Theology Week
Part 4: The joy of humans at play

Previous posts:
Part 1: Some problems with “theology” itself
Part 2: Premises of a “bodily” theology
Part 3: The God, not of foundations but of new things

• • •

I was with him as someone he could trust.
For me, every day was pure delight,
as I played in his presence all the time,.
playing everywhere on his earth,
and delighting to be with humankind.

• Proverbs 8:30-31, Complete Jewish Bible

In his book, The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art, Luke Timothy Johnson begins to develop his thesis that the living God reveals himself in and through human bodies by starting in, what was to me, a surprising place: “The Body at Play.” And while he admits that the Bible itself has little to say about the subject, at least directly or specifically, nevertheless, I think Johnson is perceptive to start here, for human play is “one of the most common, ordinary, and yet remarkable — and revealing — of human activities.”

The human body at play is thus the perfect test for the thesis of this book. If theology can only build on the words of Scripture, then nothing at all theologically important can be thought of or spoken about an activity that is both fundamental to human existence in every known culture, and finds expression in multiple and complex ways. But if theology has to do first of all with what God is up to in the world, and what God is up to is disclosed first of all in the activities of human bodies, then the human activity of play must be regarded as potentially of the greatest significance for theological reflection.

I have an idea that some of you, reading this, might be puzzled or even scoff at the idea that we can learn anything about God or the meaning of life through meditating on humans at play. What in the world does this have to do with theology? 

Well, listen to what Luke Timothy Johnson says:

As with the other short essays that make up the second part of this book, this set of reflections on the body at play is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. It would betray the entire argument I am advancing to pretend to “close the book” on any aspect of human embodiedness. My point throughout is to encourage a certain way of observing real life for the signs of God’s self-disclosure, in the conviction that theologians must learn to think inductively.

This chapter (and those that follow) then, is about helping us see life anew, to see, as it were, its “sacramental” character — God revealed in the common experiences of life in the body and in this world. To encourage this, Johnson shares some of his own observations about the pervasive human activity of “play.”

Following Johan Huizinga, Johnson describes play as “purposeless but meaningful activity.” This distinguishes “play” from “work.” We play simply to play, but we work in order to accomplish something else.

Play shows itself to be meaningful to us by the fact that we make sure it follows rules. The rules serve as boundaries, dividing play off from other spheres of activity and creating, as it were, an alternative world in which we play. The more we master these rules and enter in to the world of the game, the more spontaneous and free we are able to act.

Johnson explains why play is so refreshing: “Play is so deeply satisfying — and even relaxing for both body and spirit — just because it distinctively engages both body and spirit in rhythmic and coordinated movement. It is thus ‘meaningful’ because, in a way not matched in ordinary time and space devoted to work, it gives a sense of being part of something larger within which the presence and activity of our body and spirit is an essential part.”

This “sense of being part of something larger” at its best can be called “transcendence,” asserts Luke Timothy Johnson. And in playful activities, this sense comes in the midst of freely playing. If we were to engage in play in order to achieve the feeling of transcendence, then our play would lose its “purposeless” character and become “work.”

At this point, the author pauses to consider what these things might teach us:

• The pervasiveness of play throughout the world suggests that playful activities are deeply pleasurable and meaningful to all human beings.
• The way we play shows that structure and freedom are not opposed to each other.
• Human willingness to participate with intensity and concentration in made-up worlds of play shows that we long for something beyond survival.
• Play, often engaged in with other humans, shows that it also allows us to participate and appreciate being in a larger “body” than our own individual bodies.
• Play opens us up to experiences of “transcendence” in which “spirit leaps beyond the confines of the individual body and enters into the larger sphere of body-spirit interactions that constitute play.”

These observations remind me of C.S. Lewis’s words about “Joy,” which he himself experienced in reading and in child’s play, and sometimes from out of nowhere. In a letter he once described it like this: “It jumps under one’s ribs and tickles down one’s back and makes one forget meals and keeps one (delightedly) sleepless o’ nights.” He distinguished Joy from mere “happiness” or “pleasure,” though it has elements of both. He noted how we can be disappointed, for example, when we expect Joy from listening to a piece of music and instead it delivers only pleasure. For Lewis, Joy “was something quite different from ordinary life and even from ordinary pleasure; something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension.'”

