A Dark Night of the Soul with the Nightlight Switched on: Some Thoughts on Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity

 

I’ve just finished reading Katharine Sarah Moody’s excellent book Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity. In it she gives an brilliant overview of John Caputo’s Deconstructive Theology and Slavoj Žižek’s Materialist Theology, as well as the work of Kester Brewin and myself.

While the works of Caputo and Žižek have often been regarded as having an antagonistic relationship, Moody draws out how much their thinking overlaps and compliments each other. While noting some differences, her work draws out how they share much in common. A position that I also advocate.

In the second half of the book Moody explicitly turns her attention to my work and critically engages with it.

While she is broadly sympathetic to my project, Moody has one main concern which she explores in chapter nine. There she writes of how my work can reproduce a perverse logic in which one actively embraces doubt, questioning and even the betrayal of ones tradition, precisely as a means of ensuring that it stays pretty much the same (the transgression upholds the law).

While Moody sees this as more of a problem in my early work, particularity How (Not) to Speak of God, she notes that many people use that book as a type of Rosetta stone when approaching my later work. In this way, any potentially non-perverse readings of Christianity that one finds in books like The Divine Magician are obscured or domesticated.

To grasp her point we need only think of the many religious leaders today who advocate the embrace of doubt, ambiguity and complexity. But who attempt to frame this as is sanctioned, even celebrated by God. In other words, the argument is that one can doubt God precisely because God is still there and can handle it. My friend Jay Bakker once commented that this is like having a dark night of the soul with the night light switched on.

I can very much see Moody’s point here and think that she is putting her finger on an important issue. However, there is a sense in which my very expression of perverse reading of Christianity is employed precisely as a means of delegitimating it.

Naming a perverse structure is already a move to undermine it. Take the example of the “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy concerning homosexuality and the military. The point is that this policy named what was already the secret (perverse) position of the military. The act of actually naming it meant that what the perverse logic needed (its secret transgression) was stripped away. To name it explicitly was to undermine it and pave the way for greater equality. Once the ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy was put in place it was almost inevitable that it would collapse in on itself.

In a community where people are privately having all kinds of doubts, the work of shinning light on it is a step in the path to a religionless faith. Of course this is a little idealistic, as there are any number of people who are now affirming doubt on small things, while trying to make sure people don’t doubt the big things. But exposing the secret doubt and questioning makes it easier to expand upon it to the point that it puts everything under erasure. This is an act designed to reconfigure the perverse structure into a more productive neurotic one (one that openly questions and doubts its religious framework).

Once the institution is repositioned in this way, it is only a small step to help it move ‘beyond neurosis’ into a type of collective in which God as a Big Other is done away with and returns as the name given to the bond of the community given to the world.

An example of this can be seen in the work of David Bazan. He has noted that his very swan song to Christianity, the album Curse Your Branches, actually seemed to reveal to him the subversive heart of Christianity. As a young man he had harbored various doubts and questions, but there came a point when he pushed them as far as he could and as publicly as he could. Yet, in his attack of actually existing religion he found himself returning to an elusive liberating potential housed there. A move that Caputo would call a sensitivity to the event housed in the very name of Christianity.

My work has been an ongoing work of showing that this doubt and questioning, when taken absolutely seriously, collapses the religious structure rather than allowing it to remain. More than this, my more recent books have tried to show that this very movement is an act of fidelity to the subversive heart of Christianity. Not a fidelity to the religious structure we see today.

My argument in brief is that one should not read my later books through the lens of my earlier ones, nor the other way around, but rather see how they together chart a path through psychotic institutions (marked by certainty), past perverse ones (marked by secret doubt) into neurotic ones (where the institution openly embraces auto-deconstruction). And that this is all part of my wider project to express forms of community ‘beyond neurosis.’