{"id":5747,"date":"2022-05-31T06:03:09","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T06:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/?p=5747"},"modified":"2022-05-31T16:53:42","modified_gmt":"2022-05-31T16:53:42","slug":"religion-within-the-limits-of-history-alone-pragmatic-historicism-and-the-future-of-theology-by-demian-wheeler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/religion-within-the-limits-of-history-alone-pragmatic-historicism-and-the-future-of-theology-by-demian-wheeler\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion within the Limits of History Alone:\u00a0Pragmatic Historicism and the Future of Theology by Demian Wheeler"},"content":{"rendered":"

[1] The day I started writing this essay a review of a new musical appeared in the New York Times<\/em> under the headline, \u201c<\/em>History Always Gets To Sing the Last Note.\u201d\u00a0 According to Demian Wheeler in Religion within the Limits of History Alone, <\/em>history gets to sing the first note as well.\u00a0 It is history all the way down, he argues, in concert with the multiple thinkers he cites in this compendium of ideas about history as the water in which all of nature and culture and we as human persons swim.\u00a0 \u201cHistoricism,\u201d as Wheeler defines it, \u201cis the notion that, like anything else, human beings and all their concepts, theories, communications, texts, and so on, are historical\u2014that is, conditioned by contingent circumstances and tied to particular contexts\u201d (7).<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0 But in this text, historicism is not singing a solo.\u00a0 Wheeler partners it with pragmatism, an American philosophical and intellectual tradition that, as Charlene Seigfried, a feminist pragmatist philosopher, puts it, \u201ccame out of the powerful idea that philosophy is more than abstract thinking.\u00a0 It is something you became and did.\u201d\u00a0 Wheeler\u2019s objective in bringing together historicist ideas with American pragmatism is to create a \u201cbigger, pluralist, naturalistic\u201d historicism that can respond to some of the most pressing religious\/theological\/philosophical questions of our day:\u00a0 how to understand the potential of a radically contingent historicist worldview for theology without reducing its claims to an enervating, isolating relativity; how to think about the multiplicity of religions in the world and their relationship to each other; how to make a distinction between \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201ccertainty;\u201d how to shape a metaphysic within a naturalist framework; and how to lay out a \u201cpragmatic historicist theology of the divine.\u201d\u00a0 For Wheeler, pragmatic historicism has the potential to offer theology a set of dynamic ideas and perspectives that will insure its future against irrelevance, indifference, and skepticism on one hand and a legalistic, nondynamic, ahistorical conservatism on the other.<\/p>\n

[3] Wheeler\u2019s conversation partners are multiple.\u00a0 He draws from the works of four sets of interlocutors, some of them former professors:\u00a0 later nineteenth-century German scholars, Ernst Troeltsch in particular;\u00a0 American pragmatist philosophers, among the most prominent Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey; early Chicago School pragmatist theologians and philosophers (the list of names in this category is long);\u00a0 and contemporary historicist philosophers and theologians of the last two generations of scholars, among them Gordon Kaufman, Sheila Davaney, Delwin Brown, William Dean, and Nancy Frankenberry.<\/p>\n

[4] This is a work of both descriptive and prescriptive (constructive) theology.\u00a0 It is about ideas:\u00a0 dense, challenging, evocative, and provocative.\u00a0 These ideas are both radical, at least to some, and at times surprisingly conserving, for example when Wheeler pushes pragmatic historicism in a more constructive direction, particularly in Chapter 8, \u201cSacred Conventions, Sacred Nature:\u00a0 Toward a Pragmatic Historicist Theology of the Divine.\u201d<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0 The book\u2019s intricacies will appeal primarily, I think, to academic theologians of several disciplines, philosophers, and historians of religion.\u00a0 I\u2019d argue at the same time that the author\u2019s broader themes, among them experimental theologies of religion and the divine and non-competitive ways to understand the world\u2019s many religious traditions, will be compelling to anyone interested in how some theologians are addressing ever-evolving conversations about authenticity, credibility, religious pluralism, and \u201ctruth\u201d in contemporary religious thought and life.\u00a0 Wheeler is skilled at clarifying and re-clarifying what he\u2019s up to, but I found it helpful to re-read Chapter 1, \u201cWhat Is Historicism: A Multileveled Definition,\u201d several times along the way.\u00a0 And I confess to jumping ahead to read and read again the nine themes of the book on the first page of the Conclusion in order to reground myself in Wheeler\u2019s big picture amidst the theses of the major chapters.\u00a0 I\u2019d also suggest that reading this book with a study group would be a rewarding experience.<\/p>\n

