ends and odds

I’ve tweaked a few tweaks and found a few more ways for folks to connect to the few words that appear here from time to time:

1. If you’d like to receive posts via email, you can feed your address to a new little box in the sidebar (down at the bottom) and any new post will be delivered to your inbox within fifteen minutes (or it’s free!). Sorry no dipping sauce for the crusty bits.

2. If you are a facebookee, you can follow the blog via facebook and see new posts as news events within your regular feeds. Sign up here. While you are there, I’m apparently three people shy of being “confirmed” as the disreputable author of this blog (whatever that accomplishes). Most days I’m still fairly certain that I am indeed Eric Daryl Meyer, if you agree, there’s a button for you to express such opinions.

3. I’ve recently joined Twitter, you can find me there as: ericdaryl

While we’re at it, here are a few posts (of varying freshness) that I’ve recently found insightful, illuminating, or entertaining:

Brad flushes out more rats than he knows what to do with.

R.O. analyzes his lack of enthusiasm.

Craig parses some differences within Critical Animal Studies

on gender and God :: Gregory of Nyssa

“No one can adequately grasp the terms pertaining to God. For example, mother is mentioned in place of ‘father’ (Song 3:11). Both terms mean the same, because the divine is neither male nor female (for how could such a thing be contemplated in the divinity, when it does not remain intact permanently for us human beings either? But we all shall become one in Christ, we will be divested of the signs of this distinction together with the whole of the old man). Therefore, every name found [in Scripture] is equally able to indicate the ineffable nature, since the meaning of the undefiled nature is contaminated by neither female nor male….Hence the Song says that a crown is placed upon the bridegroom by his mother. Since the nuptials and bride are one, one mother places the crown upon the bridegroom’s head.”

Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, Homily 7.

image and likeness in Saint Basil and the ecology of the soul

It is commonplace among early Christian writers to distinguish between the image of God and the likeness of God in humanity (rooted in Genesis 1:27), though the distinction made theologically significant in various ways. While his younger brother Gregory rejects the distinction, Basil of Caesarea employs it with some regularity. This passage caught my eye today:

“Now, he has made us with the power to become like God, he let us be artisans of the likeness to God, so that the reward for the work would be ours. Thus we would not be like images made by a painter, lying inertly, lest our likeness should bring praise to another. For when you see an image exactly shaped like the prototype, you do not praise the image, but you marvel at the painter. Accordingly, so that the marvel may become mine and not another’s, he has left it to be to become according to the likeness of God. For I have that which is according to the image in being a rational being, but I become according to the likeness in becoming Christian.” [1]

In what precedes this excerpt, Basil has been quite clear that human beings exist according to the image of God as a function of their rationality—primarily expressed in ruling over the animals. As Basil continues, it becomes evident that to craft one’s life according to the likeness of God is to adopt the Pauline clothing metaphor and “put on” Christ as a garment.

At this point I wonder if there is some tension between the image and likeness, wherein the likeness of God (paradigmatically visible in the life of Jesus) actually begins to shape and determine the image (practical reason in its ruling function) in such a way as to introduce a kenotic humility and attitude of service into its exercise. This reading is at odds with Basil, but perhaps not so much as to contradict his broader intentions.

Reading this way recognizes a certain tension between the archetypical Image of God in Christ (who in the course of Basil’s homily primarily appears as the almighty Pantocrator) and the likeness of God which human beings are to “put on” perfecting their own kindness, charity, and virtue in emulation of Jesus. Secretly, and against the grain, I see the life of Jesus breaking into Basil’s text at this point, opening up fissures in his thoroughly confident notion of the power of reason (Logos in the Greek, of course) through which trickles of living water pour.

