherness; interreligious dialogue reflects the self's inescapable dialogue with God, and reveals the self as constituted by such dialogue. Thus, those more mundane forms of dialogue, which engage the self in conversation with others, offer opportunities for the further manifestation of the Divine love and the fulfillment of the divine purpose.     

A Cry of Dereliction? Reconsidering a Recent Theological Commonplace

Abstract: The ‘cry of dereliction’ (‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’) has often been understood in recent theology as pointing to a genuine abandonment of the Son by the Father in the event of the cross. Hans Urs von Balthasar's account of this is explored, and exegetical and theological reasons are offered for preferring a more traditional account in which the unity of the Trinity remains unbroken by human sin.     

Enfleshing the Erotic

Abstract

An embodied theological ethic of human sexuality must engage two specific tasks: (1) articulate a theological explanation of the body that can frame critical reflection on the right ordering of relationships at the macro, social-relational level and (2) celebrate the erotic as an essential, creative contour of human sexual experience at the micro, interpersonal level. This essay is divided into two sections. In the first section, I explore the significance of the body in theological and ethical reflection in an attempt to distill an embodied theological ethic of human sexuality that can level a critique against the sinful social realities of heterosexism and sexism. In the second part, I develop the ethic further so as to carry moral weight within sexual practices. I celebrate the erotic as the creative dimension of human sexuality that encompasses desire and pleasure. I reflect on desire and pleasure individually in light of embodied experience and ground each within an ethic of mutuality to ensure goodness, rightness, and the doing of justice in all sexual relationships.     

Framing a Theological Response to COVID-19 in the Presence of the Religious Other

The Christian faith has a long history of responding to pandemics. Its past practice bore witness to the desire to care for others: it furnished an exemplary model with some notable exceptions. The dilemma that COVID-19 presents is that the understanding of viral spread now lies within the preserve of a professionalized health system. The evident risk as a consequence is one of theological quietism and being “unavailing.” Now is not the time for simple hyper compliance at the expense of an enquiring confessional claim. The ecumenical witness in solidarity with other faiths/religions lends itself to a desire to consider how the present pandemic crisis might serve as an invitation for a theological enquiry into wider planetary issues.