Liberation (from) Theology

A little more talk about vocation, and then I’ll try to leave off the topic for a while.  It’s hard to resist this kind of navel-gazing this early in the blog or, for that matter, so early in my choice to return to school.  Assuming any PhD program will have me.

That said, PhD or otherwise, today I relish my escape from an old brand of Academia, even while tentatively applying for citizenship in another.

“Old” Academia was, for me, generally focused on universals — i.e., truths and abstractions that could conceivably be considered “timeless.”  For instance: Language is malleable and fraught with ambiguity.  Always.  So is theology, religious life, and human being.  Always, always, always. God exists and is good, or at least I’ve vowed to live that way.  Always.

At Regent College, Old Academia was my means of feeling out and then reinforcing these ideas, so I could move on with my life and quit worrying that I was a bad Christian for not believing in an actual place called “Hell” or a God who’d be willing to send someone there.

In that way, “Always” was the focus and mainstay of my graduate studies.  On that note, don’t get me wrong — I’m glad of that.  A little bit of “Always” is a good foundation.  I need some Always in my thinking to support and justify whatever I wind up doing.  But I’m sick of pursuing this Always as an end in itself.  Proving that God exists or that Jesus is worth following is necessary — or at least it has been for me — before moving on to life as a Christian.  But I’m sick of the proving now.  For now.

That’s why I was inspired today to read some of Giovanna Borradori’s Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.  In it, Borradori distinguishes between two types of philosophers (and I think we could say, two types of academics in general).  One, like Bertrand Russel, focuses on making a contribution to society foremost through the exploration of timeless truths.  I think one could also fit in here folks like Plato and Hegel, Kant and Paul Ricoeur.  Timeless truth-folk.  Very good and necessary folk.  That was the kind of academia I found myself sucked into at Regent, when I was still trying to pull some sort of Always out of my own existential chaos. At the time, I needed that.

The other type of philosopher makes her contribution by addressing current — even fleeting — social ills by way of direct and thoughtful critique.  According to this mindset, philosophy (or to stretch things, all academia) is not secondarily but primarily focused on the social and political issues of the day.  Borradori puts Hannah Arendt in this second camp, as well as Habermas and Derrida.

This is the camp in which I’d like to find myself, as a fly in the proverbial soup.  No, God help me, not as a philosopher.  I’m not wired that way, and my brain is about four pounds too light.

What I mean, though, is that I’d love to be anything but timeless.  I’d love to know that whatever work I do will be irrelevant ten years later.  I’d love for whatever books I write — assuming they’d get published at all — to be practically meaningless and forgotten within a generation.  Or less.

We need Always thinkers.  Always has been a crucial chapter in my life; it has helped me to be less flaky, less paralyzed by my own deep seated wishy-washiness.  But I’m more interested in Now now: in addressing post-9/11 politics, World Bank sneakiness, climate change, and faith’s response to them.  Issues that, optimistically, will be discussed in the past tense by the time I’m old.

In short, I’m keen on the idea of throwing a bucket or two of water on this season’s wildfires, instead of waxing eloquent on buckets.  It’s exciting to see that others have done so in the past.

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