Third Wave Theopoetics: Guiding Principles

30 October 2011

My practice of theopoetics is relatively new — I’ve only been doing this for a few years (and even less time under this term) — and so I couldn’t possibly list all the principles that go into it yet.  However, some of them, and in particular some of the principles that differentiate my present stance toward world-life-Scripture from the posture I was trained to take, are pretty near the surface and easy for me to talk about, because I’ve had to become conscious of them in order to make sense of where God has led me.  Below are a few of those.  I offer this discussion partly as an apologetic for what I do, partly as a recruiting pitch, and partly out of an obligation to honor my fathers, which in this case means explaining to the community that trained me why I have suddenly become such a weirdo.  (Believe it or not, guys, it’s because you did such a great job teaching me to take the Scriptures seriously, obey thoroughly, and where necessary, repent instantly, with no shilly-shallying about.  But more below.)

So with no further ado, some of the guiding principles of third wave theopoetics (twelve of them, for you numerological types):

Charitable Hermeneutics.  Love Yahweh first, then interpret His Word.  This cuts through a lot of the baloney in discussions of hermeneutical method.  It issues in a good-faith submission and desire to obey what we find written in the Word, with no hermeneutical monkey business about beating the text into a shape that better accommodates our sins.  Or our theology.

Divine Authorship.  Yahweh wrote the Word and the World.  The Word gives us an authoritative interpretation of the World; it’s the manual that goes with it.  The motifs, symbols and themes in the Word carry over their interpretive significance into the World.

Story-Centered.  Because we must read the Bible with love for the Author/authors, and because we recognize that the same Yahweh wrote both Word and World, theopoetics must be story-centered.  He is the author of the One Story in the Bible, and He continues to write that Story today.  Every human being, no matter how distant he might think to be from God, is part of that Story.  Our stories only make sense when embedded within the Story.

Obedient Rhetoric.  God’s speech is not just content to be parsed and then communicated how we will; it’s also a model for communication.  We have been given outstanding examples to follow, and we should be obedient to God in this, striving to live up to the rhetoric of Word and World. In simple terms, we are the image of God in the world, and we should speak as God speaks, not just in any way we decide to.  This means we don’t always play nice: there’s a lot of rough speech in the Scriptures.  It also means that we don’t simply cut everything up into topics, because even the NT authors give most of their theological and ethical instruction by situating their readers into the Story.

Trinitarian Metaphor.  The fundamental is/is not relationship that drives metaphor is a reflection of the Trinity in the world.  “If you have seen Me,” Jesus says, “You have seen the Father.”  And yet, Jesus is not the Father; He is the icon of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.  Biblical interpreters often talk about symbols, motifs, or types in the Bible; these are sub-categories of metaphor, all of them absolutely pervasive throughout both Word and World.  If you understand Word and World as Story rather than as raw material for a Systematic Theology laboratory, this makes a lot of sense; otherwise it’s going to cause you trouble.  But the biblical authors, especially in the New Testament, make metaphorical connections all over the place.  We can ignore them because they don’t fit our guiding principles, or we can submit to them, learn from them, and get to work.

Poetic Precision. Once the far-reaching implications of metaphor are understood, most conservative evangelical folks get very nervous, and start asking, “Where are the brakes on this thing?”  That’s a fair question, but to be honest it’s mostly born of inexperience.  Just because the hermeneutical controls aren’t the ones you’re used to doesn’t mean there aren’t any.  As I’ve grown in my grasp of biblical metaphor, it has become very plain that the connections are precise, and that you can’t just prove anything with it.  But it is the precision of a well-constructed poem or symphony, not the precision of a logical syllogism, and folks find that unnerving.

Imaging God.  Our primary mandate is to be God’s image, not His chief theorist. “Thinking God’s thoughts after Him” is all well and good, but being God’s image is what we’re actually called to.  The thinking is a portion of that, but it’s not the whole thing.  One of the chief implications of this is that sometimes God leads us to do something before we’ve worked out all the theological theory.  In such a case, obedience is called for–we walk by faith, not by sight–and the action forms our character and matures our theopoetic being in the world.

