Heidegger on the flight from the world

"Into the position of the vanished authority of God and of the teaching office of the Church steps the authority of conscience, obtrudes the authority of reason. Against these the social instinct rises up. The flight from the world into the suprasensory is replaced by historical progress. The otherworldly goal of everlasting bliss is transformed into the earthly happiness of the greatest number. The careful maintenance of the cult of religion is relaxed through enthusiasm for the creating of a culture or the spreading of civilization. Creativity, previously the unique property of the biblical god, becomes the distinctive mark of human activity. Human creativity finally passes over into business enterprise."
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Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (Garland Pub., 1977), 64.

Det transcendentas nya synlighet

"For a time it was fashionable in some revolutionary circles to suggest that liberation was to be found only beyond the confines of [transcendence]. If humanity was to overcome the afflictions of this present age, then a genuinely revolutionary politics must eschew, indeed escape, the constrictions of [transcendence]. Now . . . the dismissal of [transcendence] is being reconsidered. While totalizing discourse may be anathema and practice celebrated, it is recognized that liberation hinges upon a prior ontology that maps the trajectories of the constitutive power of life. [And] for a time it was also popular to espouse a militant atheism, to insist that liberation, if it is to be truly liberative, reject appeals to transcendence (and its handmaid, theology) in accord with the received prejudice that transcendence was but a species of opiate."

Creston Davis citerar Daniel Bell i The Monstrosity of Christ, s. 4

Om immanens och transcendens

Alltid intressanta Cruciform Phronesis tipsade nyligen om att senaste numret av Modern Theology (26:3) innehåller flera artiklar som diskuterar Charles Taylors monumentala A Secular Age. Av det jag hunnit läsa hittills fastnade jag särskilt för Stanley Hauerwas och Romand Coles artikel, med dess synpunkter på Taylors användning av begreppsparet immenens/ transcendens:

We share Taylor's judgement that when the Christian faith is identified with a civilizational order, Christians loose sight of the full transformation to which Christians should be committed.
...
We worry however that Taylor's use of the immanent/trancendent duality may reproduce the habits of a Christianity that still longs to be a civilizational order. It does so just to the extent such a scheme can tempt us, Christian and non-Christian alike, to think that our primary concern is maintaining a place for trancendence. But that is to make immanence and trancendence free-standing concepts lacking Christological discipline. For Christians immanence first and foremost names that God became man that we might participate in the very life of God. So nothing can be more immanent than God with us. Trancendence, moreover, is not simply another name for William James' "more," but rather the other side of God's immanence. For Christians transcendens first and foremost is the acknowledgement that death could not hold him.

Amen!

Om pengars transcendens

Jag läste nyligen The Politics of Discipleship av Graham Ward. (Rekommenderas varmt!) Ward påminner där om att alla politiska föreställningar vilar på, eller implicerar, någon form av metafysik. Dessa, oftast implicita, föreställningar kan antingen vara goda och fostra mänskligt välstånd och välbefinnande, eller skadliga genom att de förminskar vad det innebär att vara människa.

Ward menar att till exempel globalisering och kapitalism är korrumperade kopior av den kristna berättelsen, som istället för att ta det materiella på allvar enbart försöker att transcendera dem. Frågan som Ward ställer är vilken underliggande antropologi eller metafysik som ligger bakom tidens trender och förhärskande berättelser. För Ward handlar ett kristet lärjungaskap om att kritiskt granska och avslöja dessa underliggande teologiska och metafysiska antaganden.

"The politics of Christian discipleship is about first unmasking the theological and metaphysical sources of current mythologies and revealing the distortions and perversions of their current secularized forms. Then we need to reread and rewrite the Christian tradition back into contemporary culture."[1]

En teolog som tycks ta Wards uppmaning på allvar är Philip Goodchild som nyligen skrivit Theology of Money. I en intressant artikel om sin bok skriver Goodchild:

"Modern economics and politics—and even, to some extent, sociology—are based on the idea of human freedom. And they intend to advise us on the choices that we make. But they are ill-equipped for understanding money because transcendent obligations are put aside from the start, and confined to the sphere of ‘religion’ or ‘superstition.’"

"An implicit agenda of the book is to propose that theology must become a critical engagement with the actual fundamental forces and structures that shape our lives, rather than simply a reflection upon past traditions, or an impotent recommendation of ideals that itself presupposes humanism as the power to realise such ideals. In this respect, a rather tentative proposal for institutional reform of money, banking, credit, and evaluation is part of the new theological agenda."

Det låter väl spännande!? Överst på 2010 års läslista står nu Phillip Goodschilds Theology of Money. Det finns dessutom en intressant diskussion om boken att delta i här!

För fler teologer som nyligen tagit sig an marknaden och ekonomin ur ett teologiskt perspektiv, se D. Stephen Long och William Cavanaugh.

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[1] Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Baker Academics, 2009). s.165

Om konst utan transcendens

"Secular art today has all too often lost sight of this great gift of art, to transcend the human moment in the very act of capturing it. Instead it is too full of big gestures that squelch to dust human endeavour, quite literally in the case Roger Hiorns' pulverisation of a passenger aircraft engine. I detest the cynicism about humanity that clings to the conceptual nooks and crannies of secular, ironic, postmodern art." - Shirley Dent

Joel, som uppmärksammade mig på artikeln, skriver:
"Dent menar att det som gör den kristna konsten stor är inte dess "gudomlighet", utan dess fundamentala mänsklighet, och på motsvarande sätt resulterar den sekulära konsten i en tragisk reduktionism. Humanismen blir en nihilism, liksom."

Självklart är dock den "kristna" konsten egentligen först och främst mänsklig, och inte kristen. Först människa, sedan kristen således ...

En aspekt av varför detta är viktigt att framhålla har att göra med insikten om att "... when ´Christian´ is used as an adjective you can be confident that you are reproducing the habits of Constantinianism".