Of course, when discussing “play” here, we are not just talking about participating in children’s games. All human beings, children and adults alike, have the impulse to play. Luke Timothy Johnson talks about how participating in the arts reveals humans at play. He also has an extremely insightful section about how liturgy and religious ritual is, in effect, believers participating in playful activity. All the things above that characterize play — its pervasiveness among human cultures, its structure and freedom, its “made-up” world within sanctuaries, its corporate nature, and its experiences of transcendence — likewise characterize what people are doing when they worship.

He also notes, however, that like everything else, playful activity can be distorted and corrupted. When “art” becomes commercialized, for example, or put to use for purposes other than creating art itself, it becomes a form of work that does not elevate us as pure art does. Likewise, when games become “sports” driven by money and corporate interests, we inevitably lose something of the “joy” available to us in the game. And what of those things which many have done to corrupt worship?

This chapter has given me joy. In the end, I think Luke Timothy Johnson asks precisely the right (theological) question:

…perhaps play also tells us something about the kind of human activity that is, as a reflection of God, most properly human. Is the deep satisfaction or contentment that humans tend to experience in play — the combination of rest and action, of contemplation and action found intensely in art and worship — an indication of when humans are most fully human?

Theology Week
Part 3: The God, not of foundations but of new things

Previous posts:
Part 1: Some problems with “theology” itself
Part 2: Premises of a “bodily” theology

• • •

It is time that we recognized this foundationalist way of thinking for what it is. In its Christian guise, it represents not the strength of faith but the result of a faith that has lost its nerve. The Christian Scriptures set themselves up not so much as truth claims to be defended by philosophical foundations but as witnesses to the transforming power that no truth claim itself can contain. The gospel is not a “foundation” to render our traditional notions of rationality secure but a remaking of everything, including rationality itself.

• William Stacy Johnson

Today, we consider some thoughts from an essay I find complementary to what I’ve been reading in Luke Timothy Johnson’s  The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art. This is from “Reading the Scriptures Faithfully in a Postmodern Age,” a chapter written by William Stacy Johnson in the book The Art of Reading Scripture by Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays.

Johnson argues that, in reading the Bible and doing theology in the Church we must move beyond “foundationalism,” which Johnson describes as “the modern objectivist attempt to base all our ideas, institutions, and initiatives upon universal all-encompassing, self-evident, and self-legitimating foundations….”

For many Christians, particularly those who hold the doctrine of inerrancy and those who propagate popular presentations of evangelical theology, this is what Scripture is and what it is designed to do for us. As Luke Timothy Johnson put it, the Bible is viewed as a repository of propositional truths that provide an unshakeable foundation for a “Christian worldview,” which it is the Church’s duty to promote and defend. It is the source of “universal, absolute truth” that protects us from the perils of relativism.

If in doing theology we move past seeing the Scripture in these foundational terms, what then do we move toward?

The movement beyond foundations is important not just to our interpretation of the Scriptures but also to our understanding of that to which they bear witness. Neither the Scriptures nor the God to whom they bear witness — in their varying and sometimes conflicting ways — can be reduced to a manipulable “foundation.” Theology’s substantive task today is to gauge the demise of certain classical (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus) and modern (e.g., Descartes, Kant, Hegel) portraits of God that — despite their many differences — had a common tendency to reduce God to an accessible basis on which our world was thought to rest. Theology, in both its classical and modern forms, has had a difficult time freeing itself from pagan antiquity’s assumption that divinity is an abstract aseity, a fixed archē, or beginning, whose essence is to remain forever as it was in the beginning. Eberhard Jüngel has called this the metaphysical concept of God, or the God of theism. Martin Heidegger termed it the God of “onto-theology.” It is the “God” whom we reduce to some sort of “supreme being” — the perfectly timeless, impassible, self-satisfied, self-caused cause upon which the world is thought to rest. Beguiled by this assumption, Western Christian theology has become an inadvertent effort to protect this “God” from the vagaries of finitude and surprise — an effort to free God from any of the attributes or experiences we would ordinarily associate with the ability to have meaningful relationships with others. Throughout the career of Western theology, it seems that the God who says, “Behold, I am doing a new thing” has continued to recede from view. [emphasis mine]

If, on the contrary, we refuse to reduce to a mere foundation for belief the God who is for and with human beings in Jesus Christ by the Spirit’s power, we must take the Bible, and the peculiarities of its form, more seriously. First, we must wrestle with what it means theologically that the truth about God is told in Scripture in the form of a story. It is not enough to point to the biblical narrative and say, in effect, “Look, here is our story; take it or leave it.” Rather, a theology that moves beyond foundations must engage a collection of Scriptures that renders a congeries of stories — stories that are not always saying quite the same thing. The testimony of this passage of Scripture is juxtaposed with the “countertestimony” of that passage of Scripture, and so on. Sometimes the stories are disrupting and strange, portraying God, the main character, in provocative and counterintuitive ways. In addition, the stories are accompanied by other materials that reflect upon them, problematize them, and use them in fascinating and creative ways, as we see, for example, in Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. If the Scriptures do not reduce God to a single perspective, then neither can theology. [emphasis mine]