Hunger for Righteousness.  “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness,” Jesus said, “for they shall be filled.”  We too often get so tangled up in our pursuit of freedom (even “freedom in Christ”) that we no longer want to hear how we ought to do something.  God loves us and accepts us because of Christ; no amount of commandment-keeping could earn that for us, and nothing whatsoever can separate us from it.  Precisely because that is the case, we ought to hunger for His instruction in how to live well.  “I opened my mouth and panted,” wrote the psalmist, “for I long for Your commandments.”  Amen.

Loving Scholarship.  Scholarship at its God-honoring best is loving enough to Get It Right.  This has been the subject of a post already, so I won’t repeat all that here.

Mystical Union.  There is no substitute for actually walking with God, in fellowship with Him and guided by His hand.  If we’re not doing that, we have no business talking about God.  This has been the subject of a whole series of posts already, so I’ll be brief about it here.  I know portions of my community are still uneasy with the “mystical” term, but I can’t really apologize for it.  If you don’t believe in mystical union with Christ in the sense I’ve talked about it here (with or without assenting to my choice of terms), you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, the unity of Christ’s Body, or the genuine possibility of real fellowship with a personal God (as over against Christian-life-as-thought-experiment).  If that is the case, then you need to repent.

Living Tradition.  Honoring our fathers means attending to the voices of the saints, past and present.  We are part of a living tradition spanning millennia, whether we know it or not, whether we’re willing to admit it or not.  The Tradition is our broadest fellowship, and like all fellowship it guides and guards us if we love the people in it.  I understand this sounds a bit nebulous, and I look forward to clarifying it in a future discussion.

And last but not least, Growing in Grace, or to put it a little more bluntly, Failing Well.  God calls us to grow in grace, and this means that today’s effort isn’t going to be perfect.  As Chesterton said, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly.”  My own practice of the discipline of theopoetics is still young.  I expect to make some mistakes, repent of them as soon as the Lord makes me aware of my errors, and profit from the experience.  I know of no other way to proceed, and I certainly won’t improve by burying my one talent in the backyard, waiting for that perfect, risk-free investment opportunity.  So take the risk of doing the work, out loud and in public, and when I need to repent, I’ll do that out loud and in public too.  It’s how the Body works, and I’m honored to be a part of it.

4 Comments | Hermeneutics, Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Theopoetics: The Case for Scholarship

23 October 2011

Once upon a time, someone asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest.  He said that the greatest command is to love God with everything you’ve got, and the second greatest is to love your neighbor as yourself.  Those two commands, Jesus said, undergird all the Law and the Prophets — which is to say, the whole Bible at the time He was speaking.  Paul made a similar comment when he said that love fulfills the whole Law.

I teach in a seminary.  I regularly require scholarly papers, complete with footnotes and all the appurtenances of academic geekdom.  When I have such a requirement, I expect the bibliographic citations to conform to Turabian and the Chicago Manual of Style.  How do I reconcile Jesus’ commands on love — plus all I’ve said on theopoetics in the two prior posts — with my pedagogical “rigidity” in an academic institution?  Or put another way, how does scholarship meet theopoetics?

At its best, scholarship is the opposite of laziness and sloppiness; it is precision with purpose.  Scholarship is about loving enough to Get It Right, and that  is a truly great idea.  You don’t want to hear the words “Well, I think that’ll fix it good enough” from your brain surgeon…or even from your barber, for that matter.  No, you want them to know what they’re doing, be skilled enough to get the job done, and care about you enough to be sure they get it right.

In the theo- disciplines, this means loving God enough to make sure you understand His Word (or His world) correctly.  Loving your neighbor enough to be sure you explain your idea well, and clearly.  Loving those who’ve gone before you enough to give them credit where it’s due, rather than letting your readers or listeners think you just came up with it all on your own.  Loving your fellow scholars enough to pay your dues into the guild, listen to those who’ve gone before you, gain the wisdom they have to offer, and demonstrate to them that you have something to offer which can benefit them.

However, when “academic standards” and the folkways of the guild become an end in themselves (which they often have), then they have become Dagon, and Dagon must fall in the presence of Yahweh.  When the pursuit of theory and minutia and theological castles-in-the-sky impedes our obedience to the two Greatest Commandments, then our “pursuit of truth” has become, in fact, a 72-straight-hour-long game of Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy that distracts us from reality — our relationship with the Living God.  When we are willing to sacrifice the integrity of our relationships with the brothers and sisters God gave us  in order to maintain the integrity of our thought experiment, we love neither our brothers nor our God.  At this point one can no longer talk about how some people enjoy fellowship and other people enjoy old books, as though it were a simple matter of Christian liberty.  Where there is no love, there is no liberty; addicts always think their addiction sets them free, and they’re always wrong.  Even if it’s an addiction to theology books, or a particular theological system of thought.

