Jason Bosworth, University of St. [email protected]
Centre for the Study of Religion and PoliticsSeminar Paper: 24th February 2011
This is an attempt to draw out a theological hermeneutics as a method for practical theology. These ideas here are born out of the singular experience of being a stranger in a strange land, from being a European in the US confronted by the profound alienation that occurs with one’s displacement from the comfort of the familiar.
One of the oddities of my two years studying theology at Boston University was the inordinate amount of time that I spent reading continental philosophy. Yet somehow, when discussing these texts with my American peers, I found a natural resonance between these ideas and the time and place in which I found myself. I was not, after all, alienated, but rather between: between Europe and America, and, in the end, between the divine and the human.
So this paper arises from that betweenness, the seeking of a faithful though agnostic theological speech that speaks to the political crises of identity that continue to assail us. This has become a question of how we can facilitate the coming to be of the oppressed, and in so doing realise a tenuous fragment of the kingdom that works to overcome the suffering of, ‘the least of these,’ the widow, the orphan and the stranger.
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Upon the Shifting Sands of Time: Theological Hermeneutics,Towards a Method for Practical Theology
Terry Veling, in his work Practical Theology: On Earth as it is in Heaven, reminds us that the
work of theology is an ongoing practice; one characterized by the hermeneutic movement of
critical interpretation and application. This process he summarizes as “searching the scriptures,”
and, “reading the signs of the times,”1 in a forever unfinished act of the skilled application of
one’s attention in cycles of interpretation that seek out transformation. This hermeneutical
movement of the mediation of past and present, in order to herald and tentatively embody the
possibilities of the divine not-yet, is, however, always implicated in the contextual reception and
interpretation of the sacred stories of one’s community. There is thus a profound need to
recognise the effect of one’s interpretative space or world, from which and within which one
encounters both the normative sources of the past and the present events which have brought one
up short, which have disturbed the ordinary patterns of interpretation and action. Theological
hermeneutics, as a method for practical theology, has become a potent means by which to
understand this complex dynamic, in which the wisdom of the sacred texts that form the
collective memory of faith communities is continually mediated in light of present concerns and
an abiding future hope for what is to come. It is this collective time and memory – found within a
community’s account of the past, present, and future – that shapes and influences the efforts of
application that emerge from such an encounter. By working through some of the key ideas
contained within Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work Truth and Method, in conjunction with the
concerns of certain modes of contemporary philosophy and theology with the effect of
contextual receptions of historical wisdom, I hope to offer a distinctively practical theological
1 Terry A. Veling, Practical Theology: On Earth as it is in Heaven (New York: Orbis Books, 2005), 25.
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approach to the restless expectation of the coming kingdom, whose infinite possibility stirs the
prophetic heart of the Judeo-Christian witness to past promises and future expectations.
An Initial Encounter, Being Brought Up Short by Another
Hermeneutics, as a sub-field of philosophy, is a meta-level effort to phenomenologically
account for the experience one has in reading texts. The encounter with another world in a text
can have a profound effect on the reader, as one feels oneself to be brought up short or to be put
into question. How one negotiates this experience with the otherness of a text will determine
whether or not one is beneficially transformed by the work. Gadamer believes that it is an art
that has to be worked upon and developed, as our implicit reaction can at times prohibit the
possibility of change heralded by the experience of being brought up short, as the world of the
text is assimilated into the reader’s world. For, if the reader refuses to truly engage the text any
transformative possibility is passed over and one’s world continues uninterrupted. Good reading
is facilitated by a fundamental hospitality on the reader’s part, choosing to allow oneself to be
open to another world, one which could have a profound effect upon the contours of one’s own
world if the world of the text is given the chance to become a conversation partner. Homer
Ashby’s Our Home is Over Jordan is a text that I have found to have this kind of effect, and it is
through this particular encounter that I will begin to point towards a practical theological
method, one infused with the hermeneutic endeavour.
In Our Home is Over Jordan, Ashby gives a haunting account of the threat contemporary
American society poses to the cultural and racial survival of African-Americans,
In a variety of ways blacks are being lynched at the beginning of the twenty-first century . There is the lynching of economic strangulation, the lynching of political
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disenfranchisement, the lynching of higher morbidity, the lynching of the loss of cultural identity, and the lynching of perishing because of lack of vision.2
This is Ashby’s unsettling claim, that the very structures of American society consistently under-
value African-Americans’ humanity and so actively reduce their life expectancy. The effect has
precipitated an existential crisis of disconnection, as the collective identity of African-Americans
has become fragmented and so any enervating and uniting memories are being lost. This is the
heart of the struggle, as it reduces even further the possibility of recovery as the social strength
required to bring about transformation is crippled before the struggle can even begin.
