Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн

40 страница из 123

inchoate

autopoesis

We finally arrive at the quality of radical risk, characterized by irony. Irony is, I suggest, characteristic of all theology. It is present in the very attempt to speak about something over our heads, in the sense that we cannot hope to refer to a transcendent realm with immanent ideas and terms, yet this is exactly what we do. I have already alluded to the problems of religious language, fallibilism, and truth, and won’t rehearse these points here. But irony cuts deeper into the body of theology by revealing the absurdity with which we must all struggle. Perhaps no other philosopher has wrestled more profoundly with the idea of absurdity than Søren Kierkegaard, who bound irony and absurdity together at the heart of religious life.

incarnate

What this means is that one must decide to believe, as an act of will, in something one knows to be unreasonable, illogical, preposterous, inappropriate, and incongruous: that is, the absurd. To do this one is required to regularly and constantly renew one’s commitment to God, repeating the decision to believe and form one’s life according to the teachings of Jesus. The act of belief is a continual, repeated, decision to follow Christ. Repetition is the substance of faith, for Kierkegaard, and the only way to become one’s true self. But in the face of absurdity these decisions cease to be decisions at all, for deciding in itself requires the existence of decidables, that is, options which express sensible propositions. The absurdity of the options amounts to either believing in something which is paradoxical, or taking offense at an irrelevant paradox. The former is clearly nonsensical, the latter utterly foolish. In either case these are not “live options,” as William James puts it.²⁶ Absurdity evacuates the decision of its weight; it ceases to be a decision at all. The only way out of this conundrum is to embrace, as a knight of faith, irony.