Jeffrey W. Robbins

The Gift of Unbelief

In a recent address at a major international conference on ‘‘Belief and Metaphysics,’’ the radical orthodox theologian John Milbank suggested that after the past century of antimetaphysics – a century that, coincidentally, witnessed unparalleled destruction and terror in the form of world war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation – we are now living in a ‘‘metaphysical moment.’’ This paper is at least partly intended to take a step back in order to reexamine this sweeping characterization of the last century as suggested by Milbank, to question and to problematize whether the twentieth century is rightly thought of as being antimetaphysical. For instance, if we consider three cases in point – the hermeneutical, pragmatic, and existentialist – these indicate not an antimetaphysical stance caught up in an oppositional logic but more properly speaking a post-metaphysical stance in the sense that they each take off where speculative metaphysics ends. Or in the more hermeneutical sense, each of these intellectual options dwells historically in the ruins that metaphysics has left behind. This point of distinction is not merely semantic; rather, it has important ramifications for how we read the so-called postmodern return of the religious, and how we evaluate the contemporary threats of fanaticism and violence. For instance, in Milbank’s defense of theological metaphysics he correctly observes that it is not the Roman Catholic Church, a church steeped in the Thomistic tradition, that is the contemporary source of fanaticism and terror. While this observation may be correct, the connection drawn from this observation to the conclusion that the antidote to religious fanaticism and terror is a renewed commitment to metaphysics based on more firmly held religious beliefs and a clearer sense of religious authority is not self-evident. On the contrary, there are those such as the Italian hermeneutic philosopher Gianni Vattimo who argue that in spite of the Catholic Church’s at times violent and exclusionary past, the reason that it is no longer the source of fanaticism and terror is because it has been weakened, and thus has eschewed its metaphysical pretensions. Further, it is precisely where its metaphysical assumptions have not been sufficiently dissolved (e.g., in the realm of sexual politics) that it fails to live up to its mission as an agent of peace and reconciliation in the world. Regarding Vattimo more directly, he has famously written that ‘‘the end of metaphysics and the death of the moral God have liquidated jeffrey w. robbins

Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2005. text of its writing, is the process by which the prayer came to be attributed to the sixteenthcentury pietist theologian F. C. Oetinger through the casual plagiarism of the German scholar Theodor Wilhelm, who used the prayer in a book on politics, which he published pseudonymously (and inexplicably) under the name “Friedrich Oetinger.” Sifton notes wryly that “the German subplot of the Serenity Prayer story was truly bizarre” (343). Even more bizarre was Wilhelm’s carelessness in correcting the mistake when the true author of the prayer was identified to him. The Serenity Prayer has taken on a life of its own, and traveled considerably beyond the small town of Heath where it had its birth. Surely Reinhold Niebuhr could never have expected that his short prayer for grace, courage, and wisdom would have become a foundation stone for the self-help movement. Sifton notes his very mixed feelings as his prayer found its way onto a broad array of kitsch (much of which was sent to him through friends). Yet, in The Serenity Prayer Sifton gives an honorable accounting of the true history and meaning of this prayer. By recapturing its historical context and its theological essence, Sifton reinvigorates the power of its words. She rightly notes that “the Serenity Prayer is not just a familiar, agreeable cliché. After all, its instructions are tremendously difficult and puzzling to follow” (11). But prayer at its best, and public prayer in particular, should challenge us and puzzle us. Otherwise, prayer simply becomes the enforcement of mediocrity through recitation. The Serenity Prayer, as Niebuhr prayed it in Heath and as Elizabeth Sifton tells its tale, helps us to understand the motivating and disruptive power of prayer. Scott R. Paeth DePaul University, Chicago, IL spaeth@depaul.edu

