Theology, Hermeneutics, and Shattering of Foundations - Carl Raschke

7/24/2019 Theology, Hermeneutics, and Shattering of Foundations - Carl Raschke

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Theology, Hermenutica, and theShattering of Foundations

By Carl Raschke

A man who marries the spirit of his

age soon finds himself a widower.

DEAN INGE

ACCORDING TO an ancient Chinese tale, a man once heard a rumorthat somewhere in the high and remote mountains lived a sage who had dis

covered the secret of immortality. The man sold all his possessions, severed

all ties, and went in quest of the sage. After years of searching, he finally

was directed to the home of the famed wise man. But upon arrival he was

informed that the sage was dead.

The story can be construed as a parable concerning the fate of theology

in the twentieth century. Just when theology through the tutelage of such

figures as Bultmann, Tillich, Harvey Cox, Wolfhardt Pannenberg, and Da

vid Tracy has edged away from Scripture and doctrine and toward some

thing known as "secular experience" as the rallying point for its delibera

tions it finds that such a foundation is cracking in its very depths. The "sci

entific" stance which allegedly undergirds and legitimates the world view

of secular humanity and which is supposed to undrape the universe as a

system of calculable regularities is now turned inside out not by mystics or

spirit-seers, but by scientists themselves. Thus Gary Zukav in his book

The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, which digests many of the novel, bizarre, and

seemingly "nonsensical" hypotheses of the "new physics" can refer in goodconscience to "the end of science."1 Similarly, a number of the liberal so

cial and political precepts fashionable over the past twenty years and as

sociated with the "secular" standpoint have fallen under suspicion of late.

In his latest work The Heretical Imperative the sociologist Peter Berger de

cries "any renewed effort to make Christianity palatable to what is deemed

fo be the secular consciousness of modern man." The attempt is fruitless,

Berger insists, because "this modern secularity is in crisis today."2

1. See Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (New

York: William Morrow, 1979).2. Peter Berger,The Heretical Imperative (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980), p.166.


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402 Encounter

In an ironic twist, however, the crisis of secularity and the perplexities

of theology have been wrought by a single, underlying shift that is occasion

ing upheavals throughout the different strata of modern thought. The shift

can be compared to a sudden slippage in the continental plates, as seems to

be happening right now on the West coast, generating widespread and in

tense seismic activity, not to mention unpredictable volcanic eruptions like

that of Mount St. Helens. What we are witnessing is the final shattering of

the foundations of modern consciousness. But these foundations will not

soon be replaced by new ones with a comparable stability. For the infirm

ity of modernity stems from its very preoccupation with securing founda

tions for reflection and action in the first place. It is this persistent "fundamentalism" which, according to Fritjof Capra, has made the scientific estab

lishment as balky toward many of the latest breakthroughs in theoretical

physics as the Roman Catholic inquisitors were when summoned to peer

through Galileo's telescope.3 Such a fundamentalism has also roped off

ready access to what Berger dubs "the fullness of human religious possi

bilities," which has been neglected most egregiously by theologians them

selves.

The origin of such fundamentalism is what I would call our long-stand

ing "Roman" habit of mind. According to the late political philosopher

and social historian Hannah Arendt, Roman civilization was molded on the

idea of the "founding" of urbs aeterna (the "eternal city"). Upon this

foundation rested the "tradition," its evolution and interpretation. The

foundation and its elaboration served as the larger structure of "authority"

against which new developments and notions could be validated. The Ro

man Church with its stress on dogma, papal sovereignty, apostolic succes

sion, and ecclesiastical precedent adopted this outlook wholesale. The Prot

estant reformers, by the same token, did not shed the "Roman" mentality,but merely changed the terms of the situation. Papal authority was trans

lated into the principle of sola scripture ("by Scripture alone"), cumulative

tradition into Gospel witness. One might say the Reformers simply made

the "foundation" of Christianity Pauline instead of Petrine. Protestant con

servatism buttressed by biblical fundamentalism turned out to be nought

but a primitive example of what philosophers nowadays denote as "founda-

tionalist" thinking.

The transmutation of Christianity according to the Roman prototype

is sketched by Arendt.

