Wednesday, September 22, 2004
(9:26 AM) | Anonymous:
The Function of God: A Fragmental Thought-Experiment.
It's becoming increasingly apparent to me that in most systems (political, linguistic, scientific, those that inform our specific ways of living, etc.) God exists as function only. This is true, it appears, across the strands of disciplines. A liberation theologian gives God (the Son in this case) the function of demanding justice much in the same way the Bush administration uses the "Almighty" as a way of shoring up support (though admittedly these two things are qualitatively different and that seems to be the point). This is the engine that will hopefully push forward towards the telos of that system. Though certain theologians or theological students (not to mention everyday Christians) may have misgivings about this it seems to be a brute fact that must be dealt with - God has no other existence in the temporal realm except as a function.That this bothers theologians and other Christians is obvious, and this is old hat Nietzsche here, they have prided truth (correspondence truth) as the highest virtue so when God turns out to lack existence and thus the belief is found to be a lie everything falls apart. We all know that to the point that it has become basically boring in the light of belief in God still persisting. What I find more interesting is the folks whom this "Death of God" doesn't bother. For instance this doesn't bother Lacanians since this kind of existence can be part of the Real and thus more important in the system than other modes of existence (I may be mixing my psychoanalytic and ontology here). This also doesn't bother phenomenologists (well, maybe Marion) because God is still important as something perceived regardless of its "real" existence which as a question has been bracketed. I think it might not even bother most of the Radical Orthodoxy folks since truth about anything (and subjects are things in a logically weird way) is acknowledged by Milbank to be a production (and nothing can be produced without something being given already) so any knowledge of God is more knowledge of God’s function as transcendent grounding principle rather than actual existence.1
What then happens to faith? Does it become structural, just another part of the function? I don’t know, but we may have to give up on Kierkegaard, at least Johannes de Silentio, and say rather that while Christendom was bad it was bad because the function of God had been given over to the status quo (i.e. the State). God's best function is to be found elsewhere but where? Realizing we can't ground this in justice because God determines what justice is (or those who control the function of God). But if we let the function float (I don't know how that would work mathematically) then God's function is indeterminate and undecideable (this is something like what Craig Keen and Derrida always go on about) and may creatively unravel everything. In fact this may be what religion has done throughout history from the Jews monotheism destroying the order of Mesopotamia to Paul destroying the order of Rome and the Jewish nation. In fact this could be religion without religion properly so-called, meaning religion without ties to the status quo ordering of things since religion and the state have often been synonymous. What we don't often see is the final eschaton of these acts, that is, we don't ever see anything fully constituted and due to the temporal flux that life is we likely never will. In fact it may be completely wrong to say anything about a "final" eschaton.
I want to know what this can teach our Communism, if anything (though I'm assuming something) and if God is still something worth the trouble to think about (though my intuition, or is it my piety, says God is).
1. Though I could be completely wrong here the fact that in the so-called manifesto Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology the actual existence of God is never really dealt with to my memory. Instead they seem to deal with the analogical aspects of God's being especially in the "Erotics" and "Bodies" chapters. I know this is an age old theological debate whose nuances I know little about but I still want to hold that there is some difference between material being and analogical being even though phenomenological the two can be conflated.
