Doing Theology in Dangerous Times

In this article from 2018 – adapted from a lecture given at a Loyola Institute conference that same year – authors Dr Michael Kirwan SJ and Jessica Hazrati argue for the renewal of theological practice (and its repatriation to the fore of public consciousness and political discourse) in the face of a secularised world which has limited human dignity and fractured community relationships for the sake of progress and capitalism.

Dr Michael Kirwan SJ is the Director of the Loyola Institute, situated at Trinity College Dublin. Further information on his work can be found here.

Jessica Hazrati is an Interfaith professional who currently works at the London School of Economics’ Faith Centre and Religion and Global Society Research Unit.

Michael Kirwan, Jessica Hazrati, ‘”Stand Upright and Raise Your Head!”: Doing Theology in Dangerous Times’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 107, No. 426 (Summer, 2018), 146 – 156. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/90021944

–Apocalyptic imaginationThe encouragement of Jesus to ‘raise our heads’ (Lk.21.28) is a call to hope, as we try to do theology in dangerous times: ‘dangerous’, as Paul reminds us, because these are the ‘end-times’. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek is more specific, as he names the ‘four horsemen of the apocalypse’: the worldwide ecological crisis, economic imbalances, the biogenetic revolution and exploding social divisions and ruptures. These are massive global threats, in the face of which evolution seems to have run its course. We have come to where we are by a long and arduous process of adaptation and development, but where do we go next?

There is no obvious adaptive strategy which will enable our continuation as a species. What is needed is not some incremental adaptation – more of the same – but salvation: an intentional acceptance of the call to conversion, such as we find in the Bible, and in other faith traditions. Such a conversion, according to the cultural theorist René Girard, will require us to override, even reverse, our evolutionary programming. René Girard asserts in his later writings that it is not only fruitful but necessary to utilise an apocalyptic imagination. This can only be done, however, if we recognise the fundamental truth which the apocalyptic imagination uncovers: namely, the systemic pattern of human violence, which is in stark contrast to the absolute nonviolence of God. ‘Apocalyptic’ thinking offers comfort and hope to to those ‘within the fray’, the victims of injustice and persecution. However, it also tempts us to dualistic thinking: an uncompromising antagonism between church and world, between God’s elect and secular authority.

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The call to arms of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’In this light we can reassess the secular worldview which has elbowed religion and religious belief to the margins of modern thought and culture. As a description of our modern world, the secular ‘story’ is now seen to be seriously deficient, not least in assuming the inevitable disappearance of religion. A robust challenge to secularism appeared about twenty years ago, when theologians under the banner of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ declared that ‘the logic of secularism is imploding’…Twenty years on, it might be suggested, this rallying cry sounds even more alarming and convincing. We are not simply just ‘post-Christian’ – we have become ‘post-truth’, living in a world of ‘alternative facts’. We are in retreat not only from religious transcendence but from thought, and from reasoned argument in public life. We face the dissolution of the post-war democratic consensus, and a resurgence of extremist antagonisms. Our multiple global crises – financial/economic, military/security, environmental, the ‘horsemen of the apocalypse’ – will not easily be resolved by technological and scientific means.

…In this situation, the voice of theology – Christian religious wisdom – makes itself heard once again. Slavoj Žižek – who is in fact a Marxist atheist – insists that the Christian legacy is simply too important to be left to evangelical fundamentalists. According to Žižek, the world is faced with an unsavoury choice between two false ‘religions’: either the self-massaging narcissism of late-capitalist ‘spirituality’, or the herd-like transcendence of fascistic nationalism. These are actually two sides of a coin: each betrays the same disastrous crisis of identity. In which case, says Žižek, perhaps it is wiser to stay with the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

We feel we are in the middle of a major cultural upheaval, for which the date ‘2016’ is as good a marker as any. Part of our task is to discern whether indeed ‘all is changed, changed utterly’, or whether our current upheavals are an aberration, and we will soon be back to normal.

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Gillian RoseIn the introduction to Theology and Social Theory, John Milbank acknowledges his debt to a number of thinkers, without whom the book could not have been written. These include René Girard (1923–2014), and the lesser known thinker Gillian Rose (1947–95). Rose was born into a secular Jewish family but baptised as an Anglican on her deathbed. She was emphatically a philosopher, who regarded Socrates as ‘almost a Christ-figure’ but for whom theology became increasingly important. In an interview on RTE Radio with Andy O’Mahony she urges that social theory needs to turn toward political theology and away from ‘this anodyne “love ethic”’.