Th b i f th Ch h it f b li d bli i ti


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Theology, Hermeneutics, and the Shattering of Foundations 403

faith remained its content) or the Hebrew obedience to the commands of

God, but rather the testimony of the life, of the birth, death, and resur

rection, of Jesus of Nazareth as a historically recorded event. As witnesses to this event the Apostles could become the "founding fathers" of

the Church, from whom she would derive her own authority as long as

she handed down their testimony by way of tradition from generation

to generation.4

Yet this fundamentalism, or "foundationalism," is not restricted to re

ligion entirely. A century after Luther tore up and laid afresh the grounds

of theological inquiry, Descartes dismantled with his method of hyperbolic

doubt the unwieldy edifice of Medieval philosophy and sought a new "Archi-

median point" or foundation for human understanding in the guise of hiscogito ("I think"). Descartes initiated the secular divorce of philosophy

from theology and helped to release the former from its role as a hand

maiden to the latter, while conscripting it instead into the service of the

empirical and mathematical sciences. Descartes narrowed the modern

philosophical enterprise to the domain of epistemologythe examination of

the basic principles and criteria of knowledge.

Recently the philosopher Richard Rorty has gained attention by force

fully arguing that epistemology itself,which he views as just another species

of foundationalism, must be called into question. Whereas philosophy from

the seventeenth century onwards presumed that its judgments could be anch

ored in the bedrock of certain indubitable "facts" or "clear and distinct

ideas," the new awareness of both conceptual and methodological relativism

has undercut any search for fundamental truths. In Rorty's words, "the

application of such honorifics as 'objective' and 'cognitive9is never anything

more than an expression of the presence, or the hope for, agreement among

inquirers."5 Modern epistemology, from Immanuel Kant to Bertrand Rus

sell, has labored under the illusion that it can gauge all propositions andclaims to knowledge against what Rorty refers to as "privileged representa

tions"i.e., notions or criteria which, because of their prestige and ready

applicability, can be invoked without dissension to ascertain what is genuine

and what is counterfeit in human experience. Such privileged representa

tions, however, proved to be little more than cathechismal formulae sanc

tioned by the clerisy of letters and science to enforce a common and ex

emplary kind of "rational" discourse as the lingua franca of advanced civi

lization. The upshot of the Enlightenment critique of institutional Chris

tianity was not the elimination of dogma and priestcraft. The result wassimply a substitution of the logic textbook for the breviary.


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404 Encounter

Rorty's assault on foundationalism and "objectivism" in philosophy,

moreover, has been matched by a comparable "revisionary" movement in

scientific cosmology, especially among physicists.0 Physicists in the modern

era have been pace-setters for new trends in scientific thinking at large, and

we should not expect anything different this time around. Just as Newton's

descriptions of the movements of celestial orbs and falling bodies eventually

served as the scaffolding for mechanistic explanations of everything from

molecular behavior to human actions, so the new physics stands fair to alter

drastically our now "common sense" and "self-evident" views of the greater

universe, many of which are justified every day in the dame of "science."

We are all familiar with Einstein's theories concerning the relative characterof observation and motion, not to mention his demonstration of the contingent

character of time and space, which both Newton and the average person have

taken to be immutable and absolute. Yet we are not so acquainted with

some of the most recent developments in quantum physics, which has de

molished such "foundational" assumptions as the existence of "matter."

According to Capra,

. . . classical concepts like 'elementary particle,' 'material substance' or'isolated object,' have lost their meaning; the whole universe appears asa dynamic web of inseparable energy patterns.7

Some physicists would argue that even "energy" is too substantialist a term.

Like Rorty, today's physicists are insisting that there can be no such thing

as a correspondence between an idea and an object. Indeed, they call into

question whether there are "objects" in the world to be cognized at all.

Unfortunately, contemporary theology seems not to have even become

acquainted with, let alone profited from such discoveries. Set adrift from

the breakdown, first, of traditional belief and the breakup, secondly, of the

mortar of secular intelligence contemporary theologians have desparatelyendeavored to rescue themselves by merging their agendas with specific

cultural concerns (e.g., "political theology"). Yet those ploys are tanta

mount to grabbing a chunk of flotsam before plunging over the waterfall.

Foundationalism is, like Rome, inherently imperialistic (or, more mildly

phrased, "hegemonistic"); it asserts the absolute priority or inviolability

of some mode of knowledge. It is either rigidly retrospective and shackled

to tradition or it remains bewitched by present fads. Faddism itself arises

as a desperate stab at maintaining pride of place when one's former position

and privileges have slipped away. Loss of identity, methodological frag-

6 S i l "Th N C l d h O i f M h i " Phil h


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Theology,Hermeneutics, and theShattering ofFoundations 405

mentation, and topical superficiality are camouflaged by sundry efforts to

craft a distinctly "theological" perspective on the ever fluctuating desiderataof secular sensibility. When theological argument can no longer appeal to

theDeus vult ("God wills it"), it can at least fall back upon theconsensus

gentium.