Good scholarship is first, last and always about love.  This is not simply a different-parts-of-the-body kind of argument.  If the whole body were loving, then where would be the…what?  Is there a body part or function that fits in that sentence?  No.  If I understand all mysteries and all knowledge, but have not love, then I am nothing.  An unloving scholar, a man whose “pursuit of truth” causes division and sows discord among brethren, does not serve our Lord Christ, but his own belly.  He is nothing.  Let him repent and be restored, to the greater glory of God.  If he will not, then let his days be few, and let another take his office.

Good poetry touches the real world; it makes us see something we never saw before, or see something as if we’ve never seen it before.  To do that, and do it well, we must observe the world as it really is.  In our contemplation of divinity, this means careful observation and interpretation of God’s Word, Christ’s Body, the Spirit’s work in the world, and so on.  The best sort of scholarship — the love that draws us to Get It Right — is not only helpful to good theopoetic work, it’s absolutely indispensable.

But this is a scholarship that serves, a scholarship unashamed to wash feet, not a ruler-of-the-Gentiles scholarship that aspires to personal empire-building.  It is a scholarship that serves Yahweh, not just the standards of the guild, and therefore it must be a scholarship that aspires to communicate in the way that God models for us.  It may never write a paper with footnotes and a bibliography; it is enough to love well, and in loving well, get it right.  Imperfectly, to be sure, but right enough for this application, right now.  If there is a paper with footnotes, the guild may be satisfied, but the Christian scholar must not be.  That paper must be only an intermediate step; there is no biblical precedent for that as the end product God wishes us to produce.  A scholarly paper on chronological teaching as a tool for evangelistic Bible study must become an actual evangelistic Bible study, or what’s the point?

2 Comments | Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Third Wave Theopoetics: Toward a Definition

16 October 2011

The word theopoetics has been in use since the late 60s or early 70s, apparently.  It seems it was originally coined by Stanley Romaine Hopper as part of a scholarly conversation, then independently coined a second time by Catherine Keller in the early 2000s to describe her own work.  As I presently understand them, these two uses are distinct streams of thought, but with a certain amount of overlap.  I’m still reading up, so I don’t know much about the previous uses yet.

The word was independently coined a third time (that I know of) last Sunday by me, to describe a conversation I was having with Jim and Michele.  It occurred to me at the time that it was a fairly obvious coinage, so I googled it and discovered the above history.  It’s probably been coined independently dozens of times over the years, but these are the ones I’m aware of.

Theopoetics is a wonderfully apt descriptor for a project I’m part of — a project quite unrelated to the two previous uses.  It’s too good to give up, so I’m keeping it, but in order to be fair to the other communities that are also using theopoetics to describe what they’re doing, I’m going to use the term third wave theopoetics.  Of course, I will also invest some effort in description and definition over the next little while.  I’ll begin by giving the rationale behind the coinage, then a brief definition of the project as I see it.  In later posts, I hope to fill in some of the gaps by articulating some guiding principles and looking at the project through a series of different lenses.

Why theopoetics rather than theology?  The -ology suffix generally refers to giving an orderly account of the thing to which it is attached.  Thus, geology, the study of Earth (i.e., rocks), zoology, the study of animal life, climatology, the study of climates and how they change, anthropology, the study of human societies.

A poetics, by contrast, is typically a treatise on poetry or aesthetics.  Rigor is not by any means absent from a good poetics, but it’s understood that the practice of poetics depends heavily on seasoned judgment and a trained and practiced eye and ear.  An -ology is a science; a poetics is an art and a craft.  It simply isn’t “objective” in the way that biology is.

Theology, in very simplistic terms, is the -ology, the giving of an orderly account, of God and the things related to him.  So far, so good, but to modern people, just the use of the -ology suffix causes us to catch a whiff of bunsen burners, test tubes, and fourth-grade frog dissections.  It’s impossible to use -ology without causing the odor of science to cling to the field.

On the other hand, -poetics carries none of those connotations.

