The Present State of Systematic Theology: Some Fragmentary Remarks

1 The Blessings of Pandora: After Post-Modernity

When we engaged in the conversations on post-modernity at the beginning of the 1990s^[2] I was, as I am sure many others were, a bit loath to engage with prophecies of the ‘new’ that we encountered in the programmatic rhetoric of a transition into a new state of post-modern awareness in all fields of culture. What I had not expected, at least not with such speed and such force, was that with the alleged step into a new age of post-modernity the walls that had separated the self-acclaimed age of modernity from what was termed a pre-modern era came tumbling down. Almost overnight systematic theology could no longer understand itself as a matter of course as modern theology, starting in the context of my theological formation with Schleiermacher’s Speeches from 1799 or with the Kantian critiques, but found itself – diachronically – in conversation with the wealth of theological traditions from patristic and medieval times. What had until then been the source material of doctrinal historians became theological resources for constructive systematic theologians. A new embarrassment of riches?

With the falling of the wall that separated, at least in the minds of many modern theologians, modernity from everything that went before it, other walls also seem to be crumbling, walls that were part of the self-understanding of modernity, like the wall between a naturally dogmatic theology and a naturally critical, in the perception of many theologians, agnostic, if not, almost by profession, atheistic philosophy. Many Christian theologians, still devising apologetic arguments against atheistic or naturalistic philosophies, were caught unawares by the advent of Christian philosophers who with the same or even more analytical rigour with which their atheistic predecessors had criticized Christian doctrines now defended them with all the technical apparatus and skills that their discipline could muster.^[3] What should systematic theologians do in such a situation? Should they gratefully accept that analytic theology is the continuation of systematic theology by other means?^[4] Or should they retain the memories of their struggles with modernity as part of a hermeneutic awareness that acknowledges that the problems of modernity have not gone away, but now appear under a different guise? The de-canonization of the principles of the Enlightenment does not mean that the problems the Enlightenment addressed have disappeared, but only that they can now be reflected in a different way, no longer under the normative strictures which the Enlightenment, in the spirit of modernity, imposed on the enterprise of doing systematic theology.

What do I expect from systematic theologians in this situation? How do I, as a member of the guild, hope to respond to a situation where the curses of Pandora’s box offer new and unexpected blessings? My first answer is simply that I hope that systematic theologies remain theo-logy, or in other words, that the principal motivation for engaging in systematic theology remains the passion for engaging with the God of Christian faith, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, who gives Godself as the object of our theological inquiry. Furthermore, I hope that systematic theologies remain critically systematic: systematic in making connections, in relating the different fields of Christian doctrine and practice in an ordered, transparent way. This, for me, is a direct implication of understanding the subject-matter of theology as “God and everything as it relates to God”; and critical, in that systematic theology must constantly ask whether the form of the theological “system” is really a system of propositions (and be they the teaching of the church for which is claimed authority) or rather a connected form of practices (theoretical and practical) which is self-consciously eccentric.^[5]

2 Borders and Boundaries

The blessings of Pandora’s box of post-modernity came with the advent of religious and philosophical pluralism within the religious traditions, between the religious traditions and across religious and philosophical traditions.^[6] Instead of an ordered theological landscape where every theological orientation has found its place in relating to European modernity there appeared a rugged, multi-faceted and fissured scenery of theological positions, unevenly distributed across the globe. The end of the grand narrative of modernity^[7] meant by no means an end to all master stories, but rather the proliferation of competing master narratives. With the great wall separating modernity from other pre-modern forms of discourse and life, many of the smaller walls and fences that were connected to the great wall also began to crumble. The fences between systematic theology and historical and exegetical theology, a direct inheritance from modernity, appear less fortified today. Feminist, womanist, queer theologies and the various forms of “contextual theologies” have become important conversation partners of systematic theology, asserting their own voices in critically interacting with received styles of doing systematic theology. When Christian systematic theologies began to interact with their Jewish and Islamic theological counterparts, discovering in the process that they had a long common history of conversation in late Antiquity and medieval times, interreligious discourses were rediscovered and newly established that had become invisible by modern Christian theology’s insistence that their conversation partners conform to their rules of critical Wissenschaft.^[8] Today we regain the rich histories of interactions between the religions as a creative resource for interreligious dialogues.^[9] Furthermore, the dialogue between the sciences and theology becomes lively when it is no longer conducted under the auspices of the Kantian distinction of a realm of necessity, investigated exclusively by the empirical sciences, and a realm of freedom, where theological claims are all too easily transformed into moral imperatives, and no longer say anything about reality as it is.^[10] The boundaries between the different spheres of culture become permeable and we discover in the sciences, the arts, literature and music forms of theology that express themselves in different idioms but sometimes include a distinctive reference to God and everything in relation to God.

In such a situation a lot depends on whether we interpret the diversities of the different approaches as self-contained spaces or as interacting spheres. Everything depends on whether we see the lines of contact – to take up an important distinction by Richard Sennett^[11] – as borders or boundaries: as boundaries which try to make the border safe and establish forms of intellectual or even theological homeland security, walls of resistance, or as borders, meeting-places where different theological and religious traditions interact, conduct conversations and trade ideas, intent on devising means of bridging the separating lines by modes of translation. The right balance between porosity and resistance is what I hope for Christian systematic theology today.