The Political Becoming of Hermeneutics

In his book, The Reckless Minds: Intellectuals in Politics, Mark Lilla rehearses the familiar condemnation of Martin Heidegger for his association with the Nazi Party. For Lilla, Heidegger is just one of many contemporary intellectuals who has no business commenting on, or involving oneself in, politics: Better to avoid the political sphere altogether than run the risk of the philosophical love of wisdom degenerating into what Lilla terms a philotyranny. In contrast to Lilla, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala accomplish the nearly unthinkable task, not only taking on the mantle of Heidegger for their entirely original and sorely needed articulation of the meaning of the politics of hermeneutics, but convincingly demonstrate that a truly Heideggerian politics would be communistic, not fascist. In so doing, Vattimo and Zabala not only reinvigorate the politics of the left, but even more, they redefine and redirect philosophical hermeneutics. As such, it can be argued that Hermeneutic Communism is the first salvo in the political becoming of hermeneutics.

Changing Ontotheology: Paul Tillich, Catherine Malabou, and the Plastic God

By his identification of God with being-itself Paul Tillich is an ontotheologian par excellence. As Charles Winquist affirms: “Tillich is not a postmodern theologian. He clearly works within the ontotheological tradition.”1 Indeed, Tillich may be seen as the last unabashed ontotheologian. While this relatively straightforward claim has been contested by many leading scholars of Tillich, it will be my argument that the radical Tillich is the ontotheological Tillich.2

Conclusion: The Event

The New Materialism is a radical theological sketch for a potential postcapitalist world. We need to learn how to think and how to live, and this is what theology is truly about, when it stops being a conservative investment in the status quo or nostalgia for another world in the past or future. To learn means always to relearn, to learn again and again. It is a repetition, but not a repetition of the same or the identical. It is what Deleuze calls a repetition of difference. And it is what we are calling here an event.1

Being (a Brain)

In Book Two of his Metaphysics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle asks the question of being. His task is to “study the things that are, qua being.”1 Being refers fundamentally to substance, but there are multiple substances and “many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be.’”2 Aristotle affirms that being exists as a multiplicity or a plurality, rather than a simple unity. All humans by nature desire to know being, or what is, but the answer is not easy or simple or self-evident. In this chapter, we will affirm that being is energy transformation, which is the conclusion of the previous chapters. At the same time, we will suggest that being as energy is also becoming a brain, which means not just a physiological brain but the possibility of complexity, a fold of being that takes the form of what Gilles Deleuze calls a time-image.

Creston Davis, John Milbak and Slavoj Žižek, eds, Theology and the Political: The New Debate

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2007. Importantly, Williams also interpreted the incarnation as proof that the terms of the human covenantal relationship with God had been changed. Williams argued that Christ’s coming indicated that God was no longer the deity of a single nation-state, wherein it was appropriate to use political means to enforce religious orthodoxy. Williams believed that the incarnation represented a sharp break with this Old Testament pattern; now Christ has come for all and has utilized spiritual means to further His kingdom. Unlike Cotton, whose theology emphasized the Massachusetts Bay Colony as the continuance of the special relationship God had established with Israel, Williams insisted that Christ’s incarnation reveals the rationale for a separation between the powers of the church and the powers of the state. Of course, Davis’s focus on Williams’s incarnational theology reinforces the author’s point that Williams is to be considered an important early American theologian, whose political arguments were developed on firm theological grounds. The last major aim of Davis’s book is to point to Williams as a compelling model of a theologian who successfully retained his theological commitments (often stubbornly so) while also engaging the broader secular community in pursuit of the common good. Davis claims that Williams is a refreshing alternative in Christian ethics between “the universalist’s tendency to theological dissolve and the communitarian’s threat of public withdrawal” (117). Davis argues that Williams shows that the relationship between Christian convictions and universal moral claims “need not be fundamentally adversarial,” and “one need not always retain the right to trump the other” (xiii–xiv). Davis ably demonstrates that Williams’s Christian convictions were not in fundamental contradiction with his universal moral commitments, and that these convictions indeed strengthened his commitment to universal moral norms. Williams was able to maintain commitments to both moral universalism and theological particularity because the resources of his Reformed tradition (conscience, natural law) facilitated a creative synthesis between universal and particular moral commitments. Christian Rice Harvard Divinity School crice@hds.harvard.edu