A perhaps irremediable weakness of theology is that it is foundational

by its very nature. Aristotle, who was the first to use the word "theology"

consistently, characterized it in his Metaphysics as the investigation of

archai, which can be translated as "ultimate foundations." Christian the

ology has always appealed in some measure to Biblical revelation as its

foundational starting point. Or it has calibrated Christian symbols andconfessional statements against some authoritative set of secular categories,

as in Tillich's "method of correlation." Thus the closure of the era of

foundationalist thinking betokens what I in my own book The Alchemy of

the Wordhave termed "the end of theology."8 The end of theology, like the

"end of science" in Zukav's sense, implies not the cessation of what might be

loosely imagined as "theological" conversation, but abstention from any

"theologizing" that recurs to privileged representations such as kerygma,

doctrine, or even "God" in the doctrinaire meaning of the word.

But what is left standing when the foundations have been decisively

fractured? In philosophy, Rorty tells us, the movement must be from

foundationalism to "hermeneutics." Within the ambit of foundationalist

theology "hermeneutics" has meant the interpretation of some ancient credo.

That is why in Protestant thought hermeneutics has been controlled by Bib

lical exegetes. Rorty, however, views hermeneutics as an ongoing "conver

sation," shorn of presuppositions, between rival methods and viewpoints as

an ever unwinding thread of continuity within the intricate tapestry of

pluralism. But even Rorty's commendation of the hermeneutical alternative misses some of its more intriguing prospects.

"Hermeneutics" derives from the Greekhermeneinwhich can be trans

lated literally as "to interpret." But it has a more original and important

connotation as well. It can also mean "to manifest" or to "appear unex

pectedly." Every "hermeneutical" insight is a kind of unbidden disclosure,

the decoding of a secret message on the runes of time. The Greek god

Hermes was the bearer of tidings from the underworld. The radical mean

ing of "hermeneutics" is akin to that of "revelation." It does not indicate"revelation" in the confessional or even the Scriptural vein, but with regard

t t di ti d ti i t d fl h f di i i ithi


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406 Encounter

the existing order of things. Hermeneutics, therefore, is an invitation to the

viewing of the divine inbreaking in hidden places, a ticket to the theater of

God's surprises. Theological foundationalism has assumed for more than

a millenium that "revelation" was an event from the irretrievable past; but

the openness of the hermeneutical attitude permits divine showings and the

activation of cosmic connections within the "unified field" of nature and

history.

Moreover, it is precisely the hermeneutical, as opposed to the founda

tionalist, perspective which prevails in the new physics. The older New

tonian mechanism was hewn from a foundationalist paradigm. The newphysics, however, is "hermeneutical," because it trades on the ancient, Greek

meaning of the word physis which can be rendered as "growth," "emer

gence," or "manifestation." Or, as Zukav observes, within the new physical

paradigm, individual "things" or events

. . . are no longer separate entities. They are different forms of the same

thing. Everything is a manifestation. It is not possible to answer the

question, "Manifestation of what?" because the "what" is that which is

beyond words, beyond concept, beyond form, beyond even space and

time. Everything is a manifestation of what which is9

Hermeneutical vision catches sight of the divine, the "that which is," in its

multiple intimations and linkages. The new cosmology centers around what

the British physicist David Bhm has designated as "the implicate order."

In such a universe, according to another physicist Jack Sarfatti, "all things

are interconnected."10 The new physics, like the ancient religious mystics,

conceives not a "block universe," as William James put it, but an open ex

panse of infinite possibilities.

If physics, the queen of the "hard sciences," can attune our minds to

the ever impinging mystery that homo religiosus has symbolized and wor

shipped as "God," then theology has much catching up to do. The shatter

ing of the foundations of secular thought represents both an ending and be

ginning for modern civilization. Through the fissures in the weathered slabs

of the ruined temple springs of new vegetation must struggle toward the

sunlight. This shattering constitutes an end to our conventional presump

tions and certainties about the texture of reality and the beginning of a far-reaching "space probe" across the outer limits of human understanding and

beyond Theology as well as modern thinking must relinquish any nos


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Theology, Hermeneutics,and theShattering ofFoundations 407

talgic yearning for the erection of new "foundations." For knowledge can

neither be segmented or grounded. We may take to heart the words of theGerman poet Schiller:

Only the totality leads to clarity,And in the abyss alone dwells truth.


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Theology, Hermeneutics, and Shattering of Foundations - Carl Raschke

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