Context-Attentive Theology: On the Rearticulation of Experience in Theological Inquiry

1.1 Theology is Grounded in Experience

The first implication is that all theology is ultimately grounded in experience, if by this we mean that all theology is always-already reflecting on how people experience the divine/sacred (both in the ordinary and in the extraordinary forms described above). This, no theology can escape, even if some theologies are close to and others far from religious experiences taking place in the everyday.

Hence, the true difference between theological orientations is whether a theology is attentive to religious experiences taking place in the everyday or not.^[9] I call such theologies context-attentive, a concept on which I will expand shortly. As we all know, many theologians mainly reflect within the boundaries of their received traditions and are more concerned with expanding theoretically developed ideas of, say, Martin Luther, John Calvin, or Thomas Aquinas than with thinking anew issues like the experience of God in, say, the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon taking place in many modern societies. Put differently, many theologians pursue theology as a task that operates within a system of preexistent concepts and assumptions, where their skill is applied to expanding, clarifying these concepts and assumptions. Others, in turn, focus on theological issues taking place in the contingency of everyday life, trying to ascertain their meaning. One may call the first type of theological orientation, systematic; the second, empirical or inductive. Naturally, these distinctions do not imply radical separation, as if one orientation inherently excludes the other. But these are different emphases, with different outcomes for the faith communities, academia, and society, the three main publics of theology.^[10]

My contention is that any theology that severely isolates itself from its experiential basis is in danger of theoretical inadequacy or social irrelevancy. Even if a systematic theology can rightly focus on theoretical concerns that do not emphasize the experiential dimension of faith, forgetting this dimension altogether can render such theology theoretically inadequate. For instance, a Catholic theology too focused on doctrinal concerns about the prohibition of contraception may be inadequately equipped to grasp why most Catholics in the globe believe that the Catholic church is wrong regarding this teaching. Such a focus may lead some theologians to simply think that people are sinners or unfaithful, instead of considering that new experiences of the divine/sacred in tandem with the modern value of freedom of conscience may have developed new Catholic responses to the problem of contraception.

Similarly, theoretical inadequacy can render theology socially irrelevant. Thus, to continue with the same example, it is quite clear that for millions of Catholics, the church’s teachings on sexual morality are mostly morally irrelevant. This is not to say that the church is irrelevant for them as a whole or to say that these teachings are inherently wrong. But the lack of an adequate articulation of these teachings in a way that pays attention to how people understand their experience of faith – the sensus fidei fidelis – has rendered the teachings irrelevant in the life of most Catholics.

Thus, some basic attentiveness to the experiential dimensions of faith is important for all theologies, even if some can rightly focus on more doctrinal and closed-system matters, while others can focus on issues emerging from the messiness of lived religious experience (personal or social).

1.2 The Complexity of Experience

The second implication of my definition of theology is that no theology can operate with a narrow understanding of experience. The contributions of the Chicago School of “empirical theology” may allow me to illustrate this point.

During the first half of the twentieth century, a school of theology emerged from The University of Chicago Divinity School. Without explicitly claiming a name for itself, it became known as the Chicago School of “empirical theology.” Its main figures were Shailer Matthews, Shirley Jackson Case, and Edward Scribner Ames in its more historicist and pragmatist vein, and Henry Nelson Wieman in its Whiteheadian form. One could argue, in fact, that even without the influence of pragmatism or process theology, this empirical orientation remains alive at the Divinity School, a place in which the study of religion is marked by a strong methodological commitment to the context-attentive study of figures, scriptures, and doctrines and by an emphasis on lived religion.

