[This is a continuation of a four-part essay on Progressive Theology that seeks to explain what it is and to show its faults.]
Understanding Progressive Theology as Art
The work of theology has been
understood as the interpretation of sacred texts, God’s revelation in
Scripture. Tools and methods for this
study involve learning Greek and Hebrew, studying ancient literature to
understand the historical and cultural context, and the intertextual study of
Biblical texts within the canon of Scripture.
It has also been understood as the clarification of Scripture and
the Church’s teaching at different times and in different cultures. Such theological study requires an
understanding of official Church teaching in its history. Progressive theology, on the other hand,
understands theology as activism, a response to social injustices
and an up-to-date articulation of contemporary beliefs to support the
activism. What is allegedly needed for
such an undertaking is a Critical Theory to march through the theology and
Church of the past and on to the social justices of the future.
The recent formation of a far-left
denomination, an extension of an already theologically left United Methodism,
offers an example of what is taking place with Progressive Theology. However, Progressive Theology is a
deconstructive activism in all traditions, including ‘Evangelicalism’. It is not Christian but poses as
Christian. This denomination, the
Liberation Methodist Connexion, is just one example, but its extremes offer a
helpful understanding of its inclinations.
The post-Christian mainline denominations are other, open examples of
Progressive Theology, even though their decline originated in Liberal Theology. In Evangelical circles, it is rather an
undercurrent that pulls people away from Christian faith through progressive
campaigns and activism that replace fundamental beliefs, the Church, and its
mission.
According to the website of the
Liberation Methodist Connextion, they are ‘journeying to a new way of being
followers of Christ that refute the imbalance of powers, principalities, and
privileges that have plagued Methodism: colonialism, white supremacy, economic
injustices, patriarch, sexism, clericalism, ableism, agism, transphobia, and
heteronormativity.’ Liberation Theology
is an odd mix of modernity and postmodernity, a totalizing theology that aims
to undermine power of any sort, as listed.
Like the Marxism it admires, it originates in the progressive ideological
views of the Modernist nineteenth century but develops as a Postmodern
deconstructivism. The LMC description
continues a little later with ‘LMX
theology is not written in stone because our human understanding continues to
evolve as we deepen our personal and collective understandings of God.’ If so, I would suggest that the better term
for this is ‘art’.
Another writer, Jeremy Rios, has also
suggested that we begin to speak of ‘Progressive Theology’ distinct from any
meaning of the word ‘liberal’. He
suggests the following description of it: (1) theology is making progress, (2)
finds experience to be the primary authority over Scripture, tradition, and
reason, (3) prioritizes the love command in ethical matters, (4) sees Christian
witness as not so much about salvation from sin as about its ‘woke’ witness of ‘inclusion,
LGBTQ rights, marriage equality [homosexual marriage], … female clergy’ and (often)
pro-choice advocacy, and (5) finds traditional theology to be a bondage.[1] Such a definition does capture Progressive
Theology somewhat, although points 1, 2, and 3 in particular could be said of
Liberalism. The key distinction between
the two lies in that the latter was the theology of Western Modernity, an
Enlightenment theology that intended to replace orthodox theology. If so, Progressive Theology is the theology
of Postmodernity, and point 4 is the most relevant in that regard.
As an artistic endeavour,
Progressive Theology is not academic study or rational thought but the sort of
activism one finds in certain types of art.
The types of art are those that might themselves be called
‘progressive’, such as expressionism, fauvism, futurism, cubism, collage, and dadaism. What is needed is a different way to conceive
of theology altogether than in terms of doctrines and academic study. Artists
in these movements were both producers of art and social activists (or many
were): the connection between art and activism is actual, not strained.
Collectively, these artistic
movements are termed ‘Modern Art’. Its
origins were in the late 19th century, with artists like Vincent van
Gogh and Paul Cézanne, and its key development began in the early 20th
century with artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Modern Art might be defined broadly as a
rejection of the past and an experimentation in art that emphasized abstraction. It entailed a move away from the subject—what
was painted—to the viewer. In literary
terms, it was a move away from the author and the text to the reader, involving
a reader-response hermeneutic. While the
term ‘modern’ was applied to these artistic movements, they really represented
artistic expression that opposed Modernity.
They were ‘modern’ in the sense of being something new and different
from Modernity, and so they represent in art what would later be termed ‘postmodern’
in philosophical and cultural studies.
Several characteristics might be highlighted
from the different Modern Art movements in the pursuit of defining Progressive
Theology, considered as a theological medium prioritizing the observer/reader
in the pursuit of particular types of social activism. Fauvism, Futurism, and Expressionism together
illustrate the turn in Modern Art from representation, naturalism, realism to
an anthropocentric, unnatural, and abstract visionary experience for the
observer, who is made a participant. Fauvism,
developed by Matisse and André Derain, advanced from Impressionism’s (e.g.,
Claude Monet) still realistic characteristics to Fauvism’s (‘les fauves’
means ‘the wild beasts’ in French) use of pronounced and unnatural colours
(e.g., Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre (‘Happiness of Life’, 1905-1906) or
Jean Metzinger’s Paysage coloré aux oiseaux aquatiques (‘Colourful
Landscape with Water Birds,’ 1907).