Now some folks really like the scientific connotations, and want to practice their studies of divinity in such a way as to imitate the rigor of the chemistry lab.  They can speak for their own motivations, but I was once one of them, and I can certainly speak for myself.  For me, the attraction of dressing theology in the trappings of empirical science was the idolatrous regard our society attaches to all things “objective” and “scientific.”  I loved the praise of men rather than the praise of God, and God rewarded my sterility of spirit with a sterility of intellect and worship to match.  In His mercy, He also led me in due time to repent.  This to say that I’ve seen the case for “scientific” theology, and I’m not impressed with it.  I am even less impressed with its results: barren theology leads to barren living.

No, the New Testament itself teaches us clearly that if we want to understand what God says to men, we have to have eyes to see and ears to hear.  This is not an objective enterprise; it matters if the one looking and listening loves or hates God, if he is experienced or a novice, if he knows the One he’s listening to, or not.  It’s a relationship, and like all relationships, it’s an art and a craft.

With that preface, I’d like to define what I mean by (third wave) theopoetics.  Theopoetics is the appreciation of — no, the embodied luxuriating in — God’s words and works as art.  The same God wrote the Bible as spoke the world, so theopoetics extends from the exegesis of Paul’s use  of kosmos to the dancing of taste buds at breakfast this morning.

You could say that this is a supplement to theology.  That would be true, in some sense.  But I mean it as a rebuke for theology’s tin ear, glass eye, and wooden leg, a corrective to too many theologians’ bean-counting ways.

The artfully written Bible and the artfully spoken world are both revelation and rhetoric.  God communicates by feasting our senses, by engaging the whole man, the dust and the breath.  Theopoetics is about being God’s image, living as His likeness, and therefore will not advance itself by writing laboriously footnoted papers.  The medium is the message.

Away with the temptation to write scholarly papers!  Let no man say when he is tempted to write a scholarly paper, “I am tempted by God,” for God is not tempted to write scholarly papers, nor does He Himself tempt anyone.  If God ever inspired a scholarly paper, He had the mercy not to inflict it on His people in Scripture; let us follow His good example.  Let the scholarly paper’s laboriously footnoted pages be few and let another medium take its office.  Let there be stories, songs, poems, vignettes, parables, sculptures, tapestries.  Let there be dances!  Let there be great rigor, but let it be the rigor of Miriam dancing well and playing the timbrel in time, the rigor of David’s perfect songs, the rigor of Solomon’s fitly spoken proverbs and Jesus’ apt parables, well-driven nails given by one Shepherd.

Let us learn the lessons of the Tabernacle by sculpting one, even a miniature one, and the more detail and prayer goes into it, the better.  Let the plagues be painted on murals, complete with the crushed heads of the Egyptian gods.  Let dances be choreographed in honor of the Red Sea crossing.  Let beer be brewed in honor of Jael slaying Sisera.  Let bread be baked in honor of the feeding of the five thousand — and let it be given to the poor and homeless in the name of Jesus.  Let rattlesnakes be barbecued in honor of Moses’ bronze serpent (we can eat off St. Peter’s sheet; why not?)  Let vibrant old liturgies be revived and adapted in honor of the resurrection of the Son of God.  Let our grasp of the nature and character of God be embodied to the hilt — something we can eat, drink, watch, touch, feel, smell.

And yes, hear.

But let us cease to worry about what those with no ears to hear will say.  They will want proof in the form of footnotes and syllogisms; we will simply live the proof before them, and wait for God to open their ears and remove the scales from their eyes.  “To him who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance.”

God grant that all His people have eyes to see and ears to hear the glory of the Father, expressed in time and space by the Body of the Son through the indwelling power of the Spirit.  Amen.

7 Comments | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Theopoetic Reflection: The Body in the World

9 October 2011

Before someone else does the requisite Google search: yes, I’m aware that “theopoetics” is a pre-existing term, and as a field of endeavor has operated almost exclusively in ways that aren’t particularly amenable to conservatives.  I just discovered that fact this morning, after independently coining the term to describe a conversation I was having.  I mean it maybe a bit differently from the way it’s been meant up to this point, and I’m comfortable with that.  What, exactly, I mean may be the subject for a future post.  For now, the reflection itself, with many thanks to Jim and Michele for their part in shaping it.

The wicked devour God’s people as men eat bread.

From Jeremiah, we learn that God’s word is not just something that we should listen to and obey; it’s also something we should eat, and that gives us joy.