My point is that the empirical orientation of the Divinity School was seldom naïve. Despite the overly scientific jargon of the early Chicago School, no version of empirical theology was shaped by a narrow understanding – we may call it, empiricist – of empirical work. Experience is always-already interpreted experience. No experience is merely about sense data. No empirical theology, therefore, can grasp reality transparently. Lastly, and decisively, reality is not reduced only to what we can empirically verify. Otherwise, there would be little room for meaning or ideal-formation, and less so for the experience of the divine/sacred.^[11]

This expansion of the meaning of experience, of course, is one of the decisive contributions of American pragmatism – via William James and John Dewey – to philosophical, but also theological studies. It is no coincidence that two of the greatest pragmatists, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, were members of the faculty of The University of Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century. Both of them, in addition to the writings of William James, were notoriously influential in the development of empirical theology across the main quad, at the Divinity School.^[12]

1.3 Context-Attentive Theology: What is in a Name?

My approach to theology – and to systematic theology as a part of it – takes this rich understanding of experience as its starting point, while making a normative claim about the importance of a theological inquiry that is context-attentive. I use the term “context-attentive” as a way to avoid some of the misunderstandings that the terms “empirical,” “experiential,” and “inductive” may provoke when applied to theology. As suggested above, the notion of “empirical theology” (the same is true of “inductive”) is always vulnerable to the charge of empiricism, since their ideal of inquiry is modeled after the natural sciences. Even though the empirical theologians of the Chicago School significantly revised the empiricist biases of Darwinian or Comtean empiricism, the materialist overtones of the empiricist language often created confusion, polemic, and overshadowed their transformative vision of theology. Further, speaking of “empirical,” “experiential,” or “inductive” theology may suggest that there are theologies that can be coherently otherwise. I have argued that this is not the case, even if different emphases are possible and desirable. Therefore, my preference for “context-attentive theology” is to describe a family of theological viewpoints that gather around the basic commitment of paying attention to people’s experience of the divine/sacred. Key among these family of viewpoints are Latin American and Black liberation theologies, feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies, queer theologies, and eco-theologies. These theologies are not equal, and they do not pay attention to religious experience with equal levels of depth and philosophical finesse either.^[13] However, they do share a context-attentive orientation that I take to be essential to pursue the task of theology coherently. Thus, this article stands as an effort to refine and clarify the context-attentive orientation present in several traditions of theological inquiry.

In my view, the characterization of theological inquiry as context-attentive has two significant advantages. On the one hand, the reference to context signals a more hermeneutical rather than empiricist approach, highlighting the importance of the human and social sciences – especially history, philosophical hermeneutics and pragmatism – for the understanding of religious experience. Of course, this does not mean excluding the natural or “empirical” sciences or dismissing the importance of psychology to understand religious experience.^[14] My point is that such sciences come to the aid of theology if they do so freed from reductionist biases. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience may stand as the classic example of how to do so in the field of psychology.^[15]

Ultimately, theology is an interpretative science whose goal is to make sense of experience in the rich sense of the word. Such richness is what I try to depict with the concept of context.^[16] Context refers to sense data, but also to their interpretation and articulation through signs and discourse. Context refers to our shared languages and cultures and to how those influence the way we inhabit the world. Context refers to the positionality of the theologian pursuing theological interpretation: their sex and gender, their social class, their ethnicity, their faith or lack of it, and so on. Context refers also to the subjects studied by the theologian, whose own contextual reality conditions the critical endeavors of the theologian. This characterization does not attempt to be exhaustive. Rather, my goal is to underscore the complex network of variables that the theologian must consider in order to produce a relatively adequate rendering of the experience of what people consider divine/sacred.^[17]

In turn, the attentiveness to which I refer in the concept of “context-attentive theology” underscores the moral and theoretical convictions of the theologian. Today, to say that theology is contextual is simply to state a fact. In contrast, to say that a theologian is context-attentive signals a commitment to do theology close to how the divine/sacred is experienced in lo cotidiano, in the everyday. This does not mean that the theologian must become an ethnographer to do good theology. It simply means that good theology must be in some form of conversation with the social sciences, the lived experience of people of faith, history, and so on. Thus, attentiveness to context is both a matter of principle and a matter of soundness. It is a matter of principle insofar as the theologian willingly commits to study what is going on in the world of lived religion because people of faith and what they experience matter to the theologian. It is a matter of soundness because – as argued before – too much distance from the religious everyday may render theology theoretically inadequate and socially irrelevant.^[18]

With these methodological remarks in mind, I turn now to my analysis of the work of Marion, Niebuhr, and Gutiérrez on the topic of divine revelation to exemplify different forms of theological inquiry vis-à-vis the model of context-attentive theology.

