Anti-Gnostic Resources

In Theology after Wittgenstein , Fergus Kerr (1986) launched a Wittgensteinian attack on the modern, Cartesian gnosticism that he found operative in Karl Rahner, Hans Kung, and Don Cuppitt. According to Kerr?s account, Wittgenstein challenges the Cartesian occlusion of the body and community, the ego?s effort to transcend particular human viewpoints and feelings and to examine the world from a godlike distance. Behind this effort lies a gnostic spiritual quest for deliverance from bodiliness. The escape from the body is also an effort to escape from language as it actually exists into an unmediated, sign-less encounter; Kerr quotes F. Waismann?s incisive comment that for much of philosophy the defect with language is that it is made up exclusively of words. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, meanings are located in public transactions, not in the immaterial mind, so that what is most fundamental are not a priori categories or metaphysical principles of any kind but the forms of life, small-scale social practices of which the signs and sounds of language are an integral part. Applied to religious studies, a Wittgensteinian perspective would enable theology to be ?naturalized?Eand would recognize that religion is literally inseparable from the speech and practices of a community. Wittgenstein enables theologians to identify and to reject the hostility to the body that is inherent in modern Western theology. While Kerr says nothing explicit about the relation of the Old to New Testament, the perspective he offers welcomes the Old Testament emphasis on rite and sign. Wittgenstein may, as Kerr suggests, have been joking when he said that his perspective was Hebraic rather than Hellenic (1986: 34), but Wittgenstein is surely more Hebraic than many Hebraists.

Kerr claims that Williams James?s pragmatism also provided a challenge to Cartesian assumptions. Nicholas Lash demurs, and spends the first several chapters of Easter In Ordinary (1988) exposing the Cartesian dualisms implicit in James?s project. Challenging James?s ?infantile?Enotion of ?pure experience?Eand his individualist restriction of religion to an affair of the private heart, Lash insists that private experience, including religious experience, is inseparable from an institutional and linguistic matrix. Lash discerns in the dualisms of material/spirit and internal/external a typical nineteenth century Protestant liberal prejudice against Catholic and Jewish religious forms. Through the latter part of the book, Lash, through an analysis of texts from Schleiermacher, Newman, von Hugel, and Buber, defends what von Hugel calls an ?inclusive mysticism,?Ea vision of religious experience that gives proper place to religious feeling but recognizes that healthy religion requires a constant interaction of theological reasoning, liturgical devotion, and government. In Buber especially Lash finds the resources to challenge a notion that religion is restricted to one dimension of experience.

The work of Stanley Hauerwas in theological ethics is important here as well, though he is dealing with a somewhat different set of concerns. I take The Peaceable Kingdom (1983) as representative of his approach. In that book, Hauerwas rejects efforts to do ethics in ?midair,?Efreed from all particularities of time and space, and his corresponding anti-foundationalism denies that any ethical presuppositions are more fundamental than theology and narrative. This implies a conception of Christian living that is rooted in material and particular life. Consistently with this, Hauerwas insists that virtues are displayed only in communities which are themselves shaped by a narratively-embodied account of the good. Specifically, Christian ethics is as much a matter of ecclesiology as of grace and redemption, and therefore all Christian ethics is social ethics; more, ethics is not a matter of principles that can be abstracted from the church, but rather the church is a social ethic. Hauerwas?s argument that there is no Cartesian ego behind the acting and doing, but that a person?s character is his acting and doing, likewise implies a view of Christian religion. Christianity is not located merely in the inner man, and pure religion is not merely a matter of the relation of the individual soul with God, but a Christian is such in his acting and doing, in his public life in the community of believers. Christians are called not to ?tell?Ethe gospel but to live it; there is no biblical distinction of belief and behavior. This account of the ethical life, inseparable from religion, is wholly compatible with the Old Testament vision of righteousness as right standing in the covenant, and it is not surprising that Hauerwas highlights the necessary conversation of Christianity with Israel. Fittingly also, he quotes freely from Old Testament texts as relevant for the Christian community, explaining the ethical significance of Jesus?Elife by reference to the Israelite offices of prophet, priest, and king.

One of the most complete reworkings of the tradition is found in the work of John Milbank. In the course of his assault on modern social theory, Milbank argues that theology is itself social theory, a genuine sociology, and that Christianity as such, in the church, is a non-political social practice. Salvation is a deliverance from the structures of the fallen world, of the saeculum, and transference into a new kind of community, so that the church herself is salvation embodied, however imperfectly, on earth. Citing Augustine?s polemics against the Donatists, Milbank rejects the notion of Christianity as a purely inward religion. Political thought is thought about the church, and culture too is a religious enterprise, since human making ( poesis ) is a reaching for transcendence, in imitation of the Creator (1990). Consistently with this, Milbank rejects the ?liberal Protestant metanarrative?Ethat denigrates the Old Testament for its worldliness and ritualism, and has attacked the philosophical and political assumptions of Wellhausen?s critical theories (1996).

Kerr?s Wittgensteinian attack on the Cartesian ego, Lash?s Easter In Ordinary , Hauerwas?s church as embodied social ethic, and Milbank?s theology as social science give us some of the tools to formulate a consistently anti-Marcionite and anti-gnostic theology.