From John, we learn that Jesus is the Word made flesh.  He gathers great crowds, miraculously feeds them bread, and then tells them the next day that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they have no part with Him.  Many follow Him no more, and the ones that do continue to follow Him don’t really understand it either.

Later, He gathers those faithful few to the Table and gives them bread and wine: “This is My body which is given for you….This is the new covenant in My blood which is poured out for you.”  We who eat Christ’s body are what we eat: Christ’s Body.

The world hates us, because it hated Him, and as the world devoured our Savior, nailing Him to a cross, so the world will devour us as men eat bread.  In this way, the world will once again play into God’s hands and be saved in spite of itself, because those who sow in tears will reap in joy, because the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, because in God’s plan, death is the precursor to glorious resurrection — for the one who dies, and often for the one’s he’s dying for as well.

In a lesser way, this plays out in the life of the Church itself, every time you forgive someone, every time you lay down your life for someone.  We die for them, that they might live, and in dying, we are (re)born to yet more abundant eternal life.  The more life we have, the more we can lay down, and the more we can lay down, the greater the resurrection, in an ever-growing upward spiral of eternal life.  Or in the language of Aslan: “Further up, and further in!”

3 Comments | Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Maginot Lines

2 October 2011

At the close of The Great War, the French were determined never again to suffer an invasion from Germany.  To that end, they constructed a massive line of fortifications, naming it after then-minister of war, Andre Maginot.  It’s not necessarily a bad strategy.  Worked pretty well for China, once upon a time.  It was state-of-the-art all the way — cafeterias for the troops, air conditioning, underground railways to connect different fortifications, and a vast number of blockhouses, turrets, shelters and observation posts bristling with the latest in machine guns, grenade launchers, and artillery.  The Maginot Line would, in fact, have been very difficult to breach…

…so the Germans invaded the Low Countries instead, and then came down into France from the north, sweeping the entire country in days and completely avoiding the irrelevant fortresses of the Maginot Line.

***

We are God’s people in exile.  “Here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.”  Despite the plain biblical revelation on this point, we persist in investing ourselves in the permanence of our Christian institutions–governments, cathedrals, seminaries, churches, mission agencies, charities and so on.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t build these things.  When the governors are Christians, they certainly ought to build a Christian government.  When the populace will furnish and fill a cathedral, they should build one.  When the church needs trained men and is incapable of training them as it ought to do, someone certainly ought to start a seminary.  When single churches can’t undertake the expense of funding a pioneering missionary on the other side of the world, a mission agency is a good idea.

But we can’t fool ourselves that we’re building something permanent with these structures.  The God-fearing governments of Christendom have given way to pagan states that acknowledge no god but themselves.  The great cathedrals, more often than not, stand empty, as do many of our large church buildings.  Most seminaries have managed to lose their effectiveness, often with in matter of a few generations.  Spirit-led mission efforts ossify and become self-serving bureaucracies that Spirit-led missionaries have to work around in order to fulfill the Great Commission.

All is mist, as the wise Preacher once said.

Having forgotten what it’s like to do without these things, we build new Christian political movements, new church buildings, new seminaries, new mission agencies.  Well-meaning Christian people scrimp and save and sacrifice to pour massive amounts of resources into these new institutions, constructed on the same principles as the old ones, and vulnerable to the same failings in the end.  History has not been kind to this strategy, but we have forgotten our earlier history, and don’t know what else to do.  Which is to say that when the enemy outflanks one Maginot Line, we build another.  And another.  And another.  The really awful part?  We have no continuing city to defend with all these fixed fortifications.

To everything there is a season, and this is not the season for building fortifications.  Defending Jerusalem is a nice thought, but unless the Lord guards the city, the watchmen watch in vain, and if you’re at Jeremiah’s point in the story rather than Hezekiah’s, the Lord isn’t interested in guard duty.  Christendom 1.0 was glorious, but in God’s providence it’s crumbling, and while Christendom 2.0 is rising, it will be a long time before we see more than foundations — far, far longer than I’ll live.  It’s Jeremiah time, and those who can’t see this harsh providence for what it is will die defending walls that can no longer even support their own weight, let alone protect anyone.

So where does that leave us?  It’s an interesting question.  We may have to find out as we go.

2 Comments | Chicken Bones, Ecclesiology, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols