Monday, December 29, 2003
(3:32 AM) | Anonymous:
Reading theology so you don't have to
Adam has reviewed the holy scriptures of other religions. We are all familiar with the wonderful insights into current progressive music that Robb gives us, along with the hilarious stories of embarrassment and misspent youth. I, in stark contrast, have not lived up to The Weblog’s goal of spreading the healing ointment of culture on the wounds of liberal and conservative hacks that infest the blogosphere. I intend to right this wrong.
I have decided to review Jurgen Moltmann’s The Trinity and the Kingdom because I have just finished it and I have no real reason to go to bed. I found this book in the trash pile at the Salvation Army thrift store I worked out during the summer, it was in perfect condition, seemed as if it had never been opened and since they were going to throw it away I stole it. I find this to be, as my mother would say, kind of special. Now I don’t expect everyone to know who Moltmann is so I must forgive the community service workers for overlooking the book since the only reason I noticed it was that Moltmann had, by some odd alignment of the planets, given lectures at Olivet Nazarene University my freshman year and Craig Keen introduced Moltmann as “my hero.” Being the good Keen hack that I am I decided to undertake the reading of Moltmann even though my initial reaction my freshman year was of utter and complete confusion which I defend by pointing out that it was my first semester and I was more interested in C.S. Lewis and ideas about avoiding sin (not that there is anything wrong with that) than I was about something called the Trinity or the Kingdom of God. Oh, and Craig made us read him in two out of three systematic classes.
The book goes through familiar Moltmann territory to students of Craig and to readers of Moltmann (I think this is a later book and part of a series by him from Fortress Press though I have no actual knowledge to back that up, maybe we should ask Adam in a few weeks after he attains Absolute Knowledge) by asserting Christ as the central access to the revelation of the Trinity but instead of reading the Trinity in the light of Christ as he does in earlier works he now reads the Trinity and its relationship to human liberty. This makes it of interest to anyone who, like me, is obsessed with the relationship of religion and politics. I think much in the section “The Passion of God” is repeated in all the works of Moltmann that people are supposed to read (ie. The Crucified God) but this isn’t a problem as these themes need to be repeated as often as possible. Because of my familiarity with Moltmann, these sections just seemed to drag until Chapter V, “The Mystery of the Trinity.” Here Moltmann expounds on the use of monotheism to justify monarchy. Focusing on the heresies of Ariaiansim and Modalism as the two strains of monotheism which have been the main champions of monarchy within the Christian church Moltmann also has some interesting critiques of Greek philosophy but only if you haven’t heard them before (meaning you haven’t had much Craig). After this brief expected critique Moltmann finally does something very unexpected: he critiques Karl Barth as being a proponent of a Trinitarian Monarchy.
This came as a surprise namely because I have come to see Barth as the theologian that people either ignore or accept but never critique but also because I had come to believe if any understanding of the Trinity occurs it is one that must automatically show the role of the Church to be a community of love. What Moltmann does here is admit that the Trinity, as a concept, isn’t going to save us but is also a concept that needs to be saved. Up till this point in the book, which is well past half way through, you had the feeling that Moltmann held the opposite view and many of my other colleagues had suggested that Moltmann was just a embodiment of a phase of Barth.
Trying to bring together theologies of East and West Moltmann defines personhood rather differently than Augustine intended, or at least that is what Moltmann says and since I have read relatively no Augustine I can’t really comment. More interesting to me he tries to bring together the liberalism of the West with the socialism of the East under a Trinitarian framework. There is also an odd journal length essay about the Filioque that, while impressive if it was in a journal, seems out of place in the narrative of the book.
The pay off of the book is the final chapter, “The Kingdom of Freedom.” After laying the foundation of his own Trinitarian thinking Moltmann seems to relax a bit and brilliantly goes about analyzing the current state (in 1980) of political and clerical monotheism. Part of this analysis is saying that the Trinity must be understood not in philosophical terms (like Aristotle’s First Cause) or in terms of political justification but in Trinitarian terms with the other concepts following this signifier (I can’t really say it is a master signifier, maybe servant signifier?). He says this in hopes that the doctrine of the Trinity will provide “the intellectual means to harmonize personality and sociality” in the anticipation of the coming of the final reign and rule of God’s Kingdom. At this point Moltmann introduces us to a relatively obscure figure in theology, Joachim of Fiore. Much of what Joachim says, and by virtue Moltmann, is radically different than what I had previously perceived to be going on in most eschatology but after this book I can see it all over. Joachim divided up sections of history into Trinitarian times of rule, where one of the three persons of the Trinity has a more profound influence over a certain time but not an absolute rule. The first is the Kingdom of the Father (law), the second is the Kingdom of the Son (faith) and the third is the Kingdom of the Spirit which is to come (love). This is differentiated from the Orthodox Protestant understanding which only has the first two orders with the third subsumed in the second. I think Zizek would find this interesting in his analysis of Lenin’s murder of the royal family and there are striking parallels to Marx’s analysis of history that Moltmann acknowledges. Ultimately Moltmann does argue for an open community of individuals who are free of an absolute ruler, like Liberalism, that exists as loving friends who work together for the common goal of the future which is like Socialism (or Communism, whatever). Though he sounds a lot like Hauerwas here he just does it better.
All in all, I think this book is a good primer for political theology especially if you are interested in how doctrines relate to creating political theory. It is rather short and because of that the end chapter suffers from a lack of spelling out some of the concepts or really expound on his insights. Most of my other issues with the book arise out of the philosophical assumptions made, while Moltmann critiques the Greeks feverishly there are hints of Greek metaphysics (though I think he would deny this) concerning Being (kind of like the Nicene creed) and some of his epistemology seemed a bit brash but this is theology so that must be forgiven and to Moltmann’s credit he does note that the actual existence of God is not of interest to theology or people of faith.
Now a side note: I think we should find a way to have our pictures appear next to our posts and I am blantaly ripping this idea off from John and Belle Have a Blog.