This kind of “crafting” would also temper the spirituality which Basil enjoins upon his hearers. Basil moves very quickly from the rule that human beings exercise over the animals to the analogous rule that human beings are to exercise over their own irrational passions and vices. Both animals and passions are subdued by reason. Most of Basil’s examples of reason exercising dominion over animals, however, are instances where human beings kill, cage, or domesticate by force. As a model for spiritual discipline (not to mention as a model for relating to animals generally), this is perhaps somewhat lacking. Attempting to eradicate one’s passions and vices by clubbing, spearing, and caging them is often an exercise in repression—one that ends in futility and frustration. The Pantocrator model of spirituality presumes unrealistic control on the part of a the subject by presuming that passions can actually be bludgeoned into submission.

Better, perhaps, is the spirituality whereby the passions are tamed by giving them a distance, recognizing their power but neither capitulating to them nor seeking to slaughter them on the spot. The sort of charity that Jesus showed to sinners in caring for their immediate needs without condoning their sin or joining in it provides a better model for confronting the disreputable elements within my own character.

[1] Basil of Caesarea, On the Human Condition, trans. Nonna Verna Harrison (Crestwood, NY: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005), 44.

the demise of a doctrine? :: Weinandy and Tilley

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

–G.K. Chesterton

While this quip from Chesterton may not quite capture the contours of the conversation, may it at least bring a touch of humor to an unfortunately acrid encounter between Terry Tilley and Thomas Weinandy.

For those who are unfamiliar with the situation (and care to acquaint themselves further): Tilley (who, in the interest of full disclosure, chairs the department where I am a student) delivered the presidential address at the CTSA this summer on three Christological impasses. Weinandy responded, pointing to what he regarded as superficial, fallacious, and theologically dangerous elements in that address. This article subsequently sensationalized the conflict. Tilley gave a short reply, to which Weinandy added a full stop. I, on the other hand, learned about the whole mess from a fellow student.

Being neither Roman Catholic nor a member of the CTSA, I am an outsider to this conversation in many regards; but I am also, perhaps, uniquely prepared to comment on it, having taken a course on Christology from Tilley and worked carefully through several of Weinandy’s texts on the same subject. Furthermore, this conflict raises questions about the nature of the theological task and the relation of contemporary theologians to a normative tradition (and about the nature of theological normativity itself). I hope to comment on the larger issues afoot in this conversation without getting too far embroiled in the ecclesial politics surrounding them.

Weinandy’s reading of Tilley’s address is not charitable; that much is hard to dispute. Weinandy’s reading is best explained by a perception (perhaps a fear?) that Tilley’s address is indicative of a larger glacial shift, one that remains largely unspoken in the address itself, but which nevertheless represents the slow drift of academic theology into vapid conformity with an anti-ecclesial culture. Weinandy’s concerns about “relativism” and “style” certainly sound this note (though I should add, having been graded by Tilley, I can personally attest that his Christological relativism is not absolute!). To my mind, the most prescient question is less whether Weinandy responded to Tilley’s address with sufficient care and charity, (I am convinced that he did not) but whether this larger perception/fear is justifiable and whether it is justifiably applied to Tilley, or whether it is altogether misplaced.

So, where precisely is the disagreement?

Weinandy and Tilley agree in speaking about the task of theology in terms of clarifying or illuminating the mysteries of faith, taking care not to misrepresent or prematurely resolve those mysteries. Yet, Weinandy accuses Tilley of a determination to explain away the mysteries of faith in the kind of resolution of paradox that has historically marked heretical movements. And in his defense of the CDF, Tilley likely sees Weinandy upholding an unhealthily narrow fixation on particular terminology, a cathexis that distorts the concepts originally communicated by that terminology—to the detriment of the faith. In other words, both see each other defending a position that would lead to the collapse of the mysteries of faith, putting the task of theology at risk either in the stalemate of a dogged dogmatic insistence on the sufficiency of fifth-century terminology or in capitulation to a contemporary rationalistic historicism averse to any advent of the supernatural (such as the Incarnation).

