THIS CHAPTER GIVES ONE AN AFFIRMATIVE POSTMODERN UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOD CONCEPT...ENJOY, TRYoung

THE DRAMA OF THE HOLY

CHAPTER

POSTMODERN UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE GOD CONCEPT:
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE DRAMA OF THE HOLY

ABSTRACT

I. INTRODUCTION Both Berger and Martin warn one away from speaking of the truth value of God and/or any religious teaching. Such instructions are, in postmodern social science, as much a challenge as a warning. I want to make a case that there is a very special way in which it is appropriate for the social scientist to speak to the reality of the god concept--and to help ascertain the degree to which the god concept is realized in the world. To that end, I will do three things; first I will summarize the nature of the postmodern in art, science and social enquiry. One will see that, Newton notwithstanding, human beings do play a creative role in the hypotheses they invent.

Then, using anthropological and sociological insights, I will suggest that the God concept has the same (varying) facticity as has any other human product. That facticity arises from the ordinary but still remarkable ability of human beings to create the social facts of their existence through symbolic interactional processes. The kinds of social realities human beings can and do construct vary from the most impersonal, degrading and/or objectifying to the most trusting, cooperative, sharing and enabling social relationships.

The postmodern spirit declines to privilege degradation, secularization, or objectification over, in this case, sanctification and deification. If humans beings sanctify themselves, their own society, and the habitat of that society, it is in their capacity as much as is destruction, pollution, humiliation or massification. All are, equally human projects and processes. If we learn anything from the postmodern critique of modern science, it is that the scientist cannot privilege one social process over another.

A pivotal point at issue with other analysts has to do with the nature of the sanctification/deification process. A Durkheim, Marx, Weber or Freud would claim that all religion is a categorical error in which one ascribes social power for good or evil to gods or devils. Postmodern sensibility would either deconstruct the hidden political agenda of a Durkheim, Weber or a Marx on the one hand or, alternately, simply accept the definitions as given by a religious group as their prerogative since they are the architects of their own lives and go on to offer a critique based upon their own politics. For the most part, I do the latter.

I take the position that sanctification/deification is as real (or false) a social endeavor as any other social process; the operant question then becomes one of the nature of the god process. In this essay, I will take the reader through those symbolic interactional processes by which time, space, persons, and relationships become sanctified in situated Dramas of the Holy. The kind of god concept and the degree of its facticity then becomes a matter of empirical investigation using the ordinary methods of social enquiry.

I make the case that, given the very technical meaning of religion (religio: L. I bind, I bind back), social justice indicators are the single best way to judge the varying facticity of the god concept. I base this last point upon the practical understandings of foundational concepts in a wide variety of grand narratives, mostly religious. Foundational concepts in any given drama of the Holy require, minimally, cooperation, compassion and mutual aid. The converse of the argument is, that when objectification, exploitation, massification, or other degradations of persons, cultures or nature ensue, death of God arguments become valid.

At the same time situated dramas of the holy are constructed within a fellowship, with the nationalization or globalization of the economy and polity, social justice concerns must be built into the larger political economy. This point hinges on the existence of deep structures in social life which lay outside the reach of personal life, however much one might be oriented to the drama of the Holy in everyday affairs. Some of these deep structures are amenable to administrative efforts of religious persons and groups but some are far deeper and require a far reaching democratic politics.

A. In sections which follow, I want the deeply religious reader to know and keep in mind that I have profound respect and abiding appreciation for those who value the ways of their god and try to keep faith with them. I do not want to challenge or deny any one the mystery, the wonder, the wisdom and the comfort of their faith; I wish only to offer a case which enables others, not so certain of the grounds for religious endeavor, to have ontological and epistemological foundations for their commitment to the drama of the Holy. It is a personal political agenda which forms the subtext of this essay.

B. As we shall see from a survey of postmodern critique in art, science and social enquiry, human responsibility for epistemology is absolute while responsibility for ontology, as a Teilhard de Chardin (1964) might say, grows as human understanding grows. To the extent postmodern knowledge processes open up room for the Drama of the Holy within the social sciences as a topic for analyses and action, to that extent is it possible for science to contribute to the 'realization' of a postmodern God in history.

And, as a Paul Tillich (1952) might say, responsibility for the god process (as 'Being an sich') lays with those who are involved in it. In many respects, what is contained in this essay is but a footnote to Tillich. Sidney Hook has said, it was Tillich who made it possible for atheists to be religious. Hook explains that Tillich insisted that God was not a Being with a mind, a will, a plan, and a personality but rather God was human beings being human. More particularly Hook (1974:193) pursued the logic of Tillich's insight with his usual careful reasoning: he said that, understanding God as being-as-such, people would be:

Full of humility and awe before the Power of Being, they would revise or reinterpret their religious symbols in order to express the highest moral reaches of human experience. They would seek more explicitly than in the past to devise symbols which would integrate rather than disintegrate human personality. They would turn to the findings of modern psychology, sociology and moral theory for leads and material rather than go adventuring on an impossible quest for Being [as prior and supernatural]. They would provide aesthetic and emotional supports for the various types of humanisms and ethical culture whose rituals are so often dreary and funereal. Religion would forever cease its warfare against science and remove its "no trespass" signs from the roads of intellectual inquiry in the mysteries of mind and spirit. [brackets added].

C. Tillich has given us an understanding of the nature of the god process which reclaims the drama of the Holy in ways that secular interpretations, such as that of a Durkheim or a Marx, could not. However, Tillich offered us an understanding the god process in ways that turns one to questions of the 'unconditioned transcendent.' Such a concept does not ring true with most postmodern understanding nor does it survive the rigorous critique of an advocate for science and reason as Hook.

II. THE POSTMODERN Premodern and modern thought processes are familiar to most persons having been immersed in one or both daily in their lived experience. Postmodern understandings are of fairly recent origins, are highly controversial and require a bit of background for those who do not follow its ways. One can begin to get a sense of the postmodern by looking at its two major expressions: postmodern critique and the postmodern condition.