Ashby’s constructive practical theology seeks to pose a strategy of intervention, one
which reunites African-Americans through a recovery of their traditions of Christian worship.
The conjuring of the story of Joshua’s conquest of the promised-land is at the heart of this effort,
being, “a magical story laced with many miraculous feats whose telling transforms the identity of
the ancient Israelites from an enslaved and desperate people to a powerful nation with land and
self-determination.”3 This ancient story is to be instantiated in the minds of contemporary
African-Americans through a conjuring, so that it may become a site of the cohesive retelling of
racial identity around which the fractured internal consciousness created by the systemic
injustices of contemporary American society can be healed by the calling into the present of past
victories and future promises. Without addressing this internalized space of memory and identity,
which has been so painfully disturbed and disrupted, the “disciplines of struggle,”4 that were the
source for powerful political, religious, and social action in the past cannot be recovered and the
fate of African-American identity and culture will be one of extinction, to be cast off into the
stasis of a white-washed history. Rather than accept this fate, the power of the conjure is to be
2 Homer U. Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003), 25. Emphasis my own.3 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 21.4 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 26.
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harnessed in order to transform the African-American community’s identity with its revitalising
and redemptive vigour, which retains its strength through an eschatological orientation. Ashby
thus maintains a dialectic between the present crisis of survival and its overcoming with both a
past-present orientation, that relives the historical promises of God to African-Americans, and a
future-present orientation, which calls into being the transformative possibilities of what is
promised to come.
Why do I call this effort to our attention? Why should we dwell on this specific crisis and
the great suffering it inflicts upon this particular people? In part it is because Ashby’s work is
akin to Veling’s hermeneutical elaboration of theology, searching the scriptures and reading the
signs of the times in light of the future expectation of the coming kingdom. But even more so, it
is because my reading of this book gave me a horrifying and profound sense of how I am
implicated in destructive movements of power, power which coalesces around my dominant
worldview and puts the healthy formation of others’ lives at risk. As a result of reading Our
Home is Over Jordan I can no longer ignore my role in this harmful dynamic. Ashby’s work has
brought me up short, it has interrupted my vision and disturbed the horizons of my world by
calling me into question. The richness of Ashby’s testimony requires me to recognise this reality,
to recognise my reproduction of these damaging structures, and it calls upon me to critically
intervene by joining him in the struggle for transformation. This will not mean that I take up a
role which is not mine to take, but it will require that I adjust my thinking to accommodate his
insights, so that together we can modify my own and wider society’s behaviour.
It is from the midst of such an experience of being brought up short that constructive
work can begin. Ashby’s work shows the important role of tradition and future promise in calling
to account the prevalent norms of society, by using points of a transcendent or utopian
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orientation that are constructed from traditional sources of wisdom in order to claim authority for
one’s insights, which are themselves born from the particular crises to which they are attuned.
By fostering such a critical theological attitude, one’s hermeneutical processes of interpretation
and application will hopefully be heightened, both in their openness to the movements of social
power and in their ability to engage these effects both empathetically and constructively. It is by
beginning here, at the site of disruption, that true theory may follow as phronesis, only in order
that one can enter into a cyclical process of question and answer as the multiple narratives one
encounters bring one up short by continually disturbing the horizon of one’s worldview, which
strives to fix the boundaries of the world with a totalised image of reality.
Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Practical Theology
Gadamer’s work in hermeneutics was motivated, in part, by an effort to outline what
happens in the study of the traditionary objects of the arts.5 This was in order to separate the
work of the arts from that of the sciences, where the approach is a methodologically consistent
effort designed to build a total view of reality by the continual refinement of a prior fount of
knowledge. Instead, the arts offer the peculiar possibility of being brought into question by
classic texts, works from the depths of history whose surplus of meaning is such that they can
continue to be relevant to contemporary readers. This dynamic involves a specific kind of
encounter, in which the prejudices or pre-judgments that constitute the world, and therefore the
subjectivity, of the reader are brought into conversation with those of the world of the text. This
requires that the reader seek to interpret the text, and in so doing this act of interpretation that
seeks understanding results in application, as the world of the reader is brought into question.
