Can we hear radical theology as an apocalyptic tone announcing the end of realism, an end that has already occurred secretly and will soon be made present to the whole world?
Radicals love the End, it is at the centre of their passion and they cry "the old world is ending, we are preparing for religious belief in the third millennium!" I think that sometimes apocalyptic exuberance can cover a little melancholic regret at what is ending.
To what end do radicals announce the End? After the End, what then?
Is radical theology part of the old world? Will it end at the End? Perhaps it would help if we noted two important traits of realism. Firstly it has to have some sort of dogma, because the theological language is determined by a supernatural reality, and secondly it has to be fairly systematic, because being the Truth it has to apply to Everything. Doesn't radicalism itself contain a shadow of these two traits?
As an example of dogma, let's look at the meaning of death. Ask from poetry the meaning of death and you will perhaps get some insights into preparing to die, into mourning and into grief. Ask from theology, whether radical, liberal or conservative, the meaning of death and it is much more likely to give a dogmatic statement (whether it is death is not the end, death must be embraced, death must be joyfully accepted and so on). With poetry, death is a question that can be asked in many different ways. With theology death is a Question that must be given an Answer.
The stupidity of people comes from their having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
Milan Kundera
Radicalism isn't systematic in the conservative or liberal sense (it will never produce a Church Dogmatics or a Summa Theologica) but it still desires a sort of levelling consistency. Having made the Christian Decision there is a constant dialectical interplay between your life and your Christian ideals. All other aspects of life are only allowed in through the gate of theological acceptability (secular ethics are allowed in because they have received theological justification).
This rather determined and rigid way of theological thinking I would like to call "hard theology". This term has a number of resonances, perhaps the most obvious being "intellectually difficult" (for example, when the Bishop of Durham was on Wogan he explained what he believed and Wogan replied "I didn't understand a word you said"). However the main significance of the term hard is as in structured, fixed, ordered, closed. Soft theology, which I shall now try to picture, is fluid, seductive, opaque. It's already happening, but not as a movement, not as a regime, not as a manifesto. Soft theology is fictional theology, poetic theology: it's theology without theology, Christianity without Christianity.
Lips that (in soft theology) would kiss, in the bitter twilight of hard theology form prayers to broken stone.
Hardcore religion: this is the dead land, this is cactus land. Dogmas like ancient stone images silently watch the hard theologian dressed in rat's coat and crowskin, digging for fire under the soft light of dying stars.
Soft theology: soft like breath, like silence, soft like whispered wedding vows. soft like a baby's grip, like the saviour's blood, like dew, like heaven empty. I can describe a fragment of soft theology, a stone fallen
from the sky which retains the memory of an hallucinated architecture, and to which it may well have belonged. Where did it come from? What was it a part of? Soft theology isn't an innocent theology, without care it will harden (like soft pornography). It requires a delicate step, as if we were walking in a forest where nightingales rustle among the thick fallen leaves.
My fragment is simply this. In our culture today there are many meditations on Christianity and its related themes, whether they be on the meaning of Christ (e.g. films like Potter's "Son of Man", Godard's "Hail Mary", "Jesus in Montreal", "The Last Temptation"), or ethics and politics (e.g. "Gandhi", "The Mission"), or ecology or relationships, whether it is Milan Kundera or Salman Rushdie or even SF ("Stranger in a Strange Land" is totally concerned with religion, Philip Jose Farmer's "Jesus on Mars" and Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man" deal with the meaning of Christ). A recent editorial in Marxism Today said that anything of worth in Marx had already been absorbed into our intellectual culture, consequently there was no longer any need for a Marx-ism. The same is true of Christianity, we don't need to turn to a theology book to consider the meaning of Christ or the value of sacrifice or the purpose of non-violence because our culture is already concerned with exactly those things and doing so (with film, video, novel, music, painting) in ways more vivid and alive than hard theologians trying to re-code old dogmas into new.
Soft theology reprograms the DNA of Christianity with soft hands but with bones of ancient stone.