A. Postmodern Critique The sense of the postmodern as critique is that the human hand lies behind in all efforts to explain, evaluate, describe, study, report or theorize about the world in which we live. Post-modern as a concept, came into use in the 1950s in reference to architectural styles as a protest to the cubes, circles, pyramids, slabs and cones that marked modern architecture. The term was extended to literary critique of all claims of universal standards for novels, poetry, and composition. It use spread to art criticism; to critique of music and theatre. Now it is used to denote an era in which all absolutes; all universals; all assertions of objective Truth and all pretensions of perfection are challenged.

B. The Postmodern world view, as an alternative to modernism, began in the late 1700's and early 1800's in literature, poetry, art, philosophy and curiously enough, in mathematics. It was fueled by feminism, anti-colonialism, democratic socialism, and other movements which located the sources of human genius and wisdom broadly throughout the population rather than at the top of the pyramids of power found in European society: gender, class, racial, political, scientific or bureaucratic systems with elites who dominated social life.

C. Postmodern critics in social sciences argue that there are no universal laws with which to ground moral, scholarly, or legal norms. In the postmodern critique, grounding of social research and of social knowledge is possible but it always presumes one or another social life world taken as a frame of reference for the sensitizing concepts, for the research priorities, and for the selective implementation of those finding (Polkenhorne, 1983:279 ff; Gill, 1990; Gilligan, 1983). Thus politics and political correctness lay behind all such efforts whether from conservatives, liberals or radicals. No one escapes the emotional and intellectual pull of one's own culture.

D. Postmodern scholars in art, literature, poetry, music and dance reject the idea that there are absolute standards in composing, performing, or judging these works. One cannot privilege Western european authors, artists, architects or theologians over African, Asian, Latin American or Native American artists without using one's own cultural values and thus converting art into politics. One may not list 100 or a 1000 best works of art, music, architecture or painting any more than one may privilege one way of gendering, way of child rearing, way of healing or way of teaching out of the 3000 to 4000 cultural, hence human, formations seen in the long history of the world.

Mozart and Bizet may be grand but Gershwin, Duke Ellington, or Fats Waller and the Beatles may have something of more value to offer their age or group than do dead white male Europeans. The Sex Pistols and 2 Live Crew, Madonna and the Prince speak out of their society and define its artistic standards as much as did Mozart in his time; they are different, neither better or worse except in terms which privilege some culture; some given world view.

Social Bases of Postmodern Critique In America The social base for postmodern consciousness was not found in institutional politics, academic disciplines or the various media of America. In the 1950s and 60s, the faculties of American state universities and small colleges, especially in the liberal arts and social sciences became part of a populist knowledge process which challenged the intellectual hegemony of elitist universities and the artistic hegemony of white european males.

A. The most direct source of this cultural rebellion in academia today is to be found in the street politics of a civil rights movement of the 50s, and the women's liberation movement, the antiwar movement, the Black Power movement and student rights movements of the 60s. The social base for such street politics was effectively dismantled by the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush administrations with a lot of help from the many underground political structures in the USA (Young, 1983). Fragments of that consciousness remain in academia and take the name of postmodern.

B. In the 90s, these depoliticized faculties, borrowing from european critics, venture into the wilderness of the postmodern with curiosity and determination. Peter Manning (1989) has a very accessible survey of those European postmodernists from which American scholarship borrowed. Many are mentioned in postmodern work around the country: Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard and others. At Durham, at Lubbock, at Ft. Collins, at Chico, at Pullman, at East Lansing and at Muncie, Indiana one can find postmodern expressions in art, music, poetry, philosophy and religion listed in class schedules. These faculties teach postmodern art forms to hundreds of thousands of students who, in other days, would be taught that Shakespeare, Milton, Da Vinci, Mozart or Aristotle preempted the nature of greatness and excellence.

These courses fuel controversies in American colleges which pit modern and classic scholars against postmodernists who want to add courses in literature, art, music and psychology which, another day, would be seen to be from 'primitive' societies; to be low or popular culture; to be obscene, vulgar or outrageous. The postmodern view is that the art of each epoch is a genre unto itself; that the scholar has as much right to investigate the poetics and politics; the social history and social impact of one such art form as any other. The Chronicle of Higher Education regularly runs explanations and condemnations of postmodern studies in its Point Of View column on the last page. Recent essays by Annette Kolodny (6 Feb., 1991), Gerald Graff (13 Feb., 1991), or by Leslie Fishbein (15 Aug., 1991) among many others, offer a brief for the defense of postmodern scholarship. These essays argue that if one person wishes to explore the subtleties, politics and meanings of Shakespeare, another has the right to explore the subtleties and meanings of street art, murals, billboards, bathroom graffiti or soap operas. All can, equally, enlighten understanding and all can if done well, equally illuminate the human condition. Neither can claim pride of place in the course syllabi of an English department.

Postmodern Phenomenology The operative point to take about the ontology of the natural and social world is that made by phenomenologists; human beings create their own lived social realities. In some readings of phenomenology (e.g., Husserl, 1913), categories of experience (eidos) predate human action and will but in postmodern phenomenology, all such categories are, in the first instance, human products. Such views seem easy to accept when social realities are considered. Yet there is a case to be made that physical realities are, in part at least, a human product.

A. Postmodern expressions in science began as astronomers began to decenter the earth as the pivotal point in the universe. It began, arguably, when Aristarchus of Samos, a 3rd century B.C. observer decentered the sun as the focus of the solar system. Until Kepler, circles were the only geometric forms which astronomers used to describe the trajectory of the stars and planets (Ekelund, 1988:7). It was most disturbing that nature did not follow such perfect geometries. A french mathematician, Poincaré showed that even in the most accurate mathematical model (that of Newton), there were dynamics of real systems which required qualitative mathematics rather than quantitative. Perfect prediction of real system dynamics of the sort Laplace, Pareto and Lundberg as well as logical positivists expect is impossible. With the advent of Chaos theory, modern science itself is decentered (Young, 1991a).

Postmodern physicists now see the human hand in the very constitution of the laws of nature: in quantum physics and in chemistry as in biological science (Ekelund, 1988; Penrose, 1989) There can be no laws of physics or laws of biology apart from the human mind which abstracts them out of regions in phase-space since phase-space itself is constructed by the mathematics in terms of the cultural concepts which probe nature and all its attributes.