5 In Truth and Method Gadamer’s concern is largely with texts and language, but the interpretative experience of the artistic object, such as a painting or a piece of music, is also considered; although only in an exemplary fashion.
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From here the cycle begins anew, as through other texts and performances of traditionary objects
the present world of the reader is always found to be in a situation of disruption, being subject to
the questioning that emerges from the interaction with these other worlds. The reader’s
subjectivity can be transformed in and through this event of understanding, and it is this event
that is the site of hermeneutical enquiry, “Understanding proves to be an event, and the task of
hermeneutics, seen philosophically, consists in asking what kind of understanding, what kind of
science it is, that is itself advanced by historical change.”6 From the questioning the reader
experiences as one strives to interpret the text in the event of understanding meaning emerges, as
one bridges the historical distance that separates the reader from the historical text. This can
induce a change within the worldview of the reader, as this new meaning comes to be applied
through the transformative process that occurs within the event of understanding.
The kind of knowledge which arises from this encounter is phronetic (from the Greek
phronesis, which means practical wisdom), which is to say that it is a kind of moral knowledge
the purpose of which is to govern human action.7 It is, therefore, application which marks both
the end of the cycle of understanding and interpretation and the need for its resurgence, as the
reader is returned to a site of contemplation in light of the renewed understanding that the reader
has achieved through the struggle to interpret the text within history,
[T]he interpreter seeks no more than to understand the universal, the text – i.e., to understand what it says, what constitutes the text’s meaning and significance. In order to understand that, he must not try to disregard himself and his particular hermeneutical situation. He must relate the text to this situation if he wants to understand it at all.8
The reader is implicated in a process of understanding whose reference is bound by history and
6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2006), 308. Emphasis in original text.7 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 312.8 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 321. Emphasis my own.
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yet encompasses the interaction of different historical worlds. The historically effected
consciousness of the reader is thus experienced from the world of the text, which the reader now
belongs to as one becomes part of the meaning that one has begun to apprehend between the now
of oneself as the reader and the past of the text.9 Application is at the very heart of the encounter
with the text, which Gadamer expresses in the image of the event of understanding as the fusion
of horizons.10 The horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader (being the figurative
boundaries of their respective worlds) are taken up into a dialogical process of question and
answer, the experience of which is fundamentally historical. For the reader comes to know one’s
own finitude as the limits of one’s horizon are exposed through the event of understanding. But
this experience, given its radical finitude, is always open and encompasses yet more new
experiences in the encounter with other worlds, “The truly experienced person is one who has
taken this [finitude] to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future.”11 The
truly experienced reader acknowledges one’s own historicity, being bound by prejudice and
steeped in the passage of tradition, which mediates history and so creates the subject. To be
ready for this experience, to be open to the capacity to call oneself into question and thereby
reform the boundaries of the self with the distanced object of interpretation, this is the dynamic
of the historically effected consciousness.
To revel in this experience with the text is an art, one to be consciously developed and
heightened by the reader as hermeneut. Gadamer writes of the practice of hermeneutics, which
he models on the Platonic dialogues, as the “art of conversation,”12 in which one allows oneself
to be tested by another’s opinion, to be open to the possibility which it presents for one’s
understanding of the subject-at-hand. The text presents the reader with a question as the reader is 9 See, Gadamer, Truth and Method, 335.10 See, Gadamer, Truth and Method, 304-5.11 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 351.12 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 361.
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brought up short by the historical distance of the text, as its becoming meaningful exposes the
indeterminateness of things, bringing out their undetermined possibilities, “Questioning opens up
possibilities of meaning, and thus what is meaningful passes into one’s own thinking on the
subject.” Furthermore, “To understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question,”13
a question that arises from the reader’s experience of dialogical encounter with the text. It is the
experience of history, found within a reader’s openness to the question of the text that allows for
the fusion of horizons of the reader’s world and the text’s such that a newly inflected horizon
emerges within the present moment, as new possibilities emerge in the consciousness of the
reader and so one’s world adapts and transforms as it moves into the future through history.
The appeal that such an effort has for practical theology can be seen in Veling’s work.