[6] The book has eight chapters of varying lengths and the aforementioned conclusion.\u00a0 After some hand-wringing, I decided not to summarize the chapters in turn but rather to delineate some of the assumptions within which Wheeler is working and to focus on several of his ideas about a pragmatic historicist theology of the ultimate in Chapter 8.\u00a0 Suffice it to say that between Chapter 1 and Chapter 8 \u00a0there is an ever-cascading flow of ideas and issues that are by no means negligible: inter-religious dialogue and \u201ctruth reconsidered\u201d (Chapter 7) among them.<\/p>\n

[7] Chapter 8 offers compelling examples of what post-atheist God-talk might look like.\u00a0 Wheeler has intriguing things to say about \u201cironic atheism\u201d (for this concept he gives much credit to William Dean who draws from William James) and the strangely emancipatory power the \u201cnew atheists\u201d (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.) have had on contemporary theologians: \u00a0\u201cThe irony of atheism is that new theological resources reside on the other side of atheistic desolation and disbelief.\u201d\u00a0 For Wheeler these resources lie within pragmatic historicism.\u00a0 What he says about the spirit of this work reminds me of one of Paul Ricouer\u2019s famous statements about \u201csecond naivete\u201d:\u00a0 \u201cBeyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.\u201d\u00a0 It brings to mind, as well, feminist theologians who continue to ask whether after all the critiques of religions about their exclusion and oppression of women have been articulated, there is anything positive left to be said about religion, theology, and organized religion.\u00a0 A great deal, as it turns out, given the ongoing stream of creative women\u2019s theologies that we\u2019ve seen since the 1960s. \u00a0I don\u2019t think it\u2019s putting words in Wheeler\u2019s mouth to suggest that he has felt called to write about theology in some new ways:\u00a0 both to dismantle and to reconstruct.<\/p>\n

[8]\u00a0 Wheeler describes himself as constructing his theology of the ultimate within a historicist, non-foundationalist, naturalist, realist, religiously pluralist, contingent, fallibilist worldview.\u00a0 If that does not sound like very fertile ground in which to cultivate a metaphysics and a theology of the ultimate, he assures readers that pragmatic historicism should not dispense with metaphysics.\u00a0 Rather, it has the capacity to \u201ccultivate chastened metaphysicians not antimetaphysicians.\u201d \u00a0He argues, \u201ca fellow traveler on classical pragmatism\u2019s highroad around modernism [rather] than an errant nomad lost in the postmodern wilderness, pragmatic historicism refuses to throw the metaphysical baby out with the foundationalist bathwater,\u201d (249). \u00a0\u00a0Bluntly and, perhaps, too simplistically said, in Wheeler\u2019s metaphysics and theology of the ultimate, supernatural doctrines don\u2019t count as empirical fact.<\/p>\n

[9] So what does count?\u00a0 Nature and history, according to Wheeler, and\u2014irony again\u2014our own religious histories and traditions:\u00a0 \u201cThe awareness of the all-surpassing, incomprehensible mysteriousness of the ultimate, of nature in its spiritually breathtaking, ambiguous, and relativizing wholeness, compels us to return to the cataphatic and symbolic landscapes of our religious histories (including our historically constructed deities), which alone can house our highest hopes and ideals and sustain our institutional, ethical, and cultural endeavors\u201d (278).<\/p>\n