Not a few scientists point out that the techniques of measurement affect the dynamics of sub-atomic particles; thus the laws of nature are created in the act of investigation.¹ Other physical scientists, subtle in their intelligence, argue that the very act of research calls forth the subject matter of science as well as affecting its dynamics. For such physicists, reality is far too complex and far too connected to speak of individual quarks, colors, leptons, atoms, molecules, stars or galaxies as if these were separate, bounded entities with determinate laws of causality between independent and dependent variables. There are only the facts of evolution; generalizations about the pattern and meaning of those facts are distinctly human products.

B. Phenomenologists and others in the field of social enquiry see a deep and unavoidable linkage between the object of study and the knowing subject (Wm. Dilthey, 1833-1911; Wm. Wundt, 1832-1920; Franz Brentano, 1838-1917; E. Husserl, 1859-1938; Max Weber, 1864-1920). For them, all social reality is constructed; one understands it by active connection with it and by explanation of it from the point of view of those who construct it rather than by measurement and description. As the knowledge process improves and re-enters the social life world from which knowledge comes, theorists intrude evermore deeply into the ontologies they research. In the act of formulating political theory, economic theory, social theory or psychological theory, such scientists become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy that helps bring forth the reality under study (as is indeed this work so designed).

For example, some economists who study the workings of capitalism (or socialism) want to reproduce it; some want to destroy it. Those who think themselves value-free, impartial or neutral aid in the reproduction of capitalism (or socialism) by selecting the concepts congenial (or inimical) to such economic activity, isolating them for study and ignoring all the unit acts that do not fit the model.² Then using mathematical tools, such economists set forth principles from facts they do indeed find, attribute them to and only to the dynamics of that economic formation. Others, reading and using such ideas, help reconstruct the kind of reality that the economist thought existed independently of human intervention.

Ideas of social progress, of social evolution and hopes of progress toward some ontologically prior or objectively existent form of social perfection are victim to postmodern critique in sociology as well. There are no 'developed' societies in which are found social institutions more civilized than in 'primitive' societies. Each society must be judged only on that which it promises; on that which it claims it does. Immanent critique is possible; transcendent critique not. All such claims to transcendent standards or forms of social organization are, in the postmodern critique, exercises in partisan politics and an arbitrary privileging of one cultural complex over another.

Grand Narratives Thus ontology and epistemology are ineluctably intertwined from the smallest particle to economic formations and whole societies to entire galaxies and to the cosmos in its entirety. But more than specific principles or formal theory are casualty to the decentering effects of postmodern knowledge processes. Lyotard (1984) has rejected the truth value of 'grand narratives.' Freudian, marxist, Darwinian, parsonian or Keynsian theories are all, partisan stories using selected data and selected cases to help make and make over a person or a society as the theorist prefers it would be.

However, as we shall see later such grand narratives are not so much false but rather they provide parallel explanations of the social life world they help to construct; each with fractal truth value. The larger point made here is that social relations and natural phenomena are so richly interconnected and human imagination so powerfully motivated that the number of paradigms with which to encompass nature and society as well as the number of parameters to investigate realities approach infinity (Young, 1991c).

Many if not most postmodern critics hold that a dogmatic approach to any such grand narrative imprisons those who believe it naively and innocently. In my opinion, each such narrative has foundational concepts most congenial to the human project, still monolithic theories cannot but alienate those who believe them to subsume the incomprehensible complexity of nature and society. Those who are subjected to the enforcement of the principles of such grand narratives cum theory by overly enthusiastic state, professional or church functionaries are, equally, alienated from the very human activity that creates them as members of the human species (Marx, 1976: 106-119).

There is, then, for postmodern sensibilities no escaping of the human hand in any human endeavor including religion and theology. While one may center one's own work and moral views upon any number of laudable grounds; one may not appeal to inscrutable divine will or to immutable natural law as the final authority upon which to ground conceptions of excellent or of abnormal behavior for all humans beings for all time. Absent such absolute laws, rules, standards, or centers, a malaise and a despair can become the dominant mood for those who think more than they act; who desire certainty more than creativity; who need guidance more than autonomy. For them, the decentering of religious law or natural law produce an anguish and despair some call the postmodern condition.

III. The Postmodern Condition Postmodern critics comment much on the dominance of image over substance, surface over depth, on the blurring of the midline between reality and make-believe, on the preference for pastiche, nostalgia and parody (Hall, 1991: 60). Arthur Kroker and David Cook (1988), offer one the very best (cum worse) critiques of the Postmodern scene. They inventory the ruins of science, theory, philosophy, and history (Nietzsche having already ruined theology) and provide a view of the postmodern capitalism culture as excrement. In their work, Baudilliard, Lyotard, Barthes and Foucault glimpse the total darkness of the human condition from their Olympian heights and despair. In such social relations, absent truth, absent unmovable centers, absent some higher power to fear, love, venerate and defer, all is opinion and all is permitted. Such a reading of the postmodern condition reports a highly developed sociology of fraud that swings a person, a business or a nation between false pride, nihilistic despair and privatized ambition.

A. Many who write about the postmodern condition assign its negativities to modernity. In their reading of modern science, it arrived to challenge the role of revelation and meditation as pathways to knowledge. Those who stand back, look at the impersonality and remorseless decentering of god and religion by science and social philosophy come to a terrible and terrifying understanding in which, as the Poet Yeats in his great sad Irish voice put it,

Things fall apart; the Center does not hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
a blood dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Closer to the ground, one might see a bit of light in postmodern understandings of feminism, theology, ethnicity, and national chauvinism. While the best modernists may lack conviction, postmodern feminists do not. While the worse (cum most obnoxious to patriarchy) may be full of passionate intensity, still such focused intensity answers to the human project far better than does ennui. While the decentering of all that is sacred to males and male institutions originating in the middle East and exported to Europe seems the end of history, still it is the beginning of emancipation for those subordinated by such institutions.