…[W]e must [also] grapple with what it means theologically that the reality to which these stories bear witness belongs not just to the past but to something that is still unfolding today. The stories of Scripture bear witness to a larger story that is living and not yet finished. Hence, theological interpretation must push beyond viewing the Scriptures as projecting a self-enclosed, already accomplished totality of meaning. What is most important are not the past meanings the stories are thought to contain but the present meanings they continually provoke in the community of faith. [emphasis mine] At the heart and soul of reading the Scriptures faithfully is the constant rehearing of stories — and also of sayings, commandments, prophecies, and other materials — whose repetition helps kindle and inflame, right here, at this very moment, the “new thing” that the God who is for us in Jesus Christ is calling into being.

Theology Week
Part 2: Premises of a “Bodily” Theology

Previous posts:
Part 1: Some problems with “theology” itself

• • •

Today I will simply reproduce an excerpt from Luke Timothy Johnson’s new book, The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art, in order that we might see his premises and discuss them. This is from the Introduction.

Two simple convictions animate this exercise in theology. The first is that the human body is the preeminent arena for God’s revelation in the world, the medium through which God’s Holy Spirit is most clearly expressed. God’s self-disclosure in the world is thus continuous and constant. The second conviction is that the task of theology is the discernment of God’s self-disclosure in the world through the medium of the body. Therefore, theology is necessarily an inductive art rather than a deductive science.

An even simpler premise underlies these convictions: authentic faith is more than a matter of right belief; it is the response of human beings in trust and obedience to the one whom Scripture designates as the Living God, in contrast to the dead idols that are constructed by humans as projections of their own desires. The Living God of whom Scripture speaks both creates the world at every moment and challenges the ways in which human freedom tends toward the distortion of creation — and indeed of the Creator. Among the idols that authentic faith must resist are the idols of human thought concerning God. Living faith remains aware that the most subtle and sophisticated of all idolatries might actually be the one constructed by theologians who claim to know and understand God.

…In this essay I seek to enliven theological language by challenging the sufficiency of abstract propositions for the discernment of God’s work in the world. I do this by using language as a means of observing and thinking about the human experience of God or — perhaps better — of observing and thinking about human bodily experience as the self-disclosure of God’s Spirit in creation. This may seem a slight shift, but it is actually fundamental. I hold that theology seeks to articulate and praise the presence and power of God in the world, and that this power and presence is an ever-emergent reality. In this search for God’s self-disclosure, language takes its proper place as a participant in revelation rather than as the adequate expression of revelation. Actual human experience in the body — inasmuch as we can apprehend it — is taken to be the essential arena of a never-ceasing process of divine revelation.

By shifting theology’s attention to living bodies rather than the ancient texts, I mean to show no disrespect to Scripture or the creeds. Instead, Scripture is restored to its original and proper role of articulating the experience of God in the lives of humans. Its time-conditioned but truthful expression of that experience remains of the greatest importance for the present-day theological task of discerning God’s power and presence in the world. I will try to show that, from the beginning, Scripture functioned as a participation in the process of revelation. It was never intended to be the sole or exclusive repository of truth about the living God. To make such a claim for Scripture — not to mention for interpretations of Scripture — would be to displace the living God with language, and that is idolatrous.

Theology Week at IM
Part 1: Some problems with “theology” itself

I would like to spend some time following up on yesterday’s “Sundays with Michael Spencer” post on theology. Michael’s original post which I excerpted was called “I Hate Theology,” and he specified what he meant when making that striking remark: “I hate what I see theology doing to me.” In unravelling that, Michael listed a number of problems about the way theology may be practiced so as to have deleterious effects on us:

• It may be practiced without humility.
• It may be practiced in a way that bullies real ministry.
• It may be practiced in a way that makes it the enemy of personal devotion.
• It may be practiced in such a way that it acts like it is revelation, not fallible human effort.
• It may be practiced in such a way that it must swat every error in sight.
• It may be practiced in a way that ignores our humanity.

Michael’s piece, therefore, might better have been titled “I Hate the Way Theology Is Practiced.”

