Theopoetic Passion

Thoughts:

I've been reading 'Love and Good Reasons: A post-liberal approach to literature and ethics' and 'Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Biblomainia'.

'Love and Good Reasons' is approaching literature as a means of studying Ethics and Christian Ethics in particular. While I often disagree with his notion of what it means to be a 'Christian Ethic' - and hes drawing very strongly off of Stanley Hauerwas - I do agree with his approach to literature as ethical/philosophical study.

The failure of Philosophy - and much of academia - is the false attempt to create theory and ideas that are divorced from human passions. Language and idea is constructed in such a manner as to de-value the emotional life of the reader and the way in which language, image and idea evoke passion! In deed as any passionate reader will tell you many of the ways in which we know and think are in the passions that story, metaphor and narrative stir up in us.

Likewise Theories of Reading addresses the way in which the devalued reader has been exited from consideration all together. From here we can easily see the dangers of what Wendell Berry refers to as the specialization of poetry. The further the reading and writing of poetry becomes the specialized domain of a few - and the longer society allows it to exist as pretty language done by moody teenagers and over-achieving academics the longer we are able to insist that the words we say and the story's we tell have no import.

We cannot, then, evaluate the way in which Henry James sought to function as a ethicist. His work, and those who comment on it, are separated away into a specialized field. But if its true that culture is shaped and formed by stories then we have an obligation to allow story, metaphor and language to exist as discourses whos job it is to engage us in the wider realities we live in.

Scott Holland calls theology the poetry of the laity. Wendell Berry say poetry is never truly concerned with eternity but with the here and now. To insist that poetry is specialized and only a 'pleasurable exercise' instead of an 'intellectual discourse' is to say that the laity - the common people - have no ideas worth exploring.

The danger of the specialization of poetry mimics also the danger of the specialization of theology/church (see 'Theopoetic as Way Forward' for a further exploration).

But the implication is important to note: we insist on a separation of story and thought, poetry and audience, book and reader and church and state. The things that stir our spirits are specialized and removed from our daily lives. God, then, has no more relevance to us than the sunday morning stirring in our stomachs.

Recent examples would be the foot-washing controversy in Vancouver. A church was not allowed to wash the feet of the homeless because that was a social service. Churches were only supposed to conduct religious services like prayer and worship.

The specialization of the church then prevents it from participating in the wider living-world that we find our selves embedded in. Likewise if our stories are separated from their audience (and their author) they then become another specialized field of discourse.

What does this mean for the church?
For Theology?

The THEOPOETIC is the Way Forward!