B. Fredric Jameson (1984) views the postmodern condition to be the legacy of advanced monopoly capitalism. Modern science itself, so goes the Jamesonian critique, when joined with capitalism and a through-going market liberalism decenters everything and leaves everything open for negotiations based variably on naked power, cunning, outright deceit in its early stages and the smooth professional use of image-making in mass politics, mass religion, mass sports or mass marketing to secure compliance or colonize desire in the later stages of capitalism.

Fundamentalist Ayatollahs, Rabbis, Priests and Preachers in the third world, seeing all that is sacred put on the market and sold without shame; saddled with billions in debt; seeing their children ripped from land, family and tribe, would agree. In the face of overwhelming military and economic power, Mullahs, Imams and Ayatollahs despair while multinational corporations insert its own pecuniary standards in place of those which orchestrated human activity for millennia.

Indeed, despair is the dominant mood for those who, from either postmodern and premodern vantage points, look at the present modernist cum capitalist condition. Without standards, without universal laws, without eternal verities, one has cause to wonder from whence comes the necessary faith, reason, purpose and patience for the drama of the Holy. With only declining economic power to ensure survival and only the marketplace in which to find one's bread, those without it have cause to worry. Some turn to crime in a pretheoretical burst of rage; some turn to religion in a more collective effort to secure social justice.

C. I suggest that, while the [post]modern era upon which we now gaze may well warrant suspicion, nihilism, apathy or antipathy, still there are emancipatory, centering and sanctifying possibilities not now seen in the [post]modern by its harshest critics or by its most avid and avaricious partisans.³ I make the case that selected elements of the premodern, modern, and postmodern will, if we are wise enough, good enough and generous of spirit, converge to produce varying images and embodiments of the god concept in the 21st century that resanctify nature and society.

Basic to the case I make is that, if the god concept is real at all, it is made real in actual human activity:

1.

Situated Dramas of Solidarity: Baptisms, Weddings, Confirmations, Confessions, Funerals, Sunday Worship services, Festivals and Holy days, as well as prayer and personal meditations in which one reflects upon one's own embodiment of the Holy and considers how best to realize it. In such a drama, social facts are created and sanctified.



2.

Dramas of 'Being itself' in personal Life: Parenting, Friendship, Mentoring, Community Service, Citizenship. Dramas of being itself in common life; the amenities which make a town or city a lively and enlivening place to be; plays, restaurants, and malls, parks and grounds in social spaces in which to 'be' at one with one's community. In such dramas, an Nth social fact is created and sanctified.



3.

Dramas of Social Praxis in the Public Sphere: Authentic Social Knowledge, Honest Social Criticism, democratic change and renewal in social life as well as the institution of Social Justice Programs which enhance and expand 'Being Itself' for all citizens. Expansion of the Universal We to include minorities, the aged, visitors, and others besides one's own immediate family, fellowship or religion. In such dramas, an Nth social fact is enlarged and the whole society is treated as if it were a sacred entity.



4.

Sanctification Processes which reach out to join with other religions; to reach across generations, and to cherish other species as part of 'Being Itself.' International Law, Atmospheric Accords, Protected Lands, Species and Seas, Equitable Economic Agreements within and across blocs. By such dramas of the Holy, Nth entities are allowed to exist collaterally and in the same moment the whole earth and all its creatures are sanctified.

These dramas of the Holy work together to produce social justice; the first in the lived experience of an acting, knowing, trusting, giving individual within a circle of known others and the last in the deep structures of the political economy invisible to the authentic self knowledge of a person or a society but visible in the data collected by universal scholarship. Before making that case, allow me to review the process of desanctification which emerges out of modernist views of the god concept.

The most general point I offer here is, then, that the Drama of the Holy is an entirely human product and, respectful of postmodern sensibility, the location of the sanctification process in ordinary lived human experience is polycentric. Such processes raise the most profound issues of moral behavior, ethical practices and critical judgments. I deal with such questions as questions around the problem of the Universal Other.

IV. The Problem of the Universal Other Postmodern sensibility decenters all human products including the God concept by locating such products in the cultural framework in which they are constituted by intending, believing human beings. Such a refusal to privilege the God concept as a Universal Other through whose 'eye' one might look and judge the rightness or goodness of a thing leaves a person or an age without reference point for absolute and confident judgments. There are conditional solutions to the problem of the Universal Other and the loss of universal standards, morals, and ethics the absence of God implies.

Grand Unified Theory is the most general solution which informed generations of secular philosophers. Postmodern sensibility rejects Grand Unified Theory as merely, but importantly, another human product mediated by cultural themes, social statuses and personal interests. Chaos theory with its polycentric geometries and its discontinuous dynamics confirms that the ontology of almost all natural and social systems do not have natural centers from which to judge/critique all others as primitive, abnormal, prior or final.

There are many Grand Narratives which give a person or an age a standpoint with which to understand and from which to critique the totality of human activity which comes under its purview. Postmodern understandings refuse to privilege any such grand narrative as a solid base from which to judge and to guide change. Absent grand and absolutistic narratives (modernism, marxism, Islamism), the question becomes how does one know the goodness of a thing; how does one know the correctness of a course of action. If we do not look at the world through the eyes of God of our Father or through the lens of Grand Unified Theory (Structural Functionalism, Marxism or Modernization Theory), what is left of theology, emancipatory science and critical sociology.

One answer, offered here, is that while a "Universal Other" is not possible with which to inform and direct the knowledge process, the moral process or the ethical process, still one may engage immanent critique by judging a 'grand narrative' on what it promises and what its advocates deliver. More than that, there is a special way in which a 'Universal We' can be constituted in place of the Universal Other. A person or an age can judge the rightness and the correctness and the goodness of an act or a policy by the way in which its serves Being-as such for men without limiting Being-as-such for women; Being-as-such for one ethnic group without limiting Being-as-such for another ethnic group; Being as such for the present generation without limiting Being-as-such for the next two, four, and six generations.