So, it would seem that Tilley and Weinandy agree about the task of theology, but differ substantially on how to carry out this task. Weinandy, the historical theologian, would have us accept the dogmatic formulations of conciliar history, and then illuminate these formulae by filling out their meaning through distinctions, elaborations, and elucidations that maintain the absolute integrity of the verbal formulae used. The theologian is to explain the Christological formula of Chalcedon, for example, from the inside taking the propositional content of the formula as a foundation. The tradition’s normativity for Weinandy is largely propositional (though, I think that for Weinandy this normativity includes the cultural-intellectual framework where those propositions arose, i.e. the Christian-Platonic synthesis).

Tilley, the constructive theologian, would have us labor at some length to understand Scripture and the negotiated settlements of the conciliar tradition, and then to communicate the living truth of the tradition in the terms that best make that truth present in the contemporary situation. The theologian is to work in radical continuity with the tradition precisely by extending the tradition into the present. The tradition’s normativity for Tilley, then, is largely conceptual, and thus to a degree, not susceptible to containment within a single static vocabulary, as essential as a given vocabulary (say, Chalcedon) may remain for coming to grips with the concepts of the tradition. Tilley himself insists on expressing this in terms of a normativity of practice (in opposition to a purely intellectual conceptual normativity), but I think that the broader approach of which Tilley is representative is marked by this concern for conceptual fidelity.

Weinandy, then, either thinks that conceptual continuity is not sufficient to authentically practice theology (as distinct from propositional continuity), or thinks that Tilley’s particular conceptual development of the tradition breaks continuity and fails to measure up to the norm of the tradition. The latter charge would require a substantial engagement with Tilley’s published work, and frankly, such an engagement will fail to produce anything approaching the adoptionism/arianism that Weinandy alleges. The former, I think, requires a more extended argument than Weinandy is able to provide in his short article. Such an argument would also entail invalidating an enormous swath of contemporary theology, from Rahner to Pannenberg and beyond, figures deeply concerned to think faithfully in categories and conversations not available to early Christian writers.

Tilley is not arguing, as Weinandy suggests, that he has a monopoly on the original meaning of the terms of the Chalcedonian definition, nor that they are irretrievably lost in the abyss of history. Rather, he is arguing that it takes long, arduous work (the very sort of work that Weinandy does quite well) to inhabit the tradition sufficiently so that one can follow the contours of complex ancient conversations, and that employing the same language cannot guarantee that the same concepts are communicated. It is truly perverse for Weinandy to argue simultaneously that the plain meaning of Chalcedon is accessible to any intelligent person who reads the text with a degree of care and that Tilley has not (after a career of research) adequately grasped the Chalcedon definition. Nowhere does Tilley repudiate Chalcedon, nor call it a “total failure.” If Tilley’s recent book on Christology does not take Chalcedon as the starting point, it’s not because he’s abandoned the Incarnation of the Logos, but rather because he is tracing out the trajectory of other biblical christologies (particularly in the synoptics) that were instrumental in arriving at the convictions formulated in the creeds, but nevertheless underrepresented therein. The Disciples’ Jesus is, quite literally, a discursive effort at retracing the steps of the earliest Christological confessions, confessions that were rooted in and sustained by the practices of the communities that forged them.

Tilley’s presidential address is not sufficiently clear in articulating his conviction that the variety of christological traditions in the New Testament are not contradictory (a view that Weinandy unfairly imputes to him), but complementary in their diversity. There is more to the mysterious life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ than a single narrative trajectory can possibly contain. While Chalcedon provides a helpful hermeneutic to the New Testament, the compositional statement about two natures and a person cannot supplant the range of views of Jesus Christ that are contained in the New Testament and early Christian traditions.