2.1 The Biblical Witness as the Model for Revelation

For the purposes of this article, I focus on Marion’s 2014 Gifford Lectures, published as Givenness and Revelation.^[19] They represent Marion’s most explicit and systematic treatment of the problem of revelation and, as such, give us a clear account of his understanding of the task of theology.^[20] Unlike Marion’s prior accounts of revelation, here the epistemological preconditions for revelation are given by the biblical texts, not anymore by parallel revelatory experiences.^[21] Indeed, Marion concludes chapter 2 inviting the reader “to contemplate Revelation as a phenomenon in the very details of the biblical texts.”^[22]

Let me expand by examining Marion’s interpretation of Christ.^[23] For Marion, Christ represents a reversal of the order of phenomenality. As such, Christ stands, indeed, as God’s prime self-revelation:

For the knowledge of God through the created world, albeit already manifest, was not sufficient to cause him to be recognized by men, who, “although knowing God did not give him glory as God or give thanks to him…” (Rom. 1:21). Thus the order of the manifestations had to be inverted; it was fitting for the recognition to provoke the knowledge (and restore it after the fact); and, therefore, it was fitting that the manifestation (phanerosis) be radicalized into the uncovering (apokalypsis) of the totality of the mystērion, which until that point had remained in eternal silence. What is at stake here is a radical change in the modes of phenomenality: the truth (alētheia, unveiling) gives way to the uncovering (apokalypsis) of the phenomenon when we are dealing with the phenomenon of God. The uncovering of the mystery over-determines the opening of truth.^[24]

For Marion, divine revelation operates within a unique regime of truth. Unlike the realm of empirical knowledge, ordinary phenomena will not lead us to the truth (of God, in this case). Instead, truth itself allows us to see phenomena in their true light by uncovering them. The reasoning appears to be paradoxical, if not circular: the goal is to elucidate the conditions of possibility of revelation, but these are already given to us by the Gospels.

But what if one does not embrace the truth of the biblical witness? Either Marion’s argument starts only working for those who share the same beliefs regarding the Bible or we have to revise the far-reaching goals of Marion’s phenomenology of revelation. To do the latter, one may not speak of phenomenology of revelation as such, and may not put forward Christ and the Trinity as the fundamental content and form of divine revelation. Instead, one could speak of a phenomenology of the New Testament canon that attempts to cast light on the idea of divine revelation as conceived by the mainstream Christian tradition.

Note here that the problem is not that faith is a pre-condition of knowledge as a general claim. Such an idea is not particularly controversial. The problem is the lack of awareness of the “hermeneutical situation” of the speaker and the attempt to achieve far-reaching conclusions without acknowledging one’s own “historically-effected consciousness,” to use two Gadamerian concepts. Another way to put this is that Marion’s theology of revelation is not a context-attentive theology.

Indeed, the problem persists in the rest of Marion’s lectures. How does the inversion of the order of manifestation take place? The answer is given by St. Paul, Marion asserts. That the biblical text is revelatory is given for Marion. The key to understand revelation is within the text. It is a matter of careful reading to disclose the mysterion which appears to us through (some selection of) the biblical text. What we discover reading Paul, Marion argues, is that it is only God who uncovers God. But in order to do so we need to pass from our spirit to God’s Spirit: “This is nothing less than an overturning of intentionality: taking the intentional gaze of God on God, instead of claiming to retain our intentionality in front of the intuition of the mystērion.”^[25] Marion calls this process an anamorphosis. It implies the overturning of the neutral viewpoint of the masterly spectator. Only in this way the mysterion can be disclosed. We need conversion.^[26]