Gadamer’s historicising of knowledge resists the powerful urge to seek a total comprehension of
reality while acknowledging the effect the encounter of worlds has upon one’s own being-in-the-
world, as the reader’s worldview is transformed through the fusion of horizons. Veling adopts
this basic process for his outline of a practical theology, as “a more integrated theological
sensibility that attempts to honor the great learnings of theological wisdom with the desire for
God and the coming of God’s kingdom ‘on earth, as it is in heaven.’”14 This disposition is one
grounded in an interpretative resonance with tradition, being the heartfelt attunement to the great
and hard-won wisdom that is an important resource of one’s intuitive sense of being-in-the-
world.15 For the past is one’s living memory, “human beings live within important collective
memories and traditions that serve as crucial and fundamental interpretative frameworks for our
understanding and apprehension of life.”16 The excess of this historical memory contextualises
the present as this collective memory incorporates the now within history, thus transcending 13 Quotes, Gadamer, Truth and Method, 368.14 Veling, Practical Theology, 3-4.15 See, Veling, Practical Theology, 28.16 Veling, Practical Theology, 30.
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oneself in and through tradition. It is “another time,” one both in the past and the future, which
shapes one’s world in the present with “a deep remembering and expectant hopefulness that is
characteristic of the historically gifted human spirit. It is not just ‘this time’ – rather, it is this
time as shaped by the past and leaning into the future.”17
For the faithful community of the church, the revelatory address which both exceeds and
incorporates the present within a greater trajectory of history is mediated by the word of God,
If theology is anything, it is first and foremost the word of God addressed to our lives. It is first and foremost a teaching, a commandment, a deep well, an infinite word, a provocation, an announcement, a saying, a speaking to us and for us – for our sake and our salvation.”18
This divine address must elicit a response, for to be a word, to be the theological word that is
steeped in the collective memory of an ancient tradition, it must be heard again and again,
A word given is no word unless it is received. A word that teaches is no word unless it transforms. These two together – God’s word to us, and the response it calls forth – form the heart of a living tradition. Theological hermeneutics begins with the recognition that we exist within a religious tradition that begins with founding texts – the scriptures – and the way these texts have been received and interpreted by communities of faith across time and history.19
One must cultivate a receptivity and openness to the questioning and transformative possibility
that emerges from this divine address, which is mediated by the gift of tradition and can bring
about a change in one’s understanding through the dispossession of self-understanding in
kenosis, the letting go of one’s self-possession through one’s encounter with the traditionary
word. This dispossession allows one to receive the gift of religious tradition, whose excess
signals the infinity of the divine and heralds, through its profound surplus of meaning, possible
17 Veling, Practical Theology, 31.18 Veling, Practical Theology, 33. Emphasis in original text.19 Veling, Practical Theology, 34. Emphasis my own.
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worlds. Yet it also preserves the “dangerous memory,” of suffering, as the divine comes to be
witnessed in the visage of the orphan, the widow and the stranger; a revelatory experience which
proclaims the need for this divine disruption of the present with the collective memory of the
past and the future.20
Religious tradition is thus mediated through a twofold excess, as the infinite possibility of
the divine overflows into present history from the past wisdom of the faith and through the
expectation of the future not-yet. These two aspects find their momentary remembrance and
revelation in the ethical demand placed upon the faithful from the eyes of the Other, who suffers
under the weight of a present time without history. Certain totalitarian projections of being-in-
the-world dominate those without power and privilege, raising up idols that cannot be inflected
with the indeterminate questioning that emerges from the recognition of humanity’s profound
historicity. The revelatory event of understanding disrupts this totalised horizon of the dominant
account of the world with the concerns of the religious tradition, which disturb the present with
memories of the past and expectations of the future.21 For the Jewish and Christian traditions this
concern is one of justice, which in Christianity has been particularly associated the justice of the
coming kingdom. The absolute horizon of the present is interrupted and transformed by the
infinite possibility of this divine concern with justice, being the promised horizon of the future
not-yet, where the divine abides with “least of these” (Matthew 25:40, NRSV), amongst whom
we will find signs of the coming kingdom.
Christian theology becomes a work infused with this divine possibility of justice, as the
horizon of the present is transformed by the horizon of tradition and its divine concern with the
coming kingdom, which has been borne witness to throughout the history of Christian faith
