Welcome to Live Theology!
Like Improv Comedy, but a Lot More Funny. Or Less.
Live Theology! is where you’re going to hear, and quite possibly see, Treena and I doing what we just do every day, much to our own surprise: get involved in discussions that turn “theological.”
Before we really get started, deconstructive thinker as I am, it’s always good to have a talk about talking. By “deconstruction” here I don’t mean taking apart or demolishing, which is a newish term for a (perfectly legitimate) form of talk about religion these days. I mean the good old fashioned Heidegger-Derrida kind of deconstruction, where you’re not taking something apart…but you’re not building something up either. You’re looking at the whole map, and you’re the irritating guy in the room who’s going wait, do we even know where we’re going? Why do we want to go there anyway? And even more irritating—what is a map anyway? What does “looking at a map” really mean? What is “whole”?
You think part of the everyday violence and distress of life is too much blundering about and rushing to and fro altogether, often justified by maps and mapping. Just for a moment you want to not get from A to B but to stay on A. Before you get to B you might want to find out where you’re at. You might want to know what “get to” means and what it implies.
So you can tell if you’re talking with a deconstructor, even if they don’t profess to be one, because they’re going well, first we have to talk about “theology.” And then I guess we have to talk about “live.”
And if we’re going to talk about “theology” we ought to talk about the “theo” part and the “ology” part.
So maybe I’ll do what comes most spontaneously and easily to mind right now, and talk about the “ology” part. Logic. Logos. What is that?
Logic is really (just) how things hang together. Just that. Your shirts have a logic in your closet—they all hang together in certain ways. Biology is how lifeforms hang together—in themselves and among one another.
So theology is how the thing called “theo” at the start of that word hangs together.
It doesn’t mean this belief or that belief. It doesn’t mean this plan or that plan. Very often we mishear “logic” as “logistics.” As in “What’s the logic of this dishwasher?” It doesn’t help that circuits have things in them called logic gates, designed literally to get electrons to go from A to B, in a certain pattern, equivalent to “Yes” or “No” or what have you. But this is logistics, which is just plowing ahead according to a certain logic, implicit in the plowing, worked out beforehand, or just implicit as a feature of how the plowing-ahead is working.
There’s literally been a lot of plowing, let alone plowing-ahead, that got human beings into the mess we are now in, along with the rest of the biosphere. So I for one am very against the idea that “logic” means “an actionable plan.”
And I’m also against the idea that it must be “reasonable.” Logic requires figuring out what “reasonable” might even mean. It might mean a lot, and some of it might be really varied. You might have perfectly “reasonable” laundry folding and storing habits that might be different on different days.
And anyway, you don’t always hang your shirts in a “reasonable” way in your closet. But you do hang them. There’s a logic to them. They hang together.
So theology might mean “hanging together in THEO mode.” I’m capitalizing THEO so you don’t immediately decide on what that means. For now, THEO is just a group of letters pertaining to the kind of logic that Live Theology! will be doing.
Theology could also mean “How THEO hangs together,” or “How THEO mode hangs together.”
I’m using the word “mode” because I can’t think of anything better to evoke a certain sense of “feel” or “texture” or “vibe” or something like that, without pointing at a “subject” or a “person” or an “object” or a “machine” in particular. All that stuff is too fast for doddery old deconstructive me. “Mode” evokes some kind of “how does it happen?”
How things happen tell you about what they are. This is the basic tenet of a philosophical mode called phenomenology. I’ve been super keen on it since I was seventeen. I think I was first super keen just because it’s such a very cool word. Six syllables! And it has this strange, ghostly, haunting feel to it, because of the word “phenomenon” that’s part of it.
Phenomenology is the logic of phenomena. How phenomena hang together—phenomena being just appearances, without reference to whether they’re “real” or not, who’s having them or experiencing them or not, of what they are about, what they refer to…and so on. The goodness of phenomenology is that it’s so open-minded, like being a meditator or doing silent prayer.
“How a certain kind of vibe codenamed THEO hangs together.” I’m starting to like it.