For Marion, there is a second moment in Paul’s argument. This time he moves from First Corinthians to Ephesians. The first approach was mostly negative, saying that the wisdom of God was not like the wisdom of the world. This second approach, Marion argues, is more positive: this mysterion is charity.^[27] He writes:

In the horizon of charity, knowing consists not in identifying that which shows itself to such and such object or being, which we would be able to constitute and define according to our intentionality, but in recognizing an excess which saturates the gaze and submerges it in its immeasurable hyperbole.^[28]

It is love itself that allows us to see. Love allows the transformation of the gaze via saturation. Yet, this appears as an impossible task given how immersed we are in the ways of the world. From this follows that God in person must perform the conversion of our gaze:

How can the mystērion genuinely (nyn) manifest itself? Where does the hyperbole of charity that gives itself uncover and show itself, if it saturates every phenomenalization carried out by a human finite gaze? The answer, audacious yet inevitable and exceptionally logical, is unavoidable: in the only human gaze that is not merely finite, that of Christ, the ultimate and unique instance in which, once and for all, yet in an endless innovation (“Behold, I make all things new” Rev. 21:5), all that is given shows itself.^[29]

The incarnation of God in human flesh is the only way the mysterion could be uncovered. Moreover, it had to be done by God’s initiative, recapitulating all things in Christ.^[30] But for Marion, it is crucial to stress that Christ is the icon of God’s invisibility, as we have it in Colossians 1:15: in Christ the impossible becomes possible. For the invisible God somehow becomes visible in God’s icon. And this is an act of love intended as such from the beginning of time. God’s intention is clear for Marion: nothing that was veiled will remain hidden.^[31]

2.2 Revelation Does Not Belong to History?

My brief sketch of Marion’s phenomenology of revelation should suffice to see why his theology does not represent the kind of context-attentive theology this article proposes, notwithstanding the substantial contributions of his work to the theology of revelation. With Marion, I believe that seeing in Christ the icon of the invisible God requires a particular kind of gaze. Such a gaze will not be that of the historian whose only goal is to achieve the “neutral viewpoint of the masterly spectator.”^[32] We do not even have to consider something as extraordinary as divine revelation to acknowledge the need for a different gaze. Believing in ideals as mundane as democracy, justice, or experiences such as unconditional love requires a different kind of gaze as well.^[33]

Hence, the problem here is not the need for a certain kind of conversion of our way of seeing the world. Without it, some of the most important experiences (beauty, love, faith) become unknowable to us. In this sense, Marion’s phenomenology is an important contribution to the effort of rebuking narrow understandings of rationality, evidence, and experience. Moreover, his exegesis of Scripture is tremendously insightful with a phenomenological depth that reminds the reader of the best Patristic exegesis.

But Marion can take us only so far. After all, his account of revelation explicitly denies the historicity of revelation and, as such, the need for a context-attentive theology. He writes:

strictly speaking, Revelation does not belong to history (neither in the sense of the Historie of the historians, nor in that of the philosophical Geschichte), but is registered in, or rather through, events, that is, saturated phenomena, which are un-objectifiable by concepts, and the coming of which (unexpected arrival, arrivage) therefore imposes an unlimited hermeneutics on their witnesses.^[34]

If revelation is an impossible phenomenon, the making visible of that which is by definition invisible, the collapse of our horizons of understanding; then, it is either unintelligible or Marion is overstating his case. It may well be that the mysterion is truly unintelligible according to human terms. However, revelation has a history and is part of human history. In the context of the Christian tradition, it has, first, the history of the early Christian communities that started the discernment of who Jesus was and what the implications of his preaching, life, and death were. Such a historical process also shaped the formation of the New Testament in quite identifiable ways, a process that created differences in the depiction of Jesus in the Gospels as well as in the other texts of the Christian scriptures (not to mention the apocrypha). For a long time, as a matter of fact, the developing Christian tradition struggled to settle the question of Jesus’s divine nature. The trinitarian consensus that Marion takes for granted in his interpretation of revelation was not self-evident at all for the early church. Such a consensus was the result of a very concrete sociopolitical history, in addition to its theological and biblical sources. Marion overlooks all these historical, contextual matters.^[35]