In answer to such monumentally important concerns, a Universal We, constituted by means of a process by which an age defines its own conditioned transcendent without preempting all future conditional transcendent answers to the need for judgment and critique. Joining with liberation theology in fashioning such conditional transcendent Universal We are poetry, cinema, modern science, journalism, political dialogue, art, music and dance. In this approach to a theory of critique, the repositories of moral agency is not confined solely to the church or the state or the literati. It is broadly distributed in the arts and sciences and excludes no one or no peoples in making either prophetic utterances or priestly urgings.

In such a way, all these 'eyes' watching, looking upon and gauging promise against performance, help a person or an age to 'see' itself. One relies upon human genius and intersubjective reality constitutive processes with which to embody a Universal We. A Universal We is thus conditioned by human needs and human judgments about what is good and what is right but transcends any particular We.

The Conditioned Transcendent The postmodern philosopher cum theologian would find it difficult to talk about the 'transcendent' while the hard-headed logician would, as did Hook, point out the utter nonsense of talking about anything being 'unconditioned' when it is a human, historical product. Yet it is entirely possible, within the logics of postmodern thought and within the logics of logic itself, to speak of a 'conditioned transcendent.' Before any reader wonders how something transcendent could be conditioned, I hasten to add that transcendent as used here means only transcendent of any given human culture...not transcendent of the cultural process itself and certainly not transcendent of the historical epoch in which its definitions are set.

The task for a conditional transcendent theology in this limited, conditional meaning is then, to think about how to judge, assess, evaluate or weigh the being and becoming process such that one's full humanity can be realized--such that the cumulative and totality of human beingness within and across societies today and tomorrow is realized in the flesh and in the world a bit more tomorrow than yesterday.

A. A subsidiary contribution offered to Tillich's work in this essay is to use social justice concerns as the bases with which to ground assessment of a 'conditioned transcendent.' Social justice standards and measures are themselves conditioned. They change from society to society and from age to age. The many freedoms and great resources available in this age would have looked good through the eyes of most people living but 100 years ago. Those same freedoms and great resources for most seem but a start when compared to the far greater freedoms to speak, to protest and to travel available to the rich and the powerful among us. The advances of science and technology promise more to the contemporary embodiment of being-as-such today than for which even the rich and powerful could have hoped but a few hundred years ago.

The many rights, protections, guarantees and insurance which most in the rich industrial democracies enjoy seem more than enough to those who argue for a ruthless social Darwinism. Abuse by many of rights, protections, guarantees and insurance programs argue for the rescission, remission or reduction among those whose own rights and resources are shared out. Those who hold themselves in high esteem and hold others in low estate find it hard to accept still more social justice talk or action. A good case can be made that it was competition that got us this far and that a single-minded push for personal gain which will take us farther.

For such critics and thinkers, more equality and help for the weak or the slow is a liability to the human project rather than an asset. For them, to equate the god process with the movement toward social justice is irrational and counterproductive. I hope to be able to show otherwise in the pages which follow. I hope that I can speak to those with such reservations in a language and a logic that will persuade rather than alienate. What is common to both modern and postmodern sensibility is that the moral dimensions of such work be a matter of honest self understanding and open social critique. I will listen to such arguments but I insist upon looking at the grounding of arguments that one can have their god and injustice too.

Wisdom and reason argue for adoption of the best, in human terms, of all three modalities of understandings examined in this essay. There is much of value in premodern understandings of the god concept (Albright, 1948; Campbell, 1988; James, 1960; McDannell and Lang, 1988; Parrinder, 1971; and Weaver, 1987). There is much to be lost in the rejection of the modern in favor of the premodern (Barbour, 1966; Berger, 1967; Durkheim, 1961; Weaver, 1987; Weber, 1920). There is more to be lost in the rejection of the postmodern in favor of either the pre-modern or the modern understanding of the god concept (Bellah, et al, 1985; Berryman, 1987; Carmody, 1985; Gill, 1991; Hamilton, 1965; Kung, 1988; Tanner, 1970; Weidman, 1984).

B. We can begin to see the shape of an emerging postmodern god concept as we compare, contrast and perchance integrate the elements of postmodern emancipatory phenomenology along with those of modern science together with the profound religious questions grounded in premodern sensibility. If we find great progress in women's right in highly competitive and laissez faire states, we must ask whether that progress is not build upon a great immiseration of third world peoples. If we find that life expectancy has risen from an average of 35 years for American workers in 1800 to 75 years for American workers in 1990, we must ask, at the same time, did all or part of that improvement in life expectancy in the United States come from impairing social justice processes in Latin America. If the life expectancy of American men is a mark of success attributable to laissez faire capitalism at home, is the difference between life expectancy of men in North and South America not also attributable to privatized economic policies?

If a conditioned transcendent means anything, it means that the welfare of Asian babies is as important to the human being process as is the welfare of Gerber babies at home. The status of African women speak to the process by which 'being an sich' expands as much as for English women. The energy, zest and joy of life found among American students at North Texas State University or Notre Dame has no greater (or lesser) bearing on the coming to beingness for humans than the students in Mexico who are shot during the 1968 Olympics.

There are those in El Salvador or Peru are tortured and murdered even today for demanding the same resources and life chances from their governments for their children, workers and women as did Americans from the British not too many generations ago. In 1775, Americans rose up to act upon their conditioned sense of Being as Such. In 1975, American agencies are the instrument of oppression in the third world: the C.I.A., A.I.D., The World Bank, and the military power of the USA is levied not against the dictators and authoritarian governments but against the opposition to them. Yet as John Donne said, the human condition is indivisible. My being as a human is diminished if your human being is diminished; more so if, as a condition of my own liberation, you are exploited and alienated from your own potential.

The postmodern notion of the god process declines to favor one social quest for human being over another. It decenters all claims to preference in the god process by a tribe, a people or a nation. The postmodern, in its more theological moments, does not ask God to take sides but rather asks the sides to transcend an understanding of the god process which confines it to males, to the successful or to a chosen people. Postmodern theology has a writ to deconstruct the god process but none to destruct it.

