An Immanence without the World

This essay proposes to rethink the conceptual associations that bind immanence to the secular and oppose it to (divine) transcendence. It asks: What if immanence is divorced from the conceptual opposition between the world and its openings to (divine) other(s), between enclosure and the trace of a transcendent outside? What might arise if immanence is severed from its link with secularity, if it ceases to be merely another conceptual support in secularism’s metaphysical armature? To pursue these questions, the essay engages a variety of materials, including medieval mysticism, anthropological critiques of the secular, work in Black studies, critiques of the subject, and François Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. The result links immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the subject’s self-possession—and entwines it with the undercommons, as the atopic lowest place, rather than with the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its regime of the proper. Immanence is thought of as anti- and antenomian force, a groundless ground coming underneath the conceptual logics of the world, its normative order of things, and life lived according to its distributions. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence opens forth trajectories for its destitution and delegitimation.

“We Are Not Aliens in the Universe”

Marilynne Robinson, in her novels and essays, sets out to retrieve a foundational strain of religious experience, one that has been minimized or even repressed in most branches of the Protestant tradition. This is what, following Paul Ricœur, American theologian David Tracy calls “the manifestation orientation” in religious expression. Building on Tracy’s distinction between “manifestation and proclamation” within Christianity, I identify and analyze a shift of emphasis from the “proclamation orientation” of Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, with its presentation of human existence as radically homeless and alienated, to “manifestation” in Robinson’s later work. In the Gilead novels, while preserving the proclamation orientation of Protestantism through an indictment of social injustice, she corrects the one-sided Protestant emphasis on divine transcendence and human sin, affirming a fundamental “at-home-ness” (Tracy) in the universe. Through her fictional Protestant minister and a creative rereading of classical Protestant theologians, Robinson offers an imaginative alternative to Weberian accounts of Protestant spirituality.

Aristotle, Augustine and Ricœur’s Aporetics of Temporality in Context

Questioning Ricœur’s positioning of Aristotle and Augustine as the founders of the two mutually exclusive conceptions of time that dichotomize the Western tradition, this article suggests that what Ricœur describes as the aporetics of temporality is a product of the modern social time regime. Extracting Aristotle and Augustine’s conceptions of time from this modern problem reveals the Aristotelian so-called “naturalist” view of time as one that rather unifies humans and their world through symbolic mediation, while Augustine’s alleged “subjective” conception of time is read rather as expressing the subordination of time to divine transcendence.

An Inhuman God for Our Inhuman Times

This paper attempts a careful reading of chapter I of Division Two, particularly section 53, on death in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Our aim is to deconstruct some of Heidegger’s assumptions while imagining the margins of his text that could warrant a comparison and contrast with the biblical theological material of the New Testament. In parallel by reading the Synoptic Gospel of Mark on Jesus’s agony in the garden prior to his arrest, trial, death, and resurrection, we can initiate a series of comparisons and contrasts. For Heidegger, there is no conception or idea beyond death, and yet death itself as a possibility, even as the greatest possibility to be, is not like any other point in time that a human being can experience, grasp, remember, or anticipate while they are alive. It is not the witnessing of the medically certified death of another person or animal. Out of this paradox, we will argue for a greater philosophical degree of complexity that Jesus the human being experiences when it comes to the possibility of death and the impossibility to surmount it. In the same token we cannot exclude the theological doctrine of the single hypostatic substance (as two natures) of the historically finite person Jesus as human flesh and divine transcendence. So philosophically speaking, his death is unique even though its event as physical expiration on the Cross is like any other human being. However, the physical death of the human called Jesus does not answer the question of the meaning of death in the split-natured unified hypostatic substance of Christ, the Second Person of the Triune Christian God, which includes the First Person of the Father and the Third Person of the Holy Spirit. By tracing a series of complicated philosophical relations, we hope to contribute to the fields of philosophical theology, albeit a heterodox one, and the philosophy of religion while attending to the inherent secular limits that Heidegger’s philosophy requires in so far as he imagines his project as ‘ontological,’ and not ‘theological’ or ‘historical.’ We conclude with certain philosophical speculations to what is other to both Heidegger’s ontology and mainstream Christian theology.

God beyond Being

Theologians divide as to how best to understand God’s transcendence. Famously, towards the end of his Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius characterized God’s transcendence by saying that God is ‘beyond every denial, beyond every assertion’ and that God ‘lies beyond thought and beyond being’. Many in his wake have followed him in these affirmations. Contemporary analytic philosophers commonly dismiss such claims as unintelligible or inconsistent with basic doctrines of Christianity (e.g. that God exists, is personal, became incarnate). But they are so deeply entrenched in the tradition that it seems a worthwhile effort to try to do them justice. This chapter develops an intelligible account of divine transcendence that accommodates the language of beyondness while at the same time remaining consistent with the truth of central Christian doctrines.

Gender as a Divine Attribute

It is standard within the Christian tradition to characterize God in predominantly masculine terms. Let ‘traditionalism’ refer to the view that this pattern of characterization is theologically mandatory. This chapter seeks to undercut the main motivations for traditionalism by showing that it is not more accurate to characterize God as masculine rather than feminine (or vice versa). The novelty of the argument lies in the fact that it presupposes neither theological anti-realism nor a robust doctrine of divine transcendence, but instead rests heavy theoretical weight on the imago Dei doctrine and the method of perfect-being theology. The chapter closes by examining the implications of its main argument for the moral and liturgical propriety of characterizing God in predominantly masculine terms.

Eric Voegelin and Representation

This chapter discusses the political theory of Eric Voegelin as the earliest example of anti-Schmittian political theology based on the rejection of sovereignty. The chapter shows how Voegelin adopts Schmitt’s suggestion that political theology turns on the idea of a non-electoral representation of political unity but rejects Schmitt’s identification of this representative with the sovereign. Voegelin instead argues that ‘democratic’ societies are characterized by a dual system of representation, where philosophical and theological representatives of the transcendent God stand above sovereign representatives. Conversely, ‘totalitarian’ societies are societies that ‘close’ themselves to divine transcendence because they see salvation as a function of enacting immanent social laws. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between Voegelin’s idea of non-sovereign representation and contemporary accounts of populism, especially that of Ernesto Laclau.