Futurism, like the much later Postmodern
Art, embraced a wide variety of mediums for art. Begun with the publication of the poet,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, the short-lived, mostly
Italian movement was primarily an angry rejection of the past—of anything old—and
harmony and an embracing of the new in the early 20th century: youthfulness,
science, technology, speed, violence, the city (versus nature). Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910)
captures many of these characteristics.
Expressionism is an artform that
originated in Germany in the early 20th century. Its key feature was a move away from realism
to subjectivism. One might contrast the
Neoclassical work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingre (1780-1867) to expressionist
artists. Ingre meticulously depicted on
the canvas the actual folds of linen or peacock feathers in his La Grande
Odalisque (1814). Expressionism
turned to the observer, not the subject, seeking to affect emotions and
responses through ‘distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and
through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements.’[2] Instead of Ingre’s objectivity, one might
compare the evocatory colours, brush strokes, and scenes in Vincent van Gogh’s
paintings, or the emotional fear and horror of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Progressive Theology is not
interested in the technical detail of the interpretation of texts through
linguistic and historical analysis characteristic of the Modern, Enlightenment
period of Biblical studies. Nor is it
interested in the faithful representation of orthodox theology of the
Church. It even rejects the past to
embrace the progress into the future. It
locates its value in what is produced in the reader as social activist. It is also critical of the
historical-critical method of Biblical studies for its over-emphasis on
scientific methods—‘criticisms’—because this imagines that scholarship can be
conducted objectively, without presuppositions, and produce assured
results. Moreover, such results are
considered ‘inconvenient’ if they do not produce the sort of emotions needed
for a particular activism that is expected.
Progressive Theology is also critical of traditional Christian theology,
which accepts that presuppositions and perspectives needed to be understood and
evaluated. Its problem with traditional
Christianity is that it is too beholden to Biblical interpretation and the
theology of the Church when what is desired is the activism of Public Theology.
Cubism, an art form developed in
the early 20th century by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque,
incorporates multiple perspectives into the artwork. Unlike more realistic presentation,
such as still life and landscape art, cubism ventured further than Impressionism
to explore perspectival representation. If presentation followed rational and
objective categories of space and time, thus rendering art that is realistic (a
presentation in art of what is seen in reality), cubism re-presents the
object from different angles in space and different moments in time. Representation in cubism moves from exploring
perspectives to being distortive to such an extent that the original object is
itself lost. One might compare Picasso’s
Girl with a Mandolin and Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
both produced in 1910. The former does
still capture the form of a girl with a mandolin, whereas any expected physical
features of a person in a portrait are lost in the representation of the latter
work.
Picasso also introduced collage
into art, and thus an aspect of Progressive Theology, too, is its hermeneutic
of appropriation (to be discussed later).
The use of collage entails rearranging what others have already produced
and, in the process, creating art.
Taking pictures and words from printed matter involves something not
intended as creative work; the collage or arrangement in a new work is intended
to introduce the creativity necessary for artwork. Progressive Theology is often simply a collage,
a rearrangement of authors, ideas, images, texts, and so forth. Audiences are taken in by the pseudo-intellectual
breadth, the connectivity of words or ideas, or the reappropriation of Biblical
texts for new situations without regard to original intent. Arrangement, like cut flowers, produces a
work of art; arrangement of theologians or authors produces a creative
theological expression. I once heard a
lecture by a world-renowned theologian who chose a reading from a survivor of the
Holocaust and a reading from Friedrich Nietzsche, who is, at times, associated
with the rise of Nazism. The ‘theology’
presented in the lecture was nothing more than a creative arrangement of past
authors that involved shock and aesthetic value. Any reasoning in the lecture was secondary,
it was, in this case, pure conjecture. It
had no Biblical grounds or historical theological references. It was an evocative arrangement of quotations
and ideas. Many people in the audience
were, nonetheless, taken in for the rhetorical power of the lecture. Collage theology is Progressive where the
value appears in the artistry, not in the interpretation of texts, as
in traditional (and orthodox) theology or in the scientific analysis of
claims in texts, as in Modernity (with its liberal theological
outcomes). Some Biblical text is set
alongside some Greek philosopher not because there is a textual relationship
and not because the ideas of one are contextually relevant for the other but in
order to create something new, a point relevant to the present age.
In the post-World War I period,
Dadaism brought a political dimension to art through its deconstruction of
logic and reason by embracing chaos and the irrational. Dadaism rejected an understanding of art as
aesthetics—the idea that it should be appealing or pleasing. An example might be the anti-art of Marcel
Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), which depicts Politically, the movement was a
response to capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism. It was a nihilistic, artistic response to the
world that produced the explosive destruction of World War I.[3]
Like Dadaism’s anti-aestheticism,
Progressive Theology is anti-worshipful.