V. SCIENCE AND DESANCTIFICATION Central to a modernist rejection of religion and thus the sanctification of society and nature is a durkheimian reading of the god concept that is well received in anthropology and sociology. Social scientists working in the modernist tradition have, since the time of Durkheim (1961) at least, understood the god concept to be an summation of society assembled. This interpretation of the god process gives it a reading that desanctifies society and nature. The subtext of the modernist argument below is that, since god is 'only' an emergent whole of all social relationships, it has no supernatural source; absent supernatural authorship, it has no sacred content. Absent sacred content, God is dead.

In the postmodern reading of Durkheim, it is the very power and elegance of his work that leads one to be inserted into his world view uncritically. Freudians, Marxists and Weberians all make the same 'leap of faith' in the consequence of their appreciation of a theory which rings true with the facts as are adduced to corroborate it. That leap of faith is nowise different from the leap of faith which inserts a Christian into the grand narrative of the Christ story or the Muslim into the grand narrative of the Mohammed story. In the case of Durkheim, in the moment he constituted himself as the best, most insightful modernist student of religion by his convincing analyses of suicide and of religion as well as his rules of sociological method, in that same moment, he violated the very social reality he was studying by denying the legitimacy of that which religious people define and embody on their own terms.

In any grounded study of a socio-cultural formation, the social scientist does not enter into the symbolic life world under construction and make a judgment that a people are 'not really' constructing capitalism, democracy or a university. Neither Durkheim, Marx or the present reader has a transcendent right to tell a couple that they are not 'really' constructing a marriage or a family form since it has features not found within the logics of the modern perspective. Naming and defining social facts are the prerogative of the people instituting them, not the social scientist who observes them. Yet a Durkheim or a Marx would deny the social facticity of the god concept to the very people who are busy creating its facticity.

Today, were we to deconstruct Durkheim, we could very well, as have others, credit him with a social philosophy most congenial to the division of labor essential to a particular form of capitalism. Certainly, the logic of his argument was that organic solidarity of a stratified division of labor was a better source of solidarity than the mechanical solidarity emerging from ecstasy and a conflation of one's own society with putatively nonexistent gods. Thus Durkheim offered the superorganic solidarity of capitalism and a strong state to replace the supernatural solidarity of God and a sanctified people.

The problem of the Universal Other is not, however, solved in a society in which labor is divided and subdivided. If anything, such divisions separate and isolate. Each division sees best its own needs and privileges its own readings of issues and events. Interest group politics is supposed to, somehow, magically combine and coordinate these divergent interests. For some, the invisible hand of market dynamics serves as the Universal other. Thus politics and economics substitute for the God of our Fathers.

This substitution fits, excellently well, into the modernist paradigm in which there exists only objective reality with no space at all for a second, invisible world in which there is only a creating spirit which enters into and shapes the behavior of natural and social 'things.' For Durkheim, social reality could be 'sui generis,' self-generating but it could not be 'Lui generis,' generated by an eternally existing god. Persons could precede the social fact created but they created themselves as 'persons-in-social-relationships' by their own hand, wit, and faith not that of a prior, external agent.

However, persons do create their own social realities and, in that moment and none other, do they create an N+1 reality; given n number of persons and given a symbolic interactional process in which social facts are defined and embodied, an N+1 entity does emerge. Folk theorist call that N+1 entity God but Durkheim called it the Superorganic.

A. The Superorganic In the durkheimian reading of the god concept, there is thus, an ontology which answered to the god concept. This ontology is the 'superorganic' and is the direct source of that sense data apprehended and interpreted as proof of the Holy Spirit. The superorganic could be, for Durkheim, directly apprehended during an religious assembly of a social group. A durkheimian reading goes like this:

1. Claims of the power, the glory and the wisdom of god are seen by Durkheim to emerge from the interactive effects of situated dramas of the Holy. One really senses that one is in the presence of an entity greater than one's own self when one is party to a religious service, ceremony or festival. One really feels an invisible presence within one's self when one is faced with moral decisions; one really hears the remembered voice of the collective urge one to normative behavior. Wherever one goes, one takes that inner voice along. When one exercises uncommonly good judgment or uncommonly kind action, the modern scientist asserts that the premodernist interprets it, falsely in this reading, as the presence of the Holy one. Whose interpretation is to be privileged in such a discourse is a matter of considerable interest to the postmodern spirit.

2. A durkheimian reading of the god process, as a categorical error, continues that the premodern believer appreciates that the wisdom of the collective is deeper, richer and safer than is one's own judgment. In the first instance, one appreciates the priority of a superorganic intelligence. In the second instance, one resists it and in that resistance is further evidence of the omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience of God. One wonders what/who stays the hand or stops the tongue given great desire or great provocation; premodern understanding answers that it is a wiser, kinder, larger Personage than a fallible human being. The name of that entity is given the name of god by innocent believers. In a durkheimian reading, social facts are 'external' to the individuals who create it and exert constraint over them (1895). Durkheim renamed it the 'collective conscience' and thus desanctified it while a Freud would call it a superego and repersonalize it.

3. Durkheimians today, looking at premodern beliefs assert that a premodern mentality wonders at the forces of nature and, seeing daily, annual, and generational rhythms; observing persistence in the face of natural disaster; feeling the terrible power of storm, flood, and earthquake firsthand, gives those forces the name of god. One sees most unusual events which intrude themselves into the unassailable rhythms and cycles of nature and attributes them to the hand of god. Surely one is most powerful which can shake the heavens, move the earth, or cause the volcano to flow. When the powerful and arrogant bow down or are struck down, faith is validated. Modern scientists, pointing at the gods of sky, sea and lightening interpret such beliefs as myth and nonsense.

4. Sophisticated premodern intellectuals look at the architecture of the universe and, seeing such perfect rhythms conclude there must have been an architect with perfect intelligence. To that architect, they give the name of God. Given the complexity of the universe as it exists, premodernists suggest that only something more complex than a box could make a box; only something more complex that a watch could make a watch; only something more intelligent than a person could make a person. Postmodern mathematicians reply by noting that two complex numbers, one fixed and one allowed to vary at random can produce complexity infinitely richer than the two numbers themselves. Alan Turing gave the formal proof for any simple machine that produces something more complex than itself. Mathematicians call the set of such machines, Turing machines. Given Turing machines, it does not follow as premodernists assert, that one still more intelligent than humankind must have created humankind.