Let me give an analogy. When computers were first sold they had to offer everything: software, hardware, applications and so on. Such a system is impossible to sell today because businesses already have a computer, what they want is something compatible with their existing system. Similarly Christianity can no longer offer a "whole system" like hard theology wants to do, soft theology however is compatible with existing intellectual software, it is user friendly and will talk to what is already installed. Theology has to give "added value" to the existing system.
On hard drugs in the summer, on hard drugs in the winter. Hard theology, like hard drugs, flows thick in the veins confusing the brain with its sharp, jagged psychotic patterns. It is a bone machine, turning movement, grace, soul into a grey, empty rattle.
Hard radicalism is Michelangelo painting the Last Judgement with gesture and censure, extravagance, commission and power. The question concerning theology today is one of commission. Who is allowed or permitted to practise theology? What Papacy commissions the grand architecture of hard theology?
In the Kantian scheme of the university, theology was one of the higher faculties, together with medicine and law, because unlike philosophy (which was in the lower faculty) it provided a direct service, it had a direct application. Now we can understand what a false or deceptive doctor or lawyer would be like, and can thus imagine a contract between the doctor or lawyer and the consumer as to what standard of service the consumer can expect from such a professional, yet what would a false theologian be like? Would he provide false arguments, false doctrines, false salvations? How can we judge a salvation to be false if there is no dogma? Hard radicalism makes its Last Judgement, it announces the End, it thus necessitates opening up a black market of theology and letting the consumer decide whether to patronise the writer, the artist, the poet or the professional theologian. If they believe they can get a better service elsewhere, why not let them? If the theologians have a cartel it is very predictable that they will produce (bogus?) arguments against opening up theology to cowboy theologians, operating outside the law that regulates theological transactions.
Someone stands outside the door of my cell, and through the judas appears a manuscript on which is written the remainder of this article. (Within the garden of this Roman Villa I imagine Christ walks hand in hand with Peter and John, they are all dressed in the black cassocks of Dominican friars, they smile for now at last they have delivered their manuscript).
Soft theology, like the unconscious, is never present, it is hidden up behind the sky and we wait for fragments to fall to earth. Soft theology is compatible with soft science, wet knowledge and cool conceptualisations. Soft theology is bemused, gentle, paradoxical, contradictory... its "tone" is not apocalyptic but slow, poetic, mournful, melancholy. It is soft like grass, like paint, like snow. Hard theology seeks to imprison us on earth with the bruising, gritty architectures of systematic theology, the weighty girders of metaphysics (soft theology doesn't produce weighty girders, it produces daisy-chains). Do radicals want to see radical Christianity clearly? What if they couldn't define it (or couldn't finish defining it)? Do they want to see radical Christianity clearly (nakedly), to remove any veil, even the veil of Isis (or the seven veils)? In the Old Testament neither God nor the genitals could be displayed. Perhaps there are some things better left unseen? They wish to pull aside the veil/hair to reveal the ear in order that they may be clearly heard, and not misunderstood. But why did Christ speak in parables?
Is this clear? Even radical theology is too epic, too grandiose, too loud. The union between the self and God is a soft, rhythmic union. Feel God's soft breath, for the breath and the mouth (of God) are the breath of love and grace, a watery breath, an application of the head to the mouth, infusing softness, the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling. Soft theology, like the soft penis, penetrates nothing and signifies nothing.
I Yohanan...
I am in the island called Patmos
because of the word of Elohim and the testimony of Yeshoua.
I am in the breath on the day of Adon.
I hear behind me a great voice...
Soft theology offers flowers of love and persuasion. Some things cannot be explained (like why broken glass covers the floor of the empty tomb).
Radical theology is not for radicals. Soft theology is.