Contemporary social theory is problematic because it makes persuasive appeals to transcendence but at the same time hides them. This transcendence needs to be made explicit. Nevertheless, Rose rejected any appeal to transcendence which evaded the irreducible difficulty of lived experience. Vincent Lloyd summarizes: ‘Faith and love do not invoke a new law; they are ways of navigating the law we have: the difficult world of practices and norms in which we live’. Faith signals a commitment to engage with the world, despite difficulty and tension; and Love signals the intensification of the ordinary experience through such engagement. Faith and Love enable us to renew our engagement with the world: ‘propelling lovers back into the ordinary world ready to face its difficulties again’.

…We are in a process of grieving that is not going well. In both the world of politics and in the intellectual world, there seems to be a low tolerance of ‘equivocation’ – the ability, in short, to see two sides to an issue. This has reproduced dualistic, sterile ways of thinking. Against the tribalism of interest groups and identity politics, she asserts simply: ‘Politics begins not when you organise to defend an individual or particular or local interest, but when you organize to further the “general” interest within which your particular interest may be represented’. Rose seeks instead to move us beyond the repetitive dualisms of power and otherness; to look instead for an intermediate space where difficult thinking can take place: a space which does not require us to destroy or break out of the boundaries of specific communal existence.

This is an extremely suggestive analysis, which I think is utterly prophetic of our present situation. Fifty years of ‘postmodern’ thinking, in which ‘truth’ has been held to be relative, provisional and local, has left us with a political culture of despair: where tribal loyalty overrides commitment to truth, and the notion of common good has been eroded. I am not a psychologist but the sheer level of anger and denial in our present political culture surely demonstrates the plausibility of Rose’s diagnosis, of a bewildered and attenuated grieving process.

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Coda: Good Friday…As someone once said: ‘There Is No Alternative’: capitalism wins, every time! One has only to think of Walter Benjamin’s short reflection, ‘Capitalism as Religion?’, written in 1921 and posthumously published in 1985, to see how this straightforward common-sense arrangement is sinister. As Benjamin points out, capitalism insists on an evacuation of holy seasons – think of the commercial co-option of the sabbath, of Advent, of Christmas, St Patrick’s Day. Why? Because these seasons should be precious moments of reflexivity and recuperation, and therefore of potential resistance to capitalism’s smooth, total functioning…The religious analogy of consumerism as ‘cult’, set up for us by Walter Benjamin, merits a Girardian analysis. The desire to acquire what other people have, and emulate what they are, is the engine-room of capitalism. Appetites are relentlessly mediated through desires, which are stirred up in a frenzy of emulation and rivalry, of which there is one inevitable casualty: ‘Girard’s analysis reveals the link between the cult of consumerism and the sacrifice of the earth: the earth itself becomes the victim, the necessary oblation and scapegoat’…

…We do want, however, to explore the creative idea of an annual day of nonconsumption, just as the sabbath, as a day free of manual labour – a day for free people – offers a glimpse of possible resistance to the implacable logic of consumerism. More even than the sabbath, Good Friday suggests an encounter of risk, for both the church and the country. This is, indeed, theology in ‘dangerous times’. Holy Week is the most dangerous week of the year, only made bearable for us by its rendition as an elaborate sacred drama. The Christian community enters the drama on Palm Sunday, playing the part of a fickle mob, shouting in admiration for their leader but minutes later howling for his blood. We watch as the week unfolds, as fear and hostility conspire and culminate in Jesus’ torture and execution.

…Good Friday is a moment of searing honesty, when we confront what we human beings are like, and the horror of what we are capable of not least when we are fired up by religious zeal. It is also the moment when we find the church at its most generous. Too often we are inward looking, defensive of our own interests, but on Good Friday the church kneels in prayer: for herself, for other Christians, for the Jewish people, for those who do not believe in God, for those in political authority, and so on.As we have seen, Gillian Rose is critical of postmodernism not only for its failure to recognise the limitations to its own condition but also for its failure to recognise the importance of error in social relations. In Loves’ Work she comments as follows on the Judaeo-Christian history:

‘The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, forever and ever. Keep your mind in hell and despair not. … A crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, natural disaster, could be the opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the terrors of the soul, to loose and to bind, to bind and to loose. A soul which is not bound is as mad as one with cemented boundaries’.

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