20 See, Veling, Practical Theology, 35.21 See, Veling, Practical Theology, 44-7.
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communities. My encounter with Ashby’s work can be seen as one instantiation of this event of
understanding with the divine word, as his witnessing to the struggle that confronts African-
Americans today interrupts the blind-spots of my worldview through an event of understanding
in which our horizons fuse. But Ashby’s exposure of the systemic presence of racism within
contemporary American society requires that one attend to this event of understanding with a
more nuanced sensibility. The interpretative resonance that rings out from Ashby’s conjuring of
the memory of Joshua’s triumphal conquest of the promised-land disrupts the present account of
reality with its transcendent possibility, “blacks need the promise and hope found in this first
chapter of Joshua. God’s promises will not fail… In God’s promises the future outcome has
already been fulfilled.”22 The conjuring of this story creates a cohesive identity around which the
struggle to restore a healthy African-American identity, one freed from the fragmentation caused
by the brutality of systemic injustice and racism, can rally, “In Joshua identity is associated with
living within the destiny that God has proposed for God’s people, engaging in rituals of
remembrance of that destiny, and playing an active role in the actualization of that identity.”23 It
is this particular recovery of a collective memory from the divine address of the revelatory word
that creates the conditions for the solidarity of purpose and hopefulness required to struggle for
God’s destiny for African-Americans, a destiny which Ashby defines as, “living black and free
and claiming the inheritance of full humanity that God has promised.”24
It is a powerful claim, to reach into one’s tradition and call upon the power of God to
enable one’s striving to change the very shape of reality. As a white man I must take very
seriously the power of such a conjuring, knowing that as I claim the transformative possibilities
of one’s encounter with the historical text I have forgotten the power that is invested in the
22 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 47.23 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 52.24 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 66.
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contemporary encounter with a world that is just as distant to my own as that of the ancient
Greeks or Judea around the time of Christ. In reading Ashby’s work I am put into question just
as radically as I am by the canonical texts to which I regularly turn in my academic work.
However, what Ashby’s text serves to show is the inherent danger of the conditions of
receptivity, which can also perpetrate a singular world with my reading of these canonical texts
being predicated upon the diffusion of power and the rejection of dominance. To hear the
revelatory address of the divine word from Ashby’s lips, to be brought up short by his world,
should disturb my worldview. If it does not then I have not heard Ashby, I have silenced him and
evaded his witness. I have simply maintained the present shape of reality and perpetrated the
brutality that it enacts. However, I have heard him, I have re-cognised his testimony and so
allowed myself to be transformed. But my receptivity to such an experience is one conditioned
by my own worldview, which is itself a memory built out of the texts and traditions in which I
live and breathe. My world is not, therefore, one that is fundamentally inhospitable to the gift of
Ashby’s prophetic word, but its prejudices must be contextualised by this address, their
descriptive power and transformative possibilities to be acknowledged as being an address from
and to my own worldview.
To some extent Ashby reflects on this problem in his discussion of the inappropriateness
of the critique of ontological blackness, a critique steeped in the texts and traditions to which I
consistently turn.25 Raised in reaction to the grounding of African-Americans’ struggle for
emancipation in terms of a primal racial identity, this critique sought to disrupt the valorization
of one authentic expression of African-American culture. It was considered to be predicated on a
totalised world, under which different identities and understandings were subsumed by a binary
framework of One, authentic blackness, and Other, all who are not black. This kind of binary
25 See, “Discerning Black Identity,” in, Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 71ff.
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frame fixes an absolute horizon in the present, and cannot abide difference as it secures one
threatened identity under a total comprehension of true being. It therefore mimics the very
framing of reality that was perpetrated, and continues to be, by dominant whites; who have fixed
reality around One, white, and Other, all who are not white. In both cases the Other can only be
in terms of the monolithic identity of the One, and is therefore simply a mirror designed to reflect
back to the One the world as it should be. There cannot be any kind of dialogue between these
identities as there is only a simulacrum of difference to be found, the Other is simply not-same.
Any kind of malleability of identity, any kind of fundamental complexity, is lost. For African-
Americans to reiterate this patterning of reality would seem to represent the devastating effect of
centuries of having to live with a double-consciousness, thus allowing whites’ fixing of African-
American identity as not-same to continue to dominate efforts to recover and reformulate a
genuine subjectivity. It is a critique that I know very well, and fully endorse in terms of offering
a fundamental disruption of dominant patterns that subject Others, whether marked by
differences in race or class or gender. However, my encounter with Ashby’s work reveals my
need to reassess the conditions of some of my allegiances, for,
Although the idealism of the black cultural politics of difference is very appealing, it does not address major issues related to the survival and liberation of African American people… the reality is that blacks are being murdered, lynched, infected, and failing to thrive in any number of different ways.26
The question is rather of survival, and survival is predicated upon a common ground of identity
and cultural integrity. But this is not another binary. Rather it is a both/and, survival with
fulfilment in a multiplicity of response, “Multiplicity of response recognizes both the differences
that are housed in the notion of multiplicity and the cohesiveness of these different responses that
26 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 81.