What Marion takes to be his starting point, namely, that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God, that this Son was actually God, and that this God was part of a Trinity with the Father and the Holy Spirit is a historical development that took place during centuries of discernment within the Christian tradition. Sure enough, the fact that this is a historical achievement does not imply that it is false or purely contingent. However, the philosopher must address the sociohistorical location of the emergence of certain ideas. Without such an awareness, as I noted earlier, we risk theoretical inadequacy and social irrelevance. But Marion appears to believe that a historical-critical approach is incompatible with the anamorphosis his understanding of revelation requires.

In contrast, I firmly believe that the most adequate way to disclose the meaning of revelation is through criticism but beyond it. As Paul Ricoeur puts it: “Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.”^[36] The point is to “aim at a second naïveté in and through criticism,” so that “by interpreting … we can hear again.”^[37] Marion’s project is very different. It appears to try to bypass criticism altogether when it comes to biblical interpretation, as if this is necessary to allow the mystery of revelation to call upon us. The next two sections of this article attempt to show not only that bypassing historical-critical methods is not necessary, but that a more capacious understanding of revelation requires taking seriously the historical turn. Or, to put it in my language: it requires a context-attentive theology.

3.1 Between Relativism and Objectivism

But accepting the historically conditioned nature of revelation may lead to subjectivism, relativism, and the like.^[41] Can this be avoided? Niebuhr believes this is possible through a critical-historical theology that can find some intelligible patterns within the particularity of history. In the case of Christian theology, this will require a shift from “defensive” to “confessional theology.” Theology would not try to “defend,” to prove the superiority of the Christian faith over other religious beliefs. Instead, it will acknowledge that at the basis of this tradition is a confession of faith, a moment of valuation that cannot be expected from all because it depends on an existential choice. However, this must be a confessional theology that will carry the task of self-criticism for the Christian church.^[42] Otherwise, the faith becomes too self-confident and fixed, and quickly becomes defensive.

It is worth noting here that, for Niebuhr, historical relativism is not the same as subjectivism or skepticism: that certain values emerge in historical contexts and are historically conditioned does not mean that they are not true. The fact that the notion of human equality emerged in the eighteenth century does not affect its truth.^[43] Some very general moral universals are discovered in different contexts and different moments, through different and very particular forms of linguistic and philosophical articulation, yet this does not undermine their universality.

From this, some preliminary conclusions follow. First, all discourse, including discourse about revelation, is historically situated. Hence, when we speak of revelation in relation to the Christian sacred texts and in relation to Christ and the Trinity, the very first thing to acknowledge is that such an account is always-already confessional: it depends on a history of interpretation of Jesus as the Christ, as the Son of God, as the second person of the Trinity, and so forth. As Niebuhr nicely puts it: a Christian theology of revelation has to turn to the history of the faith in such a revelation. Second, any account of revelation is limited in its scope: its appeal depends on having faith in such a revelation.^[44]

To expand on these issues, Niebuhr introduces the idea of a “two-aspect history.”^[45] For Niebuhr, we should distinguish between an “external” and “internal” history. External history is the account provided by the spectator, the one who distances herself from the concrete experience at stake to provide a sort of neutral depiction of it. Revelation is all about inner history, instead. It is about those events, people, relations to which we attribute value, and worth.^[46] Now, this inner history is not merely private and evanescent, nor is it objective. It has a different status, very much like the status given to truth and ideals by the tradition of American Pragmatism: this is a shared history that can be verified in community, intersubjectively.^[47]

For Niebuhr one of the greatest problems of Christian theology has been to uproot revelation from inner history, locating it within external history. In such a way, revelation became a kind of miraculous event in “sacred” history in complete dissociation from “secular” history. Such a move made faith a-historical, not a subject of the judgments we made about secular history.^[48] And yet, Niebuhr argues, this simply does not make sense because revelation is fundamentally an inner-history event, and act of valuation, of meaning-giving.^[49]