5. Premodern intellects immersed in paleobiology know that there are missing fossils in the geological record. Emboldened by such leaps, gaps, and discontinuities in the fossil record, premodernists assert that such omissions are proof demonstrative of creation. If the struggle for survival is the agent of species formation, it is a daily and yearly struggle, therefore, there should be a daily and yearly record of the qualitative changes in the fossil record. There is not. Postmodern geneticists, using newer data and Chaos dynamics explain those gaps by genetic splitting and recombinant splicing in the mitosis and meiosis process, itself quite natural. Thus, point by point, modernists reject premodern understanding.

6. The last, arguably most stubborn, fact upon which premodernist ground the god concept is the vast array of surprises, mysteries, and miracles which modern scientists dismiss as error, chance, fraud, or faulty remembrance. Yet the new science of Chaos, itself a naturalistic science, casts doubt on the easy dismissal by modern science of that which is wonderful, impossible and entirely different from what linear, formal, and predictive science requires to happen (Gleick, 1987; Young, 1991a). Thus premodernists have a powerful ally on the point of discontinuity. Until we learn the source of these nonlinearities, a premodern answer that calls that source by the name of God can not be easily dismissed.

B. These facts of human experience, interpreted by humans in a pre-scientific era as proof demonstrative of the god concept are reinterpreted in the durkheimian reading of the supernatural as epistemic correlates of omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience generally attributed to an independent and prior god head. Durkheim (1961) put it this way:

'...[that] which is the universal and eternal objective cause of these sensations sui generis out of which religious experience is made, is society.'

And,

'If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.'

C. Situated Dramas of the Holy Religious festivals and holidays are so important since, for Durkheim, they provide a theatre of intense symbolic interaction in which society makes itself felt as a distinct entity by each member of society assembled in such a drama of the Holy. Durkheim credits collective life with producing the inner feelings which justify faith by saying:

'...we have seen if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are excited, passions more active, sensations stronger; there are even some which are produced only at this moment.'

The idea of 'society assembled' is part of the poetics found in every social analysis including that of the drama of the Holy. It does not mean, literally, that each and every person is physically present, psychologically engrossed, and behaviorally engaged in the ceremony or festival at hand. It means that the boundaries of the event are open to all those who have standing (status) in the community; that, of those present, each is expected to maintain the frame of reference at hand (hiding or suppressing non-game events) and embodying whatever specific acts are required in the sequence and place appropriate to the situation being defined and reified.

Parades, funerals, football games and poker games observed in modern times are, equally, epistemic correlates of the superorganic about which Durkheim speaks. People who respond to the extraordinary sensations they experience at football games or respond to parades in celebration of desert wars do not think of themselves as ill and in need of some medication to bring them back to a more normal sensory state. Rather they interpret those sensations as proof demonstrative of the presence of the Holy.

Durkheim noted this transformation of ecstatic states into a sense of the holy:

'A man [sic] does not recognize himself; he feels himself transformed and consequently he transforms the environment which surrounds him. In order to account for the very particular impressions which he receives, he attributes to the things with which he is most in direct contact properties which they have not; exceptional powers an virtues which the objects of everyday experience to not possess. In a word, above the real world in which his profane life passes, he has placed...[the holy].'

1. In a durkheimian reading, the concept of the superorganic and of the 'collective conscience' decentered the god concept and relocated the grounds for moral action in collective, hence human norms. The need for solidarity was decentered from the drama of the Holy (yielding mechanical solidarity) and assimilated by the division of labor (which entailed an 'organic' solidarity).

2. Before, in the time of god, an uncertain solidarity was accomplished on a face to face bases using 'mechanical' devices to bind people together; food, drink, dance, chant, music, costume in the drama of the Holy. Out of that forced and artificial solidarity, social justice emerged; people shared because they thought there was a God and that they were children of that god. Now, in a time of modern science with its rationality, planning and administering, social justice emerges out of carefully planned and competent social engineering. In appreciation of market dynamics, social justice is said to be accomplished by remote invisible, impersonal and largely progressive processes of competition, investment, organization, and unrestricted reward for individual merit. Durkheim joined Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and James Mill in celebrating capitalism as a means to provide social justice.⁴ The state was left to the job of building a playing field and ensuring that it was level, the rules observed and transgressors sanctioned.

D. In this rendition of the division of labor of capitalist economy, a form of solidarity greatly superior to 'artificial' dramas of the Holy was produced. The superorganic was composed of a complex division of labor--interdependent and largely cooperative occupations as well as functionally interdependent firms, industries and social institutions--which generated a structural organic solidarity as opposed to a more psychological hence untrustworthy mechanical solidarity. Durkheim was writing in 1870 against Marx who in 1848, along with Engels, gave capitalism a much less generous reading.

E. Modern understandings of the God concept begin with a Nietzschean view that modern science has destroyed both the ability to believe in the god concept and in the facts of creation as Christians, Muslims, and Judaic believers understood them. The moral imperatives offered in ancient stories of god and social origins were, in that moment, decentered by science (Nietzsche, 1989). For Nietzsche as for William Blake and Mary Wollanscraft Shelley before him, modern science was a much a curse as a blessing for the human condition. Nietzsche was even more convinced than was Mary Shelley that science would produce a monster. Nietzsche identified that monster in human terms. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he said that the Will cannot go backward to premodern times, so it,

"...becomes a malefactor; and upon all that can suffer it takes revenge for its inability to go backwards. ...And so, out of wrath and ill-temper, the will rolls stones about and takes its revenge upon one who, unlike the will, does not feel wrath and ill-temper."

One cannot be certain who the Will is, in everyday life. It might be certain Muslim religious figures who engineer slaughter of students and scientists as they meet the modern. It might be an American president who lets modern technology loose upon those who despise modernization and the desanctification it brings. It might well be Foucault, Baudrillard and Lyotard who look and see only darkness to curse; who know and roll words of stone in revenge upon the gods, saints and theorists who failed them.