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are distinctive.”27 The collective memory of African-American identity should, “hold disparate
and often conflicting manifestations of a culture in tension with one another.”28 But not at the
cost of the common struggle for survival and liberation, which depends upon the latent power
invested in the recovery of a cohesive identity and memory.
A practical theologian must be willing to be attuned by this kind of profound need, to be
able to reconsider constitutive images and ideas which effect one’s strategies of care. Such
hospitality will ensure that one does not perpetrate totalised worldviews, even as these are
predicated upon effecting social and individual transformation. It is a consistent and ongoing
effort, one which is able to recognise multiple sites of resistance that seek to disrupt the
dominant patterns of power which produce certain worlds and therefore certain modes of
subjectivity. However, in my tradition this effort has been sought out through certain images and
modes of engagement, and the appropriateness of these ideas must be measured against this
event of understanding, by the divine address that is mediated by Ashby’s work.
Developing a Theological Method from the Event of Understanding
One text which is of particular importance to much of my work is Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. This text was produced as a critique of the transcendent
orientation of much of Euro-American traditions of philosophy and theology, and in its singular
deployment of the arresting image of the rhizome it has proved to be a successful and
provocative challenge to the normative dynamics of certain strands of thought in the academy.
However, the limitations of this critique can be sharply felt in contrast to Ashby’s appeal to
coalesce transformative power in a determinative account of African-American identity, an
27 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 88.28 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 90.
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account which Deleuze and Guattari would call arborescent.
In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari depict reality as a complex and
interdependent biological system through the image of the rhizome. The rhizome is a particular
form of plant stem found in tubers and bulbs, recognisable by its horizontal growth and abundant
complexity, the image of which invites one to think of multiplicity and a certain ordered chaos
insofar as it is a determined organic system. By conceiving of reality as rhizomatic, Deleuze and
Guattari would resist the transcendent mode of thought that they claim typifies the Euro-
American traditions, “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains,
organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”29
The rhizome is a horizontal network marked by its inherent multiplicity and connectivity. It is
system with a “plane of consistency,”30 yet it is without a stable form, “A multiplicity has neither
subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase without
the multiplicity changing in nature.”31 Envisioned as such the rhizome therefore resists, “fascist
concretions,”32 which rupture its organic multiplicity. These ruptures are the great trees of
knowledge, arborescent systems which are, “hierarchical… with centres of significance and
subjectification.”33 They are, “the structure of Power.”34
These central nodes within the greater structure of the rhizome gather to themselves the
power to create subjects according to priorly determined principles which function dualistically,
be this and not that. Through the trees of knowledge the ground of reality has been sought, being
a stable and familiar haven that constrains the complex into the simple one. From this position
totalitarian power may be wielded as those in control of the concretion determine the flow of the
29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7.30 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9.31 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8.32 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9.33 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 16.34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 17.
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rhizome for their subjects. This impulse to establish, “the root foundation,”35 is the disease of
transcendence, and it infects all Euro-American thought, including theology.36
Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic account of reality stands in clear opposition to this,
To these centred systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbour to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment – such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency.37
This is a cartography of multiplicity, confounding concretions by the dynamic movement of
networks of communication within which power is diffused by the rhizome’s, “short-term
memory, or antimemory.”38 It is an image of reality as an interconnected system, constantly
forming and reforming itself as it adapts to new stimuli. It is to all intents and purposes chaotic,
and any order perceived has too often been imposed upon this dynamic movement. But what
these projections achieve is very real, being the violent formation of subjects in accord with a
transcendent ideal around which great power has been gathered.
In their work Deleuze and Guattari have sought to disrupt the conventional dynamics of
academic theology and philosophy. They have profoundly effected the developments of radical
thought in Europe and America, with their work being taken up in feminist and queer studies as a
profound transgression of totalizing worlds, deployed in order to interrupt these worlds’ horizons
and so disrupt their production of certain modes of subjectivity. It is the power of history that all
the authors in this paper have recognised and is a concern that each shares. And after their
respective fashions each has attempted to harness this power and so deliberately produce
alternative memories, thereby preserving subversive identities that can resist the functioning of a 35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 18.36 See, Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 18.37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 17.38 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
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reality controlled by certain fascist concretions, or dominant worldviews. However, there is a
profound resistance on the part of Deleuze and Guattari to any kind of utopian future. Each
identity, either dominant or subversive, is only provisional and temporary, and can only be a
momentary resistance to the greater flows of power, which are continually gathered by those
with the necessary ideological systems of control and production. The creation of other
subjectivities is always undone either by the overwhelming forces to which they are subjected or
by a resistance to the creation of yet another arborescent concretion. From the underside, from a
place where there has never been such control, profound need calls out for more. The visage of
the orphan, the widow, or the stranger seeks another movement, one which recovers lost
traditions to create memories and identities which are always under threat from the movement of
history, and thus must be given over to a greater, and utopian, Power.
