Friday, February 24, 2012

Postmodern Reflection I: On Existential Emergentism and the Epistemic Threshold

fiore-rosso:  ,dimitar variysky

Existentialism is compatible with nihilism in that an existentialist is born a nihilist and reborn an existentialist. The nihilist stares into the void, and as Nietzsche said, “the void stares back.” She perceives a groundless ground resting on nothing – everything from nothing – a relativising void. This is Absolute Terror. She stares it in the face, that great impenetrable darkness, and screams, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” But soon death’s prick, the experience of crucifixion, takes its toll, and the individual is left either dead or miraculously surviving. And at this point she is able to stare death in the face still and yet say,

“O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where are your inhabitants? Either they are forever asleep and have forgotten you totally, or they have vacated your empty stomach and you are left to starve. Your victory is empty and untenable.” At this point, having survived the void of death, the nihilist has gone through the cruciform cocoon and is emerging in an existential rebirth.

This rebirth is the resurrection event. The void that once rendered meaning arbitrary and illusive has been occupied by the subjective individual, rendered an object, and thus becomes a new ground for creativity. At this point the existential individual is ready to create meaning anew. Thus the creative act is born, and the individual is able to fly over the void on the wings of creative balance. This is Absolute Freedom.

Part of this existential maturity is the recognition that the impenetrable darkness perceived to be a void, an abyss of meaninglessness and soulless emptiness, cannot be confirmed as such. In fact, it may be that the darkness is the blindness that results as a consequence to an overexposure to infinite light. It may be that the dark cloud called “void,” this ineffable mystery that tears apart humanly-constructed meaning, is the sea of reality so deep and so wide that it cannot be contained and thus utterly fills every crevice while pouring over and absolutely transcending. Absolute Terror and Absolute Freedom are one. Thus the existentialist never really stepped into an abyss at all, but a sea so full that the creative act is not a god-act, but the rearranging of some materials in an infinite ocean, a form of human reductionism.

In a way, this non-god-act of dust from dust is still divine creativity. It is still a type of god-act. At the beginning of Genesis, our most popular creation story, a sea covers the earth and the spirit of the Divine sweeps over it. From this sea arises and manifests ground and land and earth and animal. Thus God creates from already existing materials, placing things in order through three acts of separation and three acts of filling:

Separation Filling

Day 1: light from dark = Day 4: light into sun and day, dark into night

Day 2: water above and water below = Day 5: fish into water and birds into sky

Day 3: land from sea = Day 6: vegetation and animals into land

And so we see that in this story, creation takes place through organization and emergence. Thus the true existentialist takes part in the creative act of emergence and organization and re-emergence and reorganization. When the flood comes up again from that deep sea called Mystery, she sails it until she finds dry land and starts again if need be. She sails the current of evolution as reality reorganizes and re-emerges, recognizing both potential and finitude, subject to that great current against which she cannot ultimately stand, but which she will one day join again.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Fundamentalism as Idolatry



The fundamental core of the “fundamentalist” brand of any faith tradition is a commitment to holding one’s articulation of all things spiritual as having the corner on the market to the exclusion and damnation of every other faith tradition. This position is damnable in itself. The problem is not a claim to authority, which works to a limited extent, but a claim to absolute authority over and above extra-traditional witness. This leaves the Divine no wiggle room.

Take for instance the extra-traditional movements of the Divine testified to in the Jewish scriptures. YHWH speaks directly to Nebachadznezzar, Gentile king of Bablyon, showing grace. God calls Abraham out of a world of utter mystery and ignorance, showing favor. In the record of Ezekiel, the Jewish temple priest Ezekiel finds himself in exile, banished from the territory of his God and his God’s temple (his God’s dwelling place), and in exile in Babylon. Babylon is the land of Ishtar, the Pagan goddess. His God surely cannot be found there. And yet, he has a surreal vision beyond words, witnessing strange creatures and wheels inside wheels and all kinds of odd stuff, and his God comes through in this vision. His God is there in the land of Ishtar, far from the temple where he “dwells” and “lives,” wrapped in mystery: the same God who called himself “I Am” to Abraham. And later this God, known as the mysterious, transcendent God who dwells behind dark clouds rather than in stone idols, becomes human! And no one would claim that the incredible accessibility of God in this human body means that God no longer transcends, although God has become very immanent. God is both transcendent and immanent.

In fundamentalism, the religious text confines God to human words and human witness. In Christian fundamentalism, the Bible itself becomes an idol. The Bible is understood quite “literally,” and the cultural worldview and language which composes the text is ignored or regarded as divinely inspired. The reader’s first or second impression of the text, apart from deep cultural study and very biased and personalized, immediately organizes itself into a theology and cages God up. The words of man in response to an encounter with the Divine become the very words of the Divine, thus solidifying the witness against any other.

Theology, like the Bible, is a witness and testament to the mystery of God. Human beings throughout history had many incredible encounters with the Divine, including the incarnation (Christ), and the product was this incredible response: the Bible. But the best words of humanity about God are not divine. They are still human words, translated through human and cultural metaphor. When a theology becomes the last word about God, it territorializes God from further revelation, denies God’s transcendence, and raises itself to the level of the Divine. Theology is our best Spirit-led understanding of a sacred text produced by a sacred witness of God, and it testifies to future witness and revelation. When we read the Bible as Christians, our stories intersect with God’s story and the stories of those before us, and out of that intersection comes a localized theology. That theology is local and limited, and yet profound and beautiful. And there will be those after us who will have other local theologies that are also beautiful, enabling them to join in the same dance with the Divine in which we are now also engaged. Let us honor this sacred witness and narrative, joining in and articulating and embracing, all the while allowing God to speak in whatever context he/she pleases.