To conclude, is Weinandy’s perception of an anti-ecclesial drift in the culture of academic theology justified? Perhaps, but this drift is no recent phenomenon, and it is a matter of certain conversations and movements, not a ubiquitous tipping of the theological playing field so that the academy becomes a slippery slope. Can the perception of this drift justifiably be applied to Terry Tilley in the public excoriation that he received from the pen of Thomas Weinandy? Not in the least. Weinandy needs to pick a new figurehead for the movement leading to the “Demise of the Doctrine of the Incarnation.”

a false negative in Luther’s 95 theses

Preparing to lecture on Luther’s 95 theses to a hapless bunch of sophomores, I found several of the theses more impenetrable than I’d remembered. My suspicion that it might have something to do with the translation I was reading out of was confirmed pretty quickly when I dug up the German text. Number 89 is particularly awful; does this sound like Luther?:

“What the pope seeks by indulgences is not money, but rather the salvation of souls; why then does he not suspend the letters and indulgences formerly conceded, and still as efficacious as ever?”

Somehow the translator managed to slip the negation (in bold print) into a sentence where it is totally lacking in German, rendering the English sentence pretty much incomprehensible—at least historically. Here’s the German:

“Wieso sucht der Papst durch den Ablaß das Heil der Seelen mehr als das Geld; warum hebt er früher gewährte Briefe und Ablässe jetzt auf, die doch ebenso wirksam sind?”

Some of the other errors are equally egregious, and this is a fairly standard collection of Luther’s writings (Martin Luther: A Selection of His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger). How does this happen? And why is a translation this bad still being anthologized?

watching my language

I’ve recently found a manageable practice for maintaining my language skills. Presently, I’m mostly concerned with German and Greek, because my knowledge of French has never been anything but superficial (meaning that it can likely be recovered with little effort) and my Spanish is well-sedimented in the crypts of 5th period adolescent angst (accompanying so much emotional baggage seems to aid the memory); unfortunately I’ve more or less abandoned the year of Hebrew I took at Regent, though I imagine that too might be recoverable.

At the beginning of the day I’ll sit down with a passage of Scripture in both German and Greek and read through them together without the aid of a dictionary or English translation. I spend about 15 or 20 minutes reading between the two texts. When the syntax or vocabulary is obscure in one language, I’m usually able to parse it out using the other (and my own familiarity with the text as well). The main benefit here is that I’m not clarifying every confusion by mediating it through English—when I’m stuck in Greek, I’m improving my German in the process of getting unmired.

This is only a strategy for bare-bones maintenance of the facility that I’ve gained with these languages; I don’t think that I’m actually gaining in vocabulary or translation skill. But, I haven’t previously found a strategy that would allow me to maintain several languages at once without devoting an inordinate amount of time or alternating between languages (which translates into an unrealistic “habit” dropped before it’s ever formed). This is also far more effective and enjoyable than the periodic cram sessions where I try to regain what I’ve lost over the last six months through a few intense weeks of remorseful rededication.

Anyone else have practices of language maintenance?

Ph.D. programs in theology

A post I assembled a few years ago while applying to Ph.D. programs myself continues to draw more interest than just about anything else I’ve written in this space. That said, John has recently finished the most thorough, categorically exhaustive, and genuinely helpful (at least as much help as one ought to expect from the internet) series on the ordeal that I’ve ever come across.

worth your time

An article from Pretty Good Lutherans on the continuing troubles surrounding this summer’s Churchwide Assembly, including a contribution from a Bronx pastor I’ve gotten to know.

2009 AAR :: the good, the bad, the unsurpassably entertaining

I woke up in Montreal this morning, and still made it back to NYC for class at 2:30 (even if a bit road-weary and goggle-eyed from the drive). While I certainly cannot say that I enjoy the AAR—at least not without adding some serious qualifications—I am glad to have gone, mainly for the opportunity to (re)connect with folks in the theological world whom I don’t often see. Here are the highlights of the conference from my perspective:

The good:

My gold medal goes to Sarah Coakley’s excellent paper on Aquinas, Christology, and the proper uses of apophaticism. Her paper said twice as much any other presentation that I listened to in about a third of the words. I wish that Denys Turner had taken up her provocations a bit more seriously.