This need to produce determinate and lasting subjectivities can be clearly seen in the
work of the French feminist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. Her efforts to re-read key texts in
the traditions of European thought is motivated by the very concern evinced throughout the
above works, to resist the particular dynamics of subject formation in, for her specifically,
European history. Irigaray’s central concern has been to expose Euro-American philosophy’s
phallocentric subjugation of the feminine other – who has been reduced to the formation of her
subjectivity in relation to the One of Euro-American discourses, the male subject. As such there
is no true Other, since subjectivity is defined as same and not-same. Irigaray believes this
impulse to be rooted in the historical definition of male subjectivity over and against the
perceived lack of the female body. Woman is conceived thus,
By a fault, a flaw, a lack, an absence, outside the system of representations… Which are man’s. By a hole in men’s signifying economy. A nothing that might cause the ultimate destruction, the splintering, the break in their systems of ‘presence,’ of ‘re-presentation’
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and ‘representation.’ A nothing threatening the process of production, reproduction, mastery, and profitability, of meaning, dominated by the phallus – that master signifier whose law of functioning erases, rejects, denies the surging up, the resurgence, the recall of a heterogeneity capable of reworking the principle of its authority.39
The phallus is the fascist concretion par excellence, and its presence as the master signifier
demands that one recognise the gendered functioning of the Power. Hence Irigaray’s clarion call,
“Outside of all self-as-same.”40 It is the demand, “to be considered as actually an/other woman,
irreducible to the masculine subject,”41 which is to gain a true subjectivity and to no longer be
simply defined as a lack. By instead preserving gendered difference, the implicit binary
reductionism of Euro-American ‘subjectivity’ can be overturned, ending this oppression “within
difference rather than by abolishing it.”42 This is represented by the rejection of the signifiers
woman and female, whose presentation assumes the One of the male subject, and the raising up
of the feminine subject as the site of true difference, forming outwith the shadow of the Power.
This presentation of the dynamics of gendered power creating totems of authority which
prohibit multiplicity by asserting unity accords well with the image of fascist concretions. But
crucially Irigaray offers a ground for the infinite project of becoming feminine in religion. Her
cry for the embodiment of the divine within the feminine is rooted in her belief that the centrality
of the divine throughout history points to some exteriority without which the process of human
becoming cannot be sustained. She writes:
God is the other that we absolutely cannot be without. In order to become, we need some shadowy perception of achievement; not a fixed objective… a cohesion and a horizon that assures us the passage between past and future, the bridge of a present that remembers, that is not sheer oblivion and loss, not a crumbling away of existence.43
39 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 50.40 Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, 200.41 Luce Irigaray, “The Question of the Other,” Yale French Studies, 87 (1995): 9.42 Irigaray, “The Question of the Other,” 10.43 Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 67. Emphasis in original text.
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This divinity has held a privileged place in Euro-American theological discourse, which as the
dominant discourse has been the locus for the suppression of a feminine subjectivity emerging in
Euro-American societies. But, by realizing a ‘herself-God’ as at once an immanent manifestation
of the embodied transcendence of feminine subjectivity, and as the ever-proximate horizon of
becoming, the binary phallocentrism of Euro-American discourses is shattered. So a dynamic,
irruptive space may be created, in which feminine subjectivity is intuitively brought forth as an
infinite project protected by an absolute presence that remembers.