[10] If this sounds complicated, let me assure you, it is\u2014intellectually and theologically\u2014in part because of the multitude of conversations and conversation partners that pervade the pages of this book and the conflicting and converging lines of thought.\u00a0 There is also the depth, breadth, and difficulty of ideas and variations of ideas considered.\u00a0 Nonetheless there is a graspable and moving piety\u2014piety in the sense of an orientation toward the ultimate\u2014in Wheeler\u2019s pragmatic historicist worldview.\u00a0 In the quote that follows (one of my favorites in the book) Wheeler is riffing on William Dean\u2019s contention that beyond atheism lies \u201ca path to new, deeper theological riches, to a sense of mystery.\u201d\u00a0 Wheeler takes off from Dean\u2019s claim:\u00a0 \u201cI will go a step further and suggest that it can even pave the way for the development of a thoroughly naturalistic, but spiritually vigorous, theologically realist, and mystically inflected metaphysics of ultimate reality\u2014a pragmatic historicist theology of the divine.\u00a0 The sublime, awesome, terrifying, ambiguous, transcendent, and mysterious depths of nature, I submit, are opened up to us by historicism and its reductive, atheistic conventionalizing.\u00a0 The way beyond humanistic religion is, ironically, through it\u201d (295). \u00a0Wheeler is not dispensing with \u201creligion\u201d as we know it.\u00a0 He is pondering its possibilities within a naturalist framework.<\/p>\n

[11] By way of concluding, I want to offer some thoughts about this book within several broader frameworks.\u00a0 First, I see it as offering further refutation of the secularization theory that dominated religious studies and some theologies during the last half of the 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 The assumption that religion and theology are fading away as credible human enterprises is no longer a thesis that holds much credibility, and Religion within the Limits of History Alone<\/em> offers intimations of why this is the case. It offers evidence of the extent to which religion and theology are vast arenas of human creativity that are not going to disappear.\u00a0 The depths of the theological imagination are bottomless.<\/p>\n

[12] Second, this book affirms Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson\u2019s contention that models of God\/ultimate reality \u201cfunction\u201d for good and for ill in the world.\u00a0 This is not a text that takes on specific issues of social justice as such, but the implications of the worldview Wheeler is constructing for addressing matters of racial, economic, gender, and ecological injustices are very close to the surface and readily accessible.<\/p>\n

[13] Third, and related to the above, Wheeler\u2019s book offers a forceful example of what Gordon Kaufman (a primary intellectual mentor for Wheeler) is talking about when he insists that an adequate model of God must be relativizing, that is, attesting to the reality that all theological claims are susceptible to reform.\u00a0 And it must be \u201chumanizing,\u201d that is, moving us to ever-greater embodying of the Gospel values of love and justice.<\/p>\n

[14] Fourth, this book offers an excellent example of the \u201ctranscendence downward\u201d trajectory of theological creativity in evidence, or, better said, \u201cacknowledged,\u201d since the nineteenth century.\u00a0 Can our religious symbols, rituals, credos, and ethical systems survive the journey to earth?\u00a0 Can they continue to demonstrate power and depth and resilience in a naturalist dwelling place?\u00a0 Wheeler, as you\u2019ve already discerned, answers in the affirmative.<\/p>\n

[15] Fifth, this book prompts this question–for me, anyway:\u00a0 Might we be moving in some ways (or have we already moved to some extent) toward a pragmatic historicist Catholicism (my own tradition) or Lutheranism, a naturalist Catholicism or Lutheranism, for example, that retains the profundity, the theological claims, and the \u201cdearness\u201d of what has gone before and what will unfold in the future?<\/p>\n

[16] I close this review with a quote that I think is apt.\u00a0 It\u2019s from a review of Mary Szybist\u2019s book of poetry, Incarnadine<\/em> (Graywolf Press) about the Annunciation and other spirit\/matters, including her own self-identity. Incarnadine<\/em>, to the astonishment of the poetry community given its subject matter, won the 2013 National Book Award for poetry.\u00a0 A sentence from the award judges\u2019 citation sums up well the spirit of Demian Wheeler\u2019s Religion within the Limits of History Alone:\u00a0 <\/em>\u201cThis is a religious book for nonbelievers, or a book of necessary doubts for the faithful.\u201d\u00a0 I would say that it\u2019s both.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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