Its concept of social justice requires too much anger to be oriented in
doxology. The nature of its focus on justice
in the public square wants from the Church only its endorsement of the
rebellion against power structures in the public sphere. As Dadaism was an anti-art, Progressive
Theology is an anti-Church movement.
What produced the Church over the centuries by, say, the mid-20th
century is now considered something to be undermined: the mainline
denominations, the theology of orthodoxy, the hymnody of historic worship, the
commitments to faithful interpretation of sacred texts, the mission of Christianity
carried forward, the unity of the Church in orthodoxy. What one gets from the 1960s on in the west
is a steady decline in the mainline denominations due to their own rejection of
their heritage along with an embrace of a ‘public theology’ that traces the
values of secular society over what was, once, a Protestant expression of
Christian orthodoxy. As Dadaism’s value
lay in its anti-war politics, so Progressive Theology lies in its advocacy for
social justice: only the conclusions are heard, not the arguments. The arguments are artistic presentations that
make the point, and the point is what really matters. The Church itself does not matter, only
social justice as currently defined by the culture. Even the local church matters little: it becomes
a worship service with a few programmes, but the activity of the local church is
disseminated into what the culture is doing such that the Church fades into
obscurity. Believers are expected to get
motivated and directed in the church’s meetings, but to find their activism in
groups in the culture. In other words,
the church is itself not a social ethic—to reference Stanley Hauerwas once
again.[4]
Summary
·
Progressive Theology treats theology as a medium
of expression, like art—especially various forms of so-called Modern art (which
are really postmodern).
·
Progressive Theology is not interpretation
of sacred texts or clarification of Scripture and the Church’s teaching
in different contexts but is activism in response to social injustices
that moves the culture along a progressive trajectory.
·
Progressive Theology is an extension of
liberation theologies into new areas, a continuous postmodern deconstruction of
religion, ethics, institutions, culture, and so forth, as hoped for in Critical
Theory (Cultural Marxism).
·
Like Futurism, it rejects the old to embrace progress
into the future. It does so through
Critical Theory, a cultural Marxism associated with Antonio Gramsci and the
Frankfort School that recently has been applied in particular to race. It is, similarly, anti-natural in its embrace
of a more anthropocentric vision (identity politics and ecclesiology, multiculturalism,
gender identity versus biology, science versus morality).
·
Progressive Theology includes a deconstruction
of Christian theology and ethics and an undefined, as yet undetermined, future
for humanity. It does not offer an
alternative set of doctrines so much as an alternative conceptualization of
theology and social activism. It is more
like activist artistic movements.
o
It is a move from realism to subjectivism (evoking
emotions and responses from the observer more than to represent the subject)
and therefore using distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy. It is inoculated against criticism and undercuts
any ‘right’ interpretation of Scripture or notion of orthodoxy in the Church
and replaces these with effectiveness in the social justice activism of the day.
o
Like Cubism, it incorporates multiple
perspectives and intends to ‘re-present’ (present differently) the subject from
different perspectives. This is where
intersectionality, diversity, and multiculturalism become cultural values, and
the original object (Scripture, orthodoxy) is distorted or even altogether
lost.
o
Like collage (and Postmodern Art), Progressive
Theology has multiple familiar elements that have been appropriated
(repurposed, rearranged, differently combined, etc.) to produce something artistic
and new. Viewers sense the vaguely
familiar—in liturgy, in the reading of Scripture, in theological terminology—but
everything is infused with alternative meaning (such as ‘atonement’, ‘resurrection’,
‘social justice’, etc.).
o
Like Dadaism, Progressive Theology embraces
chaos and the irrational to deconstruct reason and logic. It rebels against whatever is considered
hegemonic, patriarchal, and authoritative as forms of ‘ableism’—systems enabling
injustice.
Having offered this comparison in
the interest of clarifying what Progressive Theology is, the next task is to
look at Progressive Theology’s hermeneutic in greater detail. In Postmodern Art (post-1970), a key
characteristic is appropriation, which will help in defining Progressive
Theology’s hermeneutics.
[1]
Jeremy Rios, ‘Let Define “Progressive Theology”, Mustard Seed Faith Blog
(7 September, 2018); online at: https://jmichaelrios.wordpress.com/2018/09/07/lets-define-progressive-theology/.
[2]
‘Expressionism,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica; online at: https://www.britannica.com/art/Expressionism
(accessed 19 November, 2020).
[3] Following Dadaism, Surrealism
continued to explore the irrational and subconscious but without the social
anger. Salvador Dali’s The
Persistence of Memory (1931) depicted melting watches, exploring in art what
Sigmund Freud did in psychotherapy with the unconscious or dreams.
[4]
Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom, p. 99.
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