Theological Hermeneutics, A Method for an Eminently Practical Theology
The event of understanding offered in the work of Ashby has its clearest interpretative
resonance here, from the position of absolute lack, where the creation of identity can only be
conceived with the aide of the infinite possibility of the divine. Through the recovery of a
cohesive identity by the retelling and re-performance of Joshua’s story in his conjure, Ashby sees
a way to restore full humanity to African-Americans, by creating a vision of what ought-to-be,
[T]he moral authority of ‘ought to be’ carries with it a moral power whose force has the capacity to break out of imposed negative identities. In this new place with the power to create a more life-giving experience, African Americans can fashion an identity that transcends the limits imposed by the dominant society.44
The despised bodies of feminine subjects and African-Americans can become sites of memory,
instantiated within history by the deliberate and consistent effort to coalesce power around one
moment in history, a moment which could become the site of the divine address if we but had the
ears to hear. These moments are re-rooted in the past, a past that has been forgotten by the
44 Ashby, Our Home is Over Jordan, 138.
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myopic gaze of the dominant world. To recapture these lost memories and allow them to
resonate with the divine address heralds the infinite possibility of the not-yet, as an infinite
horizon projects what ought-to-be from the eternal memory of the divine. The encounter with the
divine is to be found in the midst of the event of understanding. For here is where we are
addressed by another voice and another world, one which disturbs and disrupts our present
horizons with a momentary blindness and, in turn, a shedding of the scales which cover our eyes.
The new vision which comes with the passing of our blindness is one with a profound re-
cognition of the past, one now both our own and that of another.
We are taken up into a collective memory in which can be found an echo of the divine
word, which speaks of the possibilities of being-in-the-world as it reveals and grounds our
multiple efforts to realise our humanity. It is an acute hermeneutical encounter, in which we step
beyond ourselves through another’s world and so encounter our own world anew. Such an
experience must result in the radical application of our new understanding, as our sense of self
and the world are transformed. For our fundamental agency remains, mediated through the
horizons of our world, and we are therefore implicated in the need to disseminate this new
vision, to instigate hermeneutical encounters among those who remain blind to the presence of
the kingdom amidst the sacred stories of the Other. We must entreat them to welcome the
encounter, to lead them through its paths as the revelation of infinite possibility begins to
transform our limited and finite visioning through the story told by another. Only in such an act
of phronesis can I, as a hermeneut, participate in Ashby’s struggle as I call others to hear his
prophetic denunciation of the arborescent concretions of power. The limited horizons of which
he exposes by the reiteration of another way of being-in-the-world, one that is given the weight
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of history by the conjuring of a forgotten memory that resonates with the divine word, an address
which forever lies outwith our final grasp at the boundaries of being itself.
However, the patterning of such an event through the theories in the midst of which I
struggle to be-in-the-world contains an eminent danger, as my worldview comes to fix my
horizon. Yet the encounter with such texts as Ashby’s heralds the possibility of a continual
process of transformation. But only if I attend to artistry of my reading, only if I cultivate a
sensitivity to the presence of the divine word in other worlds, and only if I am willing to be heard
to being through the words of another. As the hermeneutical cycle continues to shift throughout
history I will be brought up short again and again by the excess of multiple traditions and
subjectivities, whose retelling of collective memories continually re-establishes the flow of time
around their sense of being-in-the-world. As I allow the coalescing power of these remembrances
to effect my own subjectivity, my own traditions and memories come to participate in a diffuse
time, in which the infinite possibility of the divine moves, heralding what ought-to-be. Human
narratives, sites of power and memory, are only ever arbitrary delineations of history;
representing the cohesive effort to account for one’s experience of the world. A theological
hermeneutics sees these efforts as an important and constitutive effort in response to the
possibility of the divine word apprehended in the eyes of another. But it is only ever a
provisional act, situating oneself and one’s people within the shifting sands of time.
As a practical theologian, part of my role is to ensure this passage of time; deferring final
realizations of identity by reflecting upon my encounters with other worlds. It is a conscious act
of bringing forth the event of understanding, allowing its phronetic resonance to attune my
continued efforts to attend to the appearance of the divine word and its infinite possibilities. The
narrative which emerges from this effort will always be open, to the wisdom of my own tradition
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and that of another. In this way we can sustain a powerful solidarity with the poor and oppressed,
who, from the underside of the streams of power, can exert a decisive moral authority in the
pronouncement of another world: one within which the justice and the authority of divine
possibility, being the heralding of the kingdom itself, is to be found.
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Bibliography
Ashby, Homer U. Our Home is Over Jordan. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London: Continuum, 2006.
Irigaray, Luce. Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Irigaray, Luce. “The Question of the Other,” Yale French Studies, 87 (1995): 7-19.
Maddox, Randy L. “Practical Theology: A Discipline in Search of a Definition,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 18 (1991): 159-169
Veling, Terry A. Practical Theology: On Earth as it is in Heaven. New York: Orbis Books, 2005.
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