How many radicals are happy with radical theology? I imagine very few, because it tries to be a hard theology, but fails to produce anything. Unlike liberalism or conservatism it contains no positive content. Let me try to reproduce what liberalism says. Contemporary realism (liberalism) says OK, we know that religious claims to understand matter, medicine, astronomy etc. were in error but these were simply lightly undesirable side-effects of something more important, which was the revelation that there is an important extra-human mystery to the universe. Perhaps people did lack the language to explain it with reference to science, but that isn't surprising because science wasn't around at the time. However there is an objective spiritual structure to the world, which we do not understand ontologically (i.e. we do not understand what makes up this structure, except that it is non-material and not open to scientific investigation). What leads us to accept that it exists is a non-scientific method, faith. Faith means that we cannot prove that it is there, but we believe it to be so. The reason why we believe is generally out of a belief in certain patterns in life. Imagine you are standing before an orchard wall and above the wall you see an orange rise and fall, you infer that someone is throwing the orange up and catching it again. Life, it is argued, has similar patterns with gaps in them. Either those gaps are not filled with anything, in which case life is absurd, or it is. It is something like this: we have an implicit set of beliefs such as life is worth living, it is right to do good, we should seek to love and help people etc. Whilst we "feel" it is right to do good, goodness is more than just an emotion, thus we look for a reality outside of the world in which to ground our values. The patterns of the world don't say "love your enemy" but if you include the "hidden juggler" behind the world then it does make sense. This hidden world promises life after death, a final righting of wrongs, a final justice, and a purpose and meaning for our lives.
Realists would argue that radicals, in claiming to live wholly in this world, are not recognising that the pattern isn't complete in this world, it needs another world to complete this one and make it make sense.
Once radicals start accepting these presuppositions (that there are patterns to life, there is a meaning of life, a meaning of death, a philosophy of life that you live etc.) then you get these debates about is life meaningful, melancholy, tragic, absurd, should we have hope, can we accept that we are accepted etc. etc. My guess is that radicals find this whole game incomprehensible, listening to hard theology is like looking at great stone images from an otherwise unknown ancient culture.
In every hell Christ left a temple, in despair we may glimpse its entrance and see what statues stand within its walls.
Radicals are naturally more at home with soft theology's religio-poetic language. Poetry makes connections and religio-poetic language makes religious connections within this world, it gives the reality of this life a colour, fragrance, rhythm and resonance by connecting life with emotions, nature, culture, ethics, literature etc., religio-poetic language connects it together, weaves it into a pattern with love, light and beauty somehow making sense or at least making bearable loss, horror and tragedy. Language is able to make the noble, holy life desirable, is able to raise the spirit to hold onto life with a sort of grim ecstasy.
Notice that I'm already solidifying soft theology. Of course there is no reason to imagine we go about in a sort of Grim Ecstasy, we go about in whatever mood we're in at the moment. What I was trying to do was express the contradictions and paradoxes of life in one image (which is impossible).
To summarise. Hard theology functions as a bureaucratic ideology, which like similar ideologies functions according to certain rules which seek to dominate and oppress those not familiar with the rules. A single mother having explained why she can't have any more money for her kids because of rule E39-424 Para 6.3.1 is alienated from the state that should care for her in the same way that theology explaining demythology, transubstanciation, justification or religious non-realism alienates the people from religion.
Soft theology doesn't (and can't) exist as a separate entity. There are no soft theologians, there are no books on soft theology. Soft theology presupposes that religious questions are already being investigated within our culture and says that is the place to work through religious questions. Hardcore religion (the accompanying religion to hard theology) sublimates the brutal, horrific religious code (of human sacrifice, the torture of God, eucharistic cannibalism, martyrdom, the sexual activities of God, death and resurrection etc.) but never fully erases it. This hardcore religion is both fascinating and revolting, (for religion through rituals, services, sacraments is a huge saviour machine) and may even produce a militant, fundamentalist radicalism that includes a core of darkness, conjuring up the nihil, the death of God, the nothingness of faith etc.
The point of soft theology is that it doesn't seek to answer questions like "what does death mean?" or "what does the Eucharist mean?" but rather, through film, poetry, literature etc. suggests meanings, patterns, connections. Totalisation is necessarily hardcore religion. My poem "religion is a virus" was therefore a parody of (some) radicalism, which assumes that everyone has a systematic, structured life which acts on a set of explicitly known principles, and those principles (our "ultimate concern") equates to our religion. "We cannot escape having one main project in life, hence we cannot escape religion" the argument would go. Instead of this, soft theology works with decentred subjects, complex, dynamic, veiled, a-principled, who respond to grand, epic, totalisations with bemusement because they just can't interrogate and remould the self like that.
Has the End ended? What is to come? It doesn't matter. I tell you this, it is already happening.
JOHN MANN SEP 1990