The bad:

I have a lot of respect for Miroslav Volf, and I’ve heard him speak with eloquence and profundity. But in the session responding to David Kelsey’s massive new book on theological anthropology, Volf’s presentation was quite a disappointment. He began by admitting that he hadn’t read the book in its entirety (to be fair, it wasn’t clear that all the other panelists had either) and continued by telling us that for that reason he would not be able to offer any substantial critique. He then analyzed the title for about ten minutes, and finished with a provocative assertion of tension between the goodness of creation and the theological implications of accepting an evolutionary narrative.

The unsurpassably entertaining:

Of course, the session starring Zizek and Altizer turned out to be just as entertaining as anyone might have hoped. Altizer was unfortunately married to his written presentation; after his over-the-top delivery he refused to answer questions or make additional comments. Zizek, on the other hand, was hard to peel off the microphone. He spoke at greater length and in greater detail (with greater clarity) about his theological interest than I’ve heard or read elsewhere. In addition to being positively hilarious, his exhortations about prayer and personal commitment to the struggle of a particular tradition (without ironic/cynical/intellectual distance) were the closest thing to a preaching of the gospel that I heard in the two days that I attended. I imagine that mine weren’t the only cheeks shifting nervously in the chair at that point in the talk.

Despite his protests, his theological turn is far from orthodox (for a start, his trinitarianism is modalist), but I can’t help but feeling that Zizek must be counted as a theological ally in the face of the collusion between late-capitalism and liberal humanist optimism. Including Zizek only makes the theological conversation richer.

person and nature in Zizioulas

Is it only a drive to rhetorical clarity that pits person and nature so strongly against one another in the writing of John Zizioulas, or is there something more sinister at work?

Zizioulas’ major ontological theme is the primacy of personhood over nature, over necessity, over essence. Persons are free with respect to their nature—supremely in the case of divine persons and sacramentally in the case of human persons—not determined by them. Thus, God’s being in Trinity is not a fated necessity imposed upon the hypostases by the divine ousia, but represents the freedom of the Father in the generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit. While human persons are beholden to their natures in their biological personhood, by baptism and the eucharist human persons may be incorporated into the Person of the Son and reborn into a new mode of personhood. Zizioulas marks this transition as the movement from bondage to nature and death to a life of freedom. Nature for Zizioulas is a fundamental limitation; the connection of personhood and nature is the imposition of the necessity of death.

The caricature that Zizioulas is open to (but barely avoids) is an equation of nature with death, that the limitation of finitude is already the necessity of death. This barely-evaded equation would lead him to speak of created persons (as beings in the image of divine personhood) as entrapped within nature and awaiting release. It is clear enough that this is a caricature and that Zizioulas has a more positive view of bodiliness, finitude, and the particularity of being in a certain manner (i.e. according to a nature). But the tension only renders the strength of his anti-nature rhetoric all the more baffling.

The concept “nature” carries a double valence—nature as essence / nature as creation. My fear is that Zizioulas’ vehement differentiation and privileging of personhood finally endangers the positive theological value of both. Of course, there is a destructive and arbitrary privileging of personal freedom over “nature,” in which the power of personhood is excercised upon nature, bending it according to the will— and this is not at all what Zizioulas intends to advocate. But his theology stands open to development in that direction without additional safeguards.

Pace Zizioulas, sacramental grace does not convey a freedom from the limitations of nature, but abolishes death by engulfing its “necessity” in the illimitable communion of God’s love, where it is overwhelmed, judged, and forgotten.

never trust anyone with the first name pseudo

Over the weekend, while reading an excellent book on the reception history of 1 Enoch  (what a life, eh?)[1], I found myself thinking through pseudonymous authorship and the nest of problems that it raises for contemporary readers in a new light. Of course, pseudonymity is an issue with a document that claims to be penned by a character from the primordial history of Genesis 1-11, but it is also an issue when we come to many of the books of Scripture (i.e. 2 Timothy, 2nd/3rd Isaiah, etc.). Posed in its sharpest form, the question that pseudonymity raises might be posed like this: “How can we ascribe the authority of divine revelation (which almost always functions as a guarantee of truth)  to a text that contains an intentional deception about its author?” The standard apology for the practice—which I think is quite a good start—points out the cultural gap between our notions of the book as a finished product resulting from the creative effort of a single person (or discrete collective) and ancient notions of authorship and authority or the challenges of textual transmission.