Perhaps there are more fundamental problems, however. Maybe theology itself, as we have come to conceive it, is somewhat off base or imbalanced.

As I write these words, I am waiting to receive my copy of a new book by Luke Timothy Johnson, called The Revelatory Body: Theology as Inductive Art. I have thus far only been able to sample the book, but even the small part I’ve read has my theological juices flowing.

You can read the portion I’m working from today at Eerdmans EerdWord blog.

Here, Johnson identifies several problems with our fundamental approach to theology. In particular, he is concerned that we misunderstand the nature, complexity, and background of scripture as a source for our theological thinking. This leads us to do theology in an almost exclusively deductive manner. Luke Timothy Johnson’s book, however, is about doing theology also as an inductive art.

He begins his critique by delineating why it is reasonable for us (especially post-Reformation) to make scripture the starting point for our theological reflections:

• Scripture is more fundamental, rich, and complex than the creeds as a source for theological reflection.
• Scripture is unparalleled in its vivid testimony to the living God’s work in the world.
• Scripture is the necessary and indispensable source of knowledge for the Story of God’s work through Israel and Jesus.
• The way in which scripture interprets the Story of Israel and Jesus provides the enduring symbolic framework for any subsequent theological reflection which is specifically Christian.

However, Luke Timothy Johnson fears that we have misconceptions about the use of scripture in doing theology and that this leads us astray.

First, we don’t respect the complexity of scripture’s witness. Citing Pope John Paul II’s interpretation of the creation stories in Gen. 1-2, he shows how the pope was selective in his reading of scripture, favoring one witness in the Bible over others and never saying why.

The scriptural witness, in short, is complex rather than simple, raises as many questions as it provides answers for. But the pope does not even acknowledge the tensions created by these passages in Paul. Like many other theologians, he does not admit that his ability to find clear answers in the Bible depends a great deal on being carefully selective in what he reads.

That last phrase is a keeper, and one which should give us all pause when we start to declare, “The Bible teaches . . . .”

Second, we use texts of scripture without reading them in their historical and literary contexts. A great deal of the biblical witness is extraordinarily complex and we do not understand it by simply pulling verses out that seem clear to us and basing our theological conclusions upon them. Here’s another succinct and penetrating warning from Johnson:

When passages of Scripture are never actually read but merely cited, Scripture is not fully honored.

Third, we fail to take seriously enough the dialectical character of Scripture and experience. He suggests that there are two levels to this:

First, Scripture is read as a finished product rather than as witness to a dynamic process of interpretation carried out by believers within Israel and the early church. The impetus to write was given by the experience of God in the world, and the writings of the Old and New Testament give testimony, first of all, not to a set of static and systematic truths about reality but to the time-conditioned efforts of humans across the centuries to express the meaning of what God was up to in their lives. Because such interpretations of experience were carried out by diverse persons in diverse circumstances, and in response to different experiences — conquest is not the same as exile, suffering not the same as exaltation — the witness of Scripture is necessarily complex and heterogeneous. When the dynamic process of Scripture’s coming into being is ignored, the true character of Scripture is missed.

But the dialectic with the experience of God in the present is also neglected when the texts of Scripture are arranged into a set of propositions to form a doctrine, and then that doctrine is elaborated into a set of prescriptions for human behavior without giving any attention to the ways in which God is presently at work among God’s people; when that happens, a potentially idolatrous use of Scripture is at work. Scripture is made not merely necessary but also sufficient for theology, and this it cannot be, for the function of the interpretations offered by Scripture is to enable the continuing perception and interpretation of God’s activity here and now. Scripture has been reduced to a storehouse of propositions from which deductions can be made, rather than a collection of witnesses that also enable believers to witness to God’s work and glorify God’s presence among them.

In short, the Bible is not an “authoritative” book in the sense that it is a “handbook” that gives us teachings, answers, and directives for living in a simple, straightforward manner. Not a “storehouse of propositions” but a “collection of witnesses.” These witnesses do not always say things in the same way, nor do they always agree in their conclusions (as we talked about recently in our discussion of biblical “wisdom” literature). This “conversation in God’s kitchen” (as Michael Spencer called it) brings various and sundry ingredients together in a way that ultimately presents us with Christ and new creation.

We too are witnesses, and our task is not simply to be able to describe and categorize what God did in the past, so as to come up with a system of “universal truth” based on an unalterable foundation. This is simply not the kind of revelation God gave.

Doing theology involves responding to a living God and the Word he still speaks.