Every conversation lives from the implicit assumption that we are concerned with questions of truth in the old-fashioned sense of the adaequatio rei et intellectus. We must discover anew that cor-respondence also contains a commitment to dialogue, to listening to what the others have to tell us. Without this implicit assumption every conversation deteriorates into a power-struggle, and truth becomes a function of the will to power. Could it be that we can help to avoid that borders turn into boundaries when we continue to maintain that theological language must have a referential sense (in whatever complicated form of referentiality) if it is concerned with God and everything in relation to God? And could it be that we become more truthful when we recover the theological insight that we can never possess, control and administer truth as our prerogative, because God is truth? It is my hope that the constitutive openness of theological discourse which consists in depending to be filled by the reality of God contributes to conversations through and over the fences and fortifications of our theological, cultural and ideological positions. That would mean to do theology “on the edge” (to use, once again, Sennett’s metaphor^[12]), not only on the edge where we connect with others but also on the edge of our relationship to God.

3 Embedded Reason and Embodied Persons

The collapse of the wall between modernity and what comes before it also leads us to recognize that modern ideas of corresponding walls of abstraction within ourselves also need to be challenged, no matter, whether they are understood as the Cartesian res cogitans or the Kantian transcendental subject. One of the most creative elements in systematic theology in recent years concerns the move away from an abstract view of reason towards a concrete view of the practices of embedded reason, of the relationality and conditionality of the human activity of being rational. Our reasoning is never naked rationality, but inherently relational, clothed in our volitions, desires and affections and always located within our historical, linguistic, ethnic, social contexts. The text that we are can only be read through these contexts. With this we have rediscovered a rich heritage of theological engagement with desires, affections and the will which turns out to be highly significant for every aspect of systematic theology, be it in dogmatics, ethics or philosophical theology. Could it be that the typical abstractions of modern rationalism and irrationalism, empiricism and idealism are just ways in which reason has become disconnected from the concrete embeddedness in which we possess it, as creaturely reason, embedded and embodied reason?^[13] It is precisely in this context that the challenges of feminist, womanist, queer theologies, black theologies, political theologies and all contextual theologies have helped to recover original Christian insights which the modern European mind had made us forget. My hope is that the systematic theologies learn again to derive theological insights from the embedded character of all our reasoning which, since all the dimensions of embeddedness point towards the creaturely constitution of our rationality, and in this way point to God the creator who addresses us in all dimensions of our existence, be they affective, somatic or rational, social, cultural or linguistic and call for our responses in all these dimensions.

Embedded reason is the reason of embodied persons. It seems to me that the present state of systematic theology is characterized by a comprehensive rediscovery of the theology of embodied creatures. The ecological crisis has added a new sense of urgency to this rediscovery and teaches us that the constant interplay between theology and anthropology in modern theology has made the cosmological dimension of theology almost disappear, until it was rediscovered by the cosmologists and their own adventurous theologies. Today we have a clearer view that human existence is bound by human embodiment to its natural conditions in the life of this planet, that the Lebenswelt of humans is built upon the foundations of the world in which humans exist. How could we miss that? Today rationalist attacks or defences of belief in the resurrection of the body sometimes seem disturbingly amusing, because the primary message that embodiment is forever seems to have been missed. I see the most creative moments of systematic theology today when we recover the communicative meaning of bodiliness, the fact that our bodies are not just defined by materiality, but by the communicative character of our embodied existence through its very materiality. Could it be that Martin Luther was right after all, that everything that exists is part of God’s vocabulary, subject to the rules of divine grammar? Could it be that the poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s statement “since we are a conversation” makes only sense for embodied creatures who are called to respond to the God who is in Godself a conversation?^[14]

4 Ongoing Conversations and the Interruption by Silence

The characterisation of being human by the embedded reason of embodied persons is most clearly expressed in the practice of worship. It is here that the dialogical character of theology as response to the address of God becomes crystal-clear. It is here that the referential character of all God-talk is made evident in the first-person and second-person modes of address to God in praise, thanksgiving, petition and lament. It is in worship that communication creates communion and that created materiality becomes the means for personal communicative participation in the presence of the triune God.^[15] It is one of the most creative developments in contemporary systematic theology and philosophy of religion that it relates the tasks of systematic theology constructively to the practice of worship. Worship is just as much as a systematic-theological treatise structured by concepts expressed in gestures, actions, words, images and music. It is the point where our conversations in theological dialogues and discourses, our interactions in cooperation with another, touch base in relating back to the foundation of Christian faith.^[16] One could wonder whether the rubrics for conducting worship rightly, so that it can be distinguished from idolatry and releases its critical power against the idolatrous beliefs and practices in which we are entangled, is one of the primary tasks of systematic theology. On the other hand, relating the tasks of doing systematic theology back to theology’s core event of worship as God’s service for God’s people^[17] reminds systematic theologies of their eccentric character and so of their task to counterbalance ongoing conversation with the silence of the listener.

5 Postscript: On Being Creatively out of Sync

One may, of course, wonder whether these reflections do not show that systematic theology in its present state is, at least in the view of this practitioner, hopelessly out of sync with the real developments in our global society. Whatever our musings about Pandora’s blessings in post-modernity, there can be no doubt that, of course, the processes of modernisation continue, and we are all part of it: the developments of artificial intelligence on the basis of digitalisation, the dreams of disembodied data exchanges in discarnate data clouds, that have already targeted us with their algorithmic tentacles and so on. Are we on a route of so radically redefining what it means to be human that future generations will no longer recognise the prophets of Israel, the followers of Jesus and the philosophers of Ancient Greece as beings belonging to the same species? In view of that, it might be worth being creatively out of sync with a march of ‘progress’ that seems to be fuelled by the human dream to become like God by relying on the different promise of the one in whom God became man.