The piece that Reed added for me was a careful attention to the fluidity and interchange between orality and textuality—something quite remote to our own practices. First of all, the practice of reading in silent solitude (primarily as a visual activity) is a relatively recent phenomenon. Ancient reading, even if it was done in solitude—though that would have been much rarer as well—was likely done aloud. Reading was an auditory activity as much as visual.

In addition, the relative rarity and prohibitive cost of books meant that even knowledge that was written down was likely passed on elsewhere as “oral” tradition. Many historians, biblical scholars, and theologians operate with a somewhat romantic notion of oral traditions being passed down through centuries until some enterprising figure has the temerity to put it down in writing, upon which momentous occasion the oral tradition is frozen and becomes a treasured piece of the communities literary legacy. Even stating it reveals it as simplistic. Even with the same stories or teachings, oral traditions and written traditions likely overlapped and were mutually informative. A text is “read” and interpreted even where it is repeated orally, and this “reading” affects the hermeneutical approach of the hearer to all subsequent readings/hearings of any related material.One person might recount a (textual) reading to another in some detail without the benefit of the text for reference. That “reading” may be passed along to several more hearers, before being integrated into another text. Where this is the case,  oral and written traditions are mutually informative.

The role of the author in such a setting is profoundly more ambiguous than our preference for the solitary creative genius. Someone who is compelled to put a narrative or teaching to writing may have heard several versions, deriving from textual recitations and/or oral recitation. She may have a text in front of her that carries most, but not all, of the detail that she considers crucial to understanding and communicating the heart of the message. At any rate, where there is a fluid relationship between orality and textuality, and a concern to collect and pass on what one has received, it is actually an act of profound hubris to name oneself as the author of a text. Where traditions have been passed on in varying degrees of orality and their genealogy is not easily traceable, it is quite reasonable that teachings and stories should coalesce around a major figure, in whose name they are retold. In a context where orality and textuality commingle far more than our own, pseudonymous authorship is less likely a rhetorical ploy on the part of an unimportant author to gain credibility and readership for the text (by the way, this post has been guest-written by Ben Myers), and more likely a recognition that the text itself is only the transmission of a tradition that predates it by far.

_______

[1] Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity: The Reception of Enochic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

h/t to a venerable teacher of my past, Bruce Fisk, for the title of the post.

Karl Rahner’s Anthropocentrism

One unavoidable aspect of attending a Jesuit school is an ever-greater familiarity with the thought of Karl Rahner. While Rahner is not a theological hero or guiding light to me, I am quite glad to have gotten to know him. However, while there is much to appreciate, and much of Rahner’s legacy that has gone unnoticed both by his theological fanclub and by his detractors, I’ve repeatedly found myself coughing at his narrowly anthropocentric approach.

Karl Rahner’s essay “Christology within an Evolutionary View of the World” attempts to reconcile Christology and evolution through a narrative of formal necessities that draws parallels between the two, apparently unrelated (or worse, divergent) story lines. The starting point of this extended narrative is the deep interconnection between consciousness (or “spirit”) and matter in the one world. Rahner reflects on what it must mean that matter has come, through the course of evolution, to become self-aware in very complex ways, and thus self-transcendent—human beings wonder at beauty and grapple with expansive questions about life’s meaning. Because the teleology of creation’s self-transcendence points to an ultimate, deeper union between Spirit and matter, and ultimately to the union of matter and spirit with their creator and sustainer, the Hypostatic Union (understood formally as the self-communication of God within creation) fits naturally into “the history of the cosmos,” which is “always basically a spiritual history” (172). His essay concludes by “plugging in” the particulars of Christian faith (e.g. Jesus Christ, Israel, church) to the abstract culmination of evolutionary trajectories in Hypostatic Union and expanding on this narrative by connecting it to the more traditional narrative of sin, alienation, redemption, and reconciliation.

The great strength of Rahner’s essay, and perhaps its deepest contribution to an explicitly ecological theology, is his effort to make the “matter/spirit” binary that pervades Western thought (in many permutations) comprehensible within the theological binary of nature and grace (and particularly the Thomistic understanding thereof). Spirit is an emergent quality of matter that is “really effected by what was there before” and yet represents “the inner increase of being proper to the previous existing reality” (164). Consciousness does not abolish matter, nor should it seek to flee from it, but rather perfects matter. Consciousness is to be understood as the natural “becoming” of matter (166). Rahner points out that even though science presupposes this transcendence, it cannot quite think in these terms (qua science) because science’s approach to consciousness is always to consciousness as an object of study; the observer herself always remains invisible (transcendent!) (169). This connection is fertile ground for ecological thinking because it de-mythologizes detached, instrumental reason and encourages a more organic understanding of the connection between spirit and matter. In humanity, matter has indeed come to reflect upon itself and to radically manipulate matter (both human matter and other kinds) according to its own interests. Yet, if consciousness is the perfection of matter in an inseparable way, then matter (all matter) must be seen as the natural ecosystem of consciousness, and therefore deserving of careful attention and care. Consciousness, in this regard, is not set over-against matter as master to slave, but belongs to it. Human perfection, subsequently, cannot be thought of in isolation from the care of all earthly matter—and provision for the flourishing of all life.

Rahner’s essay, despite efforts to marry consciousness and matter together more closely, falls prey to the critique of anthropocentrism in that he tells both stories, the evolutionary and the soteriological, with the union of matter and spirit in humanity at the center, while matter elsewhere plays a secondary role. Anthropocentric thinking may be inevitable for human beings, but—to be more precise—perhaps anthropological exceptionalism is not. Anthropological exceptionalism is the belief that humanity has a unique vocation and destiny that the remainder of creation does not share (or only shares through humanity’s administration). Rahner employs this sort of thinking when he says, “natural history develops towards man, continues in him as his history, is conserved and surpassed in him and hence reaches its proper goal with and in the history of the human spirit” (168). The created world fades into the background as the shining destiny of humanity comes to the foreground! Rahner’s construal of the culmination of creation’s history in divine self-communication—essentially a verbal metaphor—rather than in divine communion essentially limits the experience of salvation to human beings (or any other creatures capable of “knowing”). This way of telling the story risks making the rest of nature unnecessary as soon as it plays its part in producing humanity through evolution; humanity becomes the central location of redemption. Rahner evidently feels this tension, because he qualifies his account of divine self-communication by saying, “God’s communication of himself does not suddenly become uncosmic—directed merely to an isolated, separate subjectivity—but is given to the human race and is historical” (174). Despite Rahner’s hedges, however, depicting the telos of creation as the immortality of the emergent spirit/consciousness, through divine self-communication (primarily an interchange of knowledge—coming to know and being known) leaves the rest of creation aside. The most ecologically prescient aspect of the concept of self-communication is not the verbal metaphor, but that part implying coming and indwelling—“communication” understood as “transfer”. Humanity might still fruitfully be thought of as the center of creation’s knowledge of God, and even as a mediator of divine blessing, but a more robustly theo-political account of creation’s destiny (i.e. Jubilee, cosmic Sabbath, shalom, Day of the Lord) would depict peace for all of creation as integral to peace for any part of creation.

All paranthetical references are to: Karl Rahner, “Christology within an Evolutionary View,” in Theological Investigations 5, (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1966), 157-92.