(10:44 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Christ of the Philosophers

My title is a variant on Pascal's "God of the philosophers," a mythical creature who is very different from the "God of the Bible" -- you know, the God who orders the death of thousands, who hardens the hearts of rulers so as to have an excuse to punish them, and whose demand for justice is so insatiable that it can only be satisfied by having himself put to death. I am, however, embarrassed to refer to Pascal, because he is too obviously Christian. I am embarassed to refer to C. S. Lewis, as well, because he is a favorite reference-point for Christians, and Kierkegaard just barely makes the cut of "secular-seeming enough," and that's only because he supposedly fathered existentialism. If I am going to refer to any distinctly Christian figures, I prefer to pull out people whom the commoners have never heard of -- I'll throw out Karl Barth or Jurgen Moltmann, because their German names make them sound like some long-forgotten, newly avant-garde German Idealist.

Why is it that young, intelligent Christians want so badly to read philosophy? Is the desire to change Jacques Derrida into a theologian of the cross qualitatively different for a desire for a Christian version of Limp Bizkit? Why is it that I instinctively turn to the ideas of Slavoj Zizek in theological debate, even though he is a confessed "fighting atheist"? Why do I prefer to gloss over those portions of the Bible that are incompatible with Marxism? If I'm going to do philosophy, why not just do philosophy and give up on this Jesus thing?

I think part of the problem is the collapse of the Christian cultural heritage. The thought of Luther or Aquinas is no longer as formative as the thought of Dobson or LaHaye -- two pseudo-theologians with questionable training and with little use for past traditions or historical knowledge. Part of the problem is assuredly the complete secularization of education, such that anyone hoping to provide children with any kind of serious engagement with religious thinkers must opt out of the school system altogether (in contrast to many other Western cultures that don't so rigorously enforce separation of church and state). That problem is only a subset of the larger problem of an evacuation of history in education -- both the conservative and liberal approaches to education hollow out the past and transform it into a march forward to either greater military and economic dominance or greater equality and moral uprightness, respectively.

Thus a certain subset of the smart Christians prefer to engage with contemporary philosophy, a field in which they have at best a fragmentary background, and thus tend to hold disproportionately strong opinions on philosophical matters -- Hegel is evil; Kant is full of crap; Plato is the root cause of all society's problems. Some kind of vaguely Christian set of ideas is supposed to ground this critique, but the Christian ideas in question are rather shallowly developed, sometimes consisting of "the opposite of what I've always heard about Jesus must be the truth about Jesus." (I only feel that I can say these things because I have been and continue to be guilty of the offenses I outline.)

And then there are the radically orthodox, who advocate a return to the sources. Back to Augustine and Aquinas! Of course, here, too, the postmodern collapse of history does its dirty work, leading to an "application" of Augustine in a vacuum, where a citation (sympathetic or unsympathetic) of Foucault or, better still, Negri is a substitute for creative cultural analysis.

We parse out the various puns inherent in the word differance, and then say either, "Don't you see? That's exactly what's going on in Luther!" or "Don't you see? That's exactly what Aquinas was fighting against!" It's no mistake that the radical orthodox movement contains both John Milbank and Graham Ward -- both the hater and the lover of contemporary philosophy.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, especially given the following uncomfortable facts:

• I prefer contemporary philosophy to theology.
  
• I am currently writing a blog post instead of engaging with a work of theology.
  
• I am making a bunch of generalizations that I cannot adequately back up with "actual knowledge."

I'm sure, though, that once I finish my PhD, I will have managed to get over all these pitfalls and will become a truly rigorous and historically informed thinker. I'll get over my ingrained "postmodern" laziness and willful ignorance and be fully equipped for the task to which God has called me: to point out the ways in which I am right and everyone else is wrong.

Still, even though my field of experience is limited, I get the distinct impression that the basic phenomenon I'm talking about is a real one and it does warrant some explanation.

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