But note that in Beyond Good and Evil (1989: 66), Nietzsche rejected only theism, not religious sensibility,

Why atheism today? "The Father" in God has been thoroughly refuted; ditto, "the Judge," "the rewarder." ...[However] It seems to me that the religious instinct is indeed in the process of growing powerfully--but the theistic [source] it refuses with deep suspicion.

F. The picture one gets from such a reading of science and from such a reading of the human condition is that each person is alone on a speck of dust drifting aimlessly and alone in an infinitely large cosmos surrounded by billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars some of which may have planets with thinking animals on them who deceive themselves into believing they are the point and purpose of all that exists. On the planet itself, all is a ruthless struggle for survival in which the fittest live for a few brief moments and then become a meal for others. The idea that the cosmos and human beings were a special act of creation by an encompassing intellect which knows, judges, and intervenes on behalf of a divine plan is set aside in favor of indifferent laws of cause and effect which brook no such interference. In such a picture, there is no god to comfort nor hope of justice.

G. In a more optimistic reading of the modern era, science replaces religion as the font of social philosophy; scientists replace the priest as the agent of emancipatory knowledge while the university replaces the church as its repository. Technocracy replaces theocracy as the proper form of governance. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) had visions of a collegium of benevolent scientists; Comte (1789-1857) thought a council of social physicists could well displace the saints as a source of order and progress while modernization theorists from the USA today scurry here, there and everywhere to bring the fruits of modern capitalism to third world peoples--heavily subsidized by the Ford Foundation, the Agency for International Development and/or by the C.I.A.

H. If one had to select a theologian who systematically appropriated modern science to the god process, one might well chose Teilhard de Chardin. In a series of works, Chardin (1959; 1964) took the position that modern science was part of the becoming of God; a process in which god was realized as an Omega point to the degree to which human reason and understanding were developed. One could scarcely find a more welcome reading of modern science than that offered by Father Teilhard:

The whole future of the earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future. (Letter to Mme Georges-Marie Haardt)

Chardin understood that awakening to be the findings of science. Such findings in the study of nature and society where embodiment of God and the omniscience of God in the world. God was made real as the 'noosphere' was developed (1964:161). Noosphere came from noos, mind and referred to the sphere of thinking creatures (163; fn.3). Chardin saw human beings to be the biological base of God (169) while human intelligence and invention, including computers, were its divine brain incarnated. Surely, the more we learned and understood, the greater would be the grace and compassion in which humans beings lived (161: fn 1).

Where Nietzsche looked as science and saw the death of God; Chardin looked at it and saw the realization of god in history. It is possible, following Chardin, to sanctify nature and society, but, in postmodern sensibility, it does not happen apart from human effort, understanding and intention. Scientists can equally realize the Nietzschean reading to the extent they sell the knowledge process to the highest bidder or serve the elitist state. It takes religious sensibilities and capacities to share out knowledges, services and goods essential to the human project rather than accumulating them in private portfolios and in market form.

I. Robert Bellah, writing with Charles Glock (1976), found the repository of these capacities in many postmodern religious sensibilities:

"...the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the oriental religious groups, the human-potential movement, and even a group like the Christian World Liberation Front, as well as the more flexible of the radical political groups, would be consonant with the new regime [a humane and liberating theology] and its needs..."

Others in the New Age spirit would insist that Native America religious traditions have much to offer to a wounded world and to a peoples wounded by crime, suicide, depression, cynicism and privatized greed. As with modern reading, many postmodern understandings of the god concept lead to nihilism, solipsism and the rankest opportunism. However, the body of work loosely labeled New Age Religion, as Glock and Bellah suggest, offers a reenactment of the drama of the Holy not entirely alien to the human project.

J. Prior to and parallel with New Age religions are the grand narratives of traditional religion. In the next section, I want to revisit them to extract the sanctifying potential both in situated dramas of the Holy and in the ways each mediates the larger political economy of which they are part. While the doing of evil can be banal, as Hannah Arendt noted, the drama of the Holy can also become banal in traditional as in New Age religion and in its banality, irrelevant. The challenge in postmodern theology is to make each grand narrative enlivening, encompassing and open to a vigorous dialogue between modernists and premodernists which enables rather than paralyses or desanctifies nature and society.

******

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Footnotes

¹ See Roger Penrose, (1989), Chapter Six, Quantum Magic and Quantum Mystery, for a discussion of the nature of objective reality and the role of the scientist in calling forth the phenomena that s/he purports to report as a distinct object independent of human activity. Among the puzzles that confound theoretical physics is the 'jumping' of that which is measured to a distant region. Given two routes a system can take, both routes become impossible once the system actually proceeds. Given the capacity to measure quantum phenomena precisely, these phenomena disappear once measured and non-quanta appear. Then too, it appears as if particles can be in two places at the same time (p.227). Whatever the case of physical reality, there is no question but that most if not all social reality is a human construct. Return

² In any given economy, most of the unit acts involving exchange occur in social relationships that cannot be called capitalistic. In terms of sheer number, most acts of production, distribution and use occur in the family unit, a decidedly nonprofit social form. Then too, crime is outside the logics of for-profit exchange. Some estimate that it entails some 8 to 25% of the American economy. Thrift shops, company picnics, garage sales, church charities, state welfare programs, and corporate contributions are nonprofit activities. It may be that, even in the most capitalist countries, only 10% of the economy is for-profit, hence capitalistic. An astute accountant would note that the very notion of profit depends upon transfer of costs to workers, customers, environment or third world countries. Return

³ I concede with every good will, that one does not need postmodern critique or formal analyses of the postmodern in order to contribute to the sanctification of nature and society in any economic formation. My audience is not those who believe and who embody the drama of the Holy. The audience for this paper is those who doubt, scoff, dismiss or despair at ever finding a connection between science, reason and faith that answers to their modernist understanding and their partisan impulse toward the Holy. Return

⁴ They had cause to celebrate capitalism; it makes many contributions to human emancipation; it is flexible, innovative, productive beyond any previous economic system and requires a knowledge process that is insatiable. Some of its negativities are discussed in the section on the death of god. Return