To expand on the relationship between external and internal history, Niebuhr appeals to the image of a drama in which the self is the protagonist.^[50] In such a narrative structure, revelation stands as a “classic drama” that reorganizes everything: it shows us the possibilities of real catastrophe and yet also the possibilities of being given new life and a new community. Our hearts and our imaginations reason with the aid of revelation.^[51] Revelation is an invitation to re-articulate and re-construct our own narrative; it is an invitation to conversion: in this sense, revelation is not an intellectual, but a moral event.^[52] Moreover, as such revelation implies a permanent revolution. It never takes place once and for all. In Niebuhr’s words: “This mountain is not one we climbed once upon a time; it is a well-known peak we never wholly know, which must be climbed in every generation, on every new day.”^[53]

The dialectical relationship of inner and external history has some important consequences for the phenomenology of revelation. First, revelation cannot be pure immediacy. Otherwise, it would be incommunicable. Second, revelation requires some previous knowledge of who or what a deity is. Otherwise, we could not recognize or articulate the experience. Lastly, revelation appears to require some religious knowledge prior to the experience of revelation in our inner history. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain so much common ground among the religions.^[54] Hence, there seems to be a very primary longing at the basis of our conception of the divine/sacred:

We desire that the values which we cherish in embodied form—loved companions, children, nations and cultures—be given a guarantee of continued existence which we cannot give, and that the realization of unrealized ideals of truth, beauty and goodness be insured by a power and purpose more continuous than our own.^[55]

This fundamental longing leads to the emergence of the belief in something beyond us, which then leads to different forms of ritual, which, in turn, become the rudiments of organized religion, and so on and so forth. Of course, the process is rather complex and never so lineal. Now, some may see this process of articulation of these basic longings with skepticism, arguing that here we see nothing but the projection of our human needs and capacities in an idealized fashion. Niebuhr accepts the challenge, but considers it an insufficient account of what takes place with religious experience and history. There is some human projection, but there is also discovery of the possibility of realities beyond us. What he rejects emphatically – in a way that resembles James’s approach in The Varieties of Religious Experience ^[56] – is the “nothing but” approach. The experience of revelation is not only the experience of something beyond us, yet it should not be reduced to nothing but human projection either.^[57] He writes:

Revelation is not a development of our religious ideas, but their continuous conversion. God’s self-disclosure is that permanent revolution in our religious life by which all religious truths are painfully transformed and all religious behavior transfigured by repentance and new faith.^[58]

In Niebuhr’s view, we clearly see this in the Christian faith in the transfiguration of key ideas like God’s unity, power, and goodness.^[59] Particularly striking is the case of the revolution surrounding the concept of power. For in Christianity, it is the deity itself who shows its power through the experience of powerlessness. True power is seen in giving up power, in even giving up one’s life for the sake of one’s love for others. For Niebuhr, the meaning of revelation lies in allowing this revolutionary understanding of love and power to grow ever deeper, permanently.

3.2 From Revelation Outside History to Revelation in a Single History

Based on this sketch of Niebuhr’s account of revelation, some contrasts with Marion can be drawn. Unlike Marion, Niebuhr defends the intelligibility of the experience of revelation and, perhaps more importantly, its intersubjective constitution throughout history. Niebuhr rejects any private, mystical understanding of it.^[60] In contrast, Marion’s understanding of revelation is significantly shaped by the mystical tradition of apophasis. As such, revelation manifests paradoxically, it is beyond reason and does not belong to history.

Niebuhr’s context-attentive theology allows him to move beyond the limitations seen in Marion’s work by stressing the complex process of articulation of the experience of revelation. In this process, Niebuhr argues, inner and external history are deeply intertwined, producing one single history in which we experience the presence of the divine. However, Niebuhr’s context-attentive theology in The Meaning of Revelation leaves the reader with only a taste of what real attention to context means. Niebuhr has developed a powerful framework to understand context-attentive theology. But what does this look like in practice? I turn now to Gutiérrez in order to answer this question.