From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Godt, Wahrheit und Amerika
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 00:03:31 +0000


Michael Eldred wrote:

>Anthony,
>
>The epiphany of a god is a phenomenon, just as the voices heard by a
>mentally ill person are a phenomenon, just as hearing a car pass by is
>a phenomenon. If you are with me when the car passes by, we can both
>hear it and thus share the phenomenon. If I tell you of the voices I
>am hearing, and you can't hear them, then you just have to believe me
>and cannot directly share the unconcealedness of this phenomenon with
>me. As evidence you have only my say-so. If Mother Theresa speaks of
>encountering God in Calcutta, I can only believe her. The god whom she
>encounters is mythologically founded. Without the Christian myth
>casting the Christian God, there could be no encounter, just as for an
>aboriginal tribe, the mountain ridge in the distance could not be a
>giant sleeping lizard without the myth that casts the mountain range
>AS a sleeping lizard (the apophantic AS which allows something to show
>up as what it is). An encounter with a god or with a mountain range as
>a giant sleeping lizard can be shared only through the respective
>myths that cast these possibilities and through belief in these myths.
>Belief in a myth means to live in a certain mythically cast historical
>world. You can only encounter God in the streets of Calcutta if you
>have faith and you can only share this encounter with the community of
>the faithful. The only way into faith is a leap (of the subject), that
>is, unless it is inculcated from birth (into the non-subject) through
>the heel of tradition.
>
>The uncovering of the phenomenon of being itself is a different
>enterprise altogether since it is not and cannot be based on belief.

The way in which modern theologies, such as that of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, 
explicate the encounter with God in terms of "love alone" (as he puts it) is 
as little based on belief as Heidegger's explication of being with Others is 
based on consciously acknowledging the existence of others. This type of 
Christian theology therefore has several distinct phenomenological 
advantages. First, since love is neither a belief nor based on belief, it 
avoids the contentiousness and disputes which accompany claims of belief. 
Secondly, the sheer universality of the phenomenon of human love (in ALL its 
forms) puts it in a unique position to be re-interpreted as a 
phenomenological fundamentum. In this way, Von Balthasar explicates ALL 
phenomena in terms of an encounter God as love, not as something that is 
believed or grasped. The fact that not everyone acknowledges all phenomena 
as encounters with God as love would then be analogous to the fact that not 
everyone acknowledges every phenomenon (even the most private) as an 
encounter with Others, or that every phenomenon (even the most "objective") 
presupposes care. The third advantage of this kind of Christian theology is 
that Christianity is unique in this regard among religions. Although all 
religions emphasize love in some way, only Christianity gives it an 
absolutely central theological role. The fact that countless Christians (and 
the Church as a whole) have failed to fulfill this role in the past is 
readily acknowledged by Von Balthasar as precisely an emphasis of belief 
over love. In this way, people encounter God in a more full or more deprived 
way (i.e., based on how they love, NOT on what religious beliefs they hold) 
analogously to how for Heidegger, we encounter beings in a more full or more 
deprived way (i.e., by manipulating and being involved, or by knowing). And 
in this way, different religions can be compared based on how much they 
emphasize being-for-Others.

Anyway, this is still all very general, but the main thing I wanted to 
address was the possibility of a phenomenological Christian theology which 
(1) transcends the main problem with traditional theology - the 
contentiousness of belief, and (2) does not indifferently cast Christianity 
among